The first time I got the pan con tomate at Chilango, the new restaurant in the 100-year-old historic space across from Bde Maka Ska in The Beach Club (the old Calhoun Beach Club), I thought I had found heaven. A tall cut of sweet brioche—well-charred, the edges toasty, the center light and springy—piled with a couple inches of berry-rich and warm heirloom tomato slices, a slick of house-made salsa macha bringing smoke and heat, a sweet swath of Duke’s mayo, and a generous handful of herbs, particularly round nasturtium leaves, those zippy South American wonders. I used a fork and knife to saw through the towering glory. Wow, the sweet, the spice, the rich, the fire: This was everything you love about the best BLT you had in your life, but brand new.
The next time I ordered the pan con tomate, a completely different version arrived. The bread was lightly toasted with the salsa macha and the herbs in a ramekin on the side. OK, top-quality tomato-mayo bread, with a side of salsa macha.
When I returned to order it a third time, the brioche was thin-cut, super charred, and the salsa macha was slathered so thickly on top of the tomatoes I could hardly taste anything. I looked up, gazed at the top-shelf mezcal and tequila cabinet, and wondered: Which of these was I supposed to review?
The first time I ordered the queso, I got a cold gluey thing in a thick, oven-proof room-temperature bowl, and I thought, This bowl clearly was supposed to be heated in the oven. Something has gone wrong. The next time I got the queso, it was the best queso I have eaten in my life—tangy, silky, melty cheese, big chunks of smoked brisket, an animating and pretty ring of chopped smoky green peppers. It was a queso to heal a bad day, a queso for any teen to build a birthday around. I had these quesos with different friends. The first friend told me she would never return. The second friend went back on her own within the week.
Will the real Chilango please stand up?
I called up chef Jorge Guzmán, star of the Twin Cities, with the obvious, difficult question: What is going on at Chilango, exactly?
I reached the chef between doctor’s appointments; his back had gone out. He had been traveling back and forth to Mexico to help his declining father. The stress didn’t stop there. He spoke of the physical stress of opening Chilango; of running after his 5-year-old; of keeping his Ohio restaurant, Sueño, and his other restaurant, Petite León, both going. The basic stress of living the Gen X sandwich-generation lifestyle. Caretaking for young and old while driving the creative and business life forward took him out.
And actually, he told me, while yes, Chilango had been open for three months, honestly, the restaurant needs eight months, or a year, before it really is itself.
“OK. I don’t know what to do with that,” I told him. “I’m reviewing it now.”
“I get it,” he said.
And here we are—humans, tomatoes, bread, time, families, ambitions, economics—together in this “review.”
Which is the real pan con tomate? For me, all of them. I go back to first principles. Who am I writing this review for? For readers of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine who go out to dinner here. I’m not writing for a theoretical international olympiad of pan con tomate tasters. I’m writing this for members of this (globally) small, literate, community- and joy-minded tribe of four million souls, out here where the Mississippi River meets the Minnesota River and gets big, eight hours northwest of Chicago, 23 hours east of Seattle, 17 hours north of Houston. The Twin Cities: Large enough for one to create a powerful career, far enough from everyone else that we know each other, and real enough that we know we need each other—and as such, doesn’t this also mean we are required to extend one another a bit of grace?
Jorge Guzmán is a chef who has been cooking for us all, decade after decade, here in the Twin Cities. If you’ve been eating out long enough here, you’ve had his food, whether you know it or not. He was running the show, back in the shadows, at important restaurants of their time, like Tejas and Solera, in the 2000s and early 2010s. He was out front in the spotlight when Food & Wine magazine named his elite restaurant Brewer’s Table inside Surly Brewing—where he was feeding practically the whole city in the brew hall, selling four tons of brisket a week—one of the top 10 restaurants in the country in 2016. He was also short-listed a few times by the James Beard Foundation for his work and leadership at both Brewer’s Table and Petite León. He was crowned Prince of Porc when he won the regional division of Cochon555, the pork-cooking competition. He has also made a few of the best things I’ve eaten in my life, including tiny pork tamales for Cochon555 and a quick-cured poached Arctic char paired with a sort of happy circus of cheffy-pickly-spicy-herby elements up at Brewer’s Table. For the last six years, he’s been trying a get a Mexican charcoal-cooked chicken restaurant off the ground, a dream restaurant that might be a one-that-got-away moment in Twin Cities food, like that person you locked eyes with but never met on a train that one time…maybe, maybe the secret to happiness was right there?
