The city of Chicago counts the second largest population of Mexican immigrants in the country—and yet, when you run a Google search for Mexican food in Chicago, not a single one of the top results is a place run by someone of Mexican descent. Diana Dávila, chef-owner of Mi Tocaya Antojería in Chicago’s Logan Square, is on a mission to change that.
“I’m not interested in making crowd-pleasing Americanized Mexican food,” the 35-year-old said on a recent Monday afternoon—her day off. She gazed over at her daughter, Adriana, who was running around the restaurant in a fairy costume and clear plastic high heels (they were going for pedicures later), then continued: “I’m cooking dishes that have been passed down through my family and are ingrained in my memory. I feel like there is something much more magical about that.”
Mi Tocaya Antojería, as the name suggests (it means “my namesake” in Spanish), is a return to Dávila’s roots: a compilation of the flavors and sensations she remembers from childhood summers in La Huasteca, combined with a desire to create a lively oasis for regional Mexican cooking in her hometown. What her kitchen turns out is one standout dish after another, each completely and distinctly Dàvila, which is why it was selected as one of our 50 best new restaurants in America this year. (And Mi Tocaya is one of the reasons we declared Chicago the restaurant city of the year.)
Most Mexican restaurants, Dávila said, fall into two categories—either the mom and pop taquerías “catering mostly to what Americans think is Mexican food,” or the clubby spots serving fishbowl margaritas. When her parents immigrated to the States in 2002, they opened the former, a now-shuttered place called Hacienda Jalapeños, in their small suburb of Oak Forest outside of Chicago. Dávila both grew up and began her culinary career there, turning it into a veritable dining destination at just 21 with her fearless, off-the-cuff way of preparing classic Mexican dishes. After trying out the D.C. restaurant scene, as the chef of the now-closed Jackie’s and then the Mexican street food spot El Chucho, she wanted to start her own restaurant. But it had to be much more personal. “I had this moment where it clicked: I am Midwest-Mexican,” she said, placing her fist square on the table. “Everything came together from there.” She settled on an opening an antojería, a Mexican take on a snack bar, where she could serve small, playful dishes to her beloved hometown.
Dávila’s food is bright, bold, one-of-a-kind, and very easy to love. And, like her, it’s unapologetic. She draws much of her culinary inspiration from her aunt Rosa, who she spent summers with in Mexico alongside her siblings, exploring all over the Gulf Coast. “We would go to the markets, and she was the one asking all the vendors, ‘What is that ingredient? How do you use that?’” she remembered. Young Dávila would follow Rosa around the stalls and then assist in the kitchen, making cecina—semicured lime-rubbed beef—or salsa veracruzana, the fiery, tangy sister to puttanesca. “I was like her Mini-Me.”
It was with her aunt that she first savored the taste of enchiladas potosinas, spicy fritters filled with smoky cascabel chiles and local cheese, then dragged through a deeply earthy chili sauce that had been hand ground in the molcajete. And tacos rojos, tortillas drenched in a salty, summery salsa roja, pan-fried on a comal (a flat, round griddle) and topped with carrots, potatoes, and fresh tomatoes.
At Mi Tocaya, Dávila presents these regional flavors through a slightly edgier lens. “I want to be a licuadora, or a blender,” she said, “taking something nostalgic and making it new.”
The best example of this is one of her most popular dishes: Peanut Butter y Lengua. It’s a variation on a dish her uncle used to make for her. “I thought, everyone is so into pork belly cubes, but you can easily swap the pork out for lengua (beef tongue), and then you can actually taste all of the flavors, not just fat,” she said. She cuts the lengua into cubes, grills them like a kebab, and tops them with papalo, a cilantro-like herb, and a sauce of roasted garlic, chiles de árbol, cured tomatoes, and peanuts. The result is an ebullient, beautifully layered bite.
Then there’s the Fideos Secos, which “eats like a pasta” in its tangled strands of short spaghetti but whose sweet-smoky-bitter sauce, chintextle, is a combination of grasshoppers, dried shrimp, and various kinds of red chilies. Dávila takes pride in being able to source practically everything, even the obscure chilies, from within Chicago itself.
Mole also takes on a form you may not have seen before in a restaurant. Gone is the deep, dark, cooked-for-days mix of nuts and roasted poblanos. Dávila prefers green mole, made of serranos, tomatillos, cloves, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds. It comes coated on a freshly roasted piece of fish. It’s not the most obvious pairing, but the bright sauce cuts perfectly through the buttery fillet.
The spiritual mascot of the restaurant is the cactus—Dávila’s way of telling people that this is not your average “rice and beans” (in her words) restaurant. When you approach the Logan Square restaurant, the neon cactus sign outside the unassuming façade lets you know you’re in the right place. There are cacti painted on