One of my signature memories of the pandemic was sitting with Guzmán in the dim twilight of a November afternoon in the dark-painted Petite León space, talking to him about the details of his life for a profile I wrote in these pages in January 2021. He described his early childhood as wonderful: “running around the hotels his dad managed and his extended family’s various Gulf Coast beach houses. Arm in arm with cousins, eating tacos made by the families’ cooks, he was carefree. Tragically, however, his dad’s alcoholism got the better of the family, and Guzmán found himself without a father in St. Louis with his brother and mom, who brought her boys up to be hard because life was hard. ‘She raised us really brutal, to be tough men—no emotion, work harder,’” I wrote at the time.
I remember looking out at the masked, shut-down world, sitting with him on one of those woolly dark Minnesota winter days when the sky seems like it is about to settle down over you like an unwanted, filthy comforter, and I remember thinking, This is all we have at the end of the world: each other, our stories, and helping. Well, that and charcoal roast chicken and margaritas, of course. Guzmán was beginning again at Petite León, named for his newborn son, after the senseless and high-profile shuttering of Brewer’s Table. For a while, it seemed like this would be the one, the place where this homegrown great chef could rise from the ashes and control his destiny while cooking us unbelievably flavorful food. I was surprised to learn earlier this year that Guzmán was looking for the next thing after Petite León.
This is not unusual in the restaurant world. First you have the thing, and soon enough the next thing. For Guzmán, the next thing is Chilango, in the near-century-old historic place now called The Beach Club. When he opened it, he was calling Chilango’s food Mex-Tex, though he might eventually call it simply his personal vision of Mexican food. But if it were Mex-Tex, it would be: the cuisine of the shifting borderlands where Mexico and the U.S. Southwest meet and overlap; the cuisine of the grazing grasslands and the Indigenous people who live and lived there; the cuisine of the Gulf Coast and trade around that coast; the cuisine of different waves of immigration, like the Chinese who came to build railroads and their diasporic descendants in Tijuana. Guzmán would be inventing it on-site. Quite the endeavor. However, if anyone had earned the right to be taken seriously in such an undertaking, or had the capacity to do such a thing, surely it was Jorge Guzmán.
Seated at Chilango, I sometimes got a sense of this new realm of culinary possibilities. The suadero smoked brisket tacos are exquisite: smoky, fatty, rich brisket, the kind people drive straight across Texas for, the brisket Texas Monthly invests months of labor reviewing and assessing, here they are, two on a plate for $14. Add a margarita and declare victory. A brisket taco could be a building block for Mex-Tex, the most logical food of Spanish Texas, those centuries of wild horses and free-ranging cattle.
The other star of the show: the cochinita pibil. For this dish, Guzmán takes a pork collar, slathers it with a tangy Yucatán achiote and herb blend, sous vide cooks it for days, then grills it till crispy to order, before plating it on good heirloom black beans cooked so long and well that they taste mushroomy and savory, more like a mushroom risotto than any black beans I’ve ever before encountered. By eye, the cochinita pibil looks like a brick-red pork steak, but it tastes rich and potent, like a brand-new food through which French pork confit conveys the essence of a Mayan herb and spice recado. Add a side order of warm tortillas, from Lake Street tortilleria Tortilla Campesina, which Guzmán likes for their Mexico City taste, and you have something entirely new in the Twin Cities, and maybe the world: a Mex-Tex dish that combines the Mayan flavors of the Yucatán with the Minnesota Mexican diaspora, in a way that restaurant-going Minnesotans like to eat—a big piece of meat that’s money for value and you can’t pull off at home.
The hangar steak, a winey, iron-y, big-tasting steak given originality and definition with a black garlic adobo marinade, is another faultless winner in that same vein. Add the gorgeous, super-crisp smashed Yukon Gold potatoes with handfuls of mint and herbs and whipped requesón cheese, and you may have found your favorite secret steak house.
“Northern Mexico, Sinaloa, Chihuahua—all those borderlands of interior, ranchland Mexican cooking—what do they mean in Minneapolis, this far north, where we have our own restaurant culture and it takes Minnesotans six months to trust you, even if you’re putting out perfect food?” Guzmán asked me as we talked about challenges facing a new endeavor. We talked at length about queso: Why does hot cheese, when it’s fondue or raclette, have a European halo of upscale, while queso gets no respect? Would chef-reconsidered queso stand a better chance of being taken seriously here than anywhere else in America, given our great love of dairy-based dips of every kind, from artichoke to spinach to onion? When the Chilango queso is hot and trembling at the end of your very good chip, as the pretty dots on your fancy margarita sparkle, it blitzes out your pleasure centers to make you feel indulgence, joy, contentment. That’s a good queso!
As for that sparkling margarita? The cocktail program at Chilango is simply wonderful. For this, Guzmán assembled an all-star team, with opening contributions from Javier Rojas (of Meteor) and ongoing work from Chilango bar creative Max Pellinger (formerly of Porzana), with a little help from bar star Keith Mrotek, who officially leads Chilango’s wine program. The basic Chilango margarita would have been big news a decade ago, an easy drinking concoction of pure lime, French cognac–based curaçao, and a tequila blend mixing the very good and the very affordable. Today, the big news is creative flourishes like a smoke-and-fresh combination of mezcal, hibiscus, and pineapple called Sparkling Toxic Mezcalinity or a graceful, zingy multi-citrus invention called the Paloma-My-God—imagine the essence of grapefruit, for cocktail lovers without a sweet tooth.
My favorite cocktail of all, however, was the I Live Across the Street. It’s a fresh watermelon, lime, and artisanal rum blend that tastes as delicate and lively as can be, and it’s made kaleidoscopically pretty with a few dots of black-salt olive oil floating on the top, scattering and rejoining like balls of mercury. When I was enjoying one of these with my perfect queso, I glanced around the front bar area, which was scattered but not packed with guests. It reminded me of the La Belle Vie bar, years ago, perfect cocktails, but never crowded.
In my long recent conversations with Guzmán, he told me that at 45—after his big career and back injury, starting over, gritting through the pandemic, starting over again—one of the things he’s thinking about most of all is the importance of a restaurant as a place where the food isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is the guests, their experience together at the table, and the restoration a good restaurant provides.
Then he told me the story of my favorite cocktail, the I Live Across the Street. The restaurant was not yet open. Guzmán was inside sanding tables and getting the physical space ready. Suddenly, he got an alert. An online one-star review? “This guy wrote, ‘I called to place a to-go order, but they didn’t answer the phone! One star,’” Guzmán recalls. “And he went on about living across the street. And I thought, ‘I like that phrase. I live across the street.’” The writer of that critical and uninformed review both was acting wildly entitled and would also be fused to Chilango for the foreseeable future, with this wonderful cocktail, whether he liked it or not, whether he engaged with the reality of restaurants being open or not, or the people inside the restaurants being fallible, or any of that.
“I feel like this is actually the hardest restaurant opening I’ve ever done,” Guzmán told me. “When I opened Surly, we had literal months of prep and planning. Now, I feel really supported and safe with my restaurant partners here, and I’m kind of falling apart and emotionally exhausted, and my body is like, Oh, is this safe? Then time to decompress. Here’s your incredible fatigue you’ve been pushing down, here’s the rest of life.” To me, he concluded: “You should come back in two months.”
I definitely will. The Chilango I tried was both amazing and a hot mess, and if I’m honest, I’m also someone who is now and then amazing and now and then a hot mess, but I get to do that in private. And if we want human endeavors that reach for the stars, invent Mayan confit dishes that have never before been tasted, and tilt out cocktails like kaleidoscopes, we have to create a world where we treat those who live across the street from us with the same grace with which we’d like to be treated ourselves.
2730 W. Lake St., Mpls., 612-920-5000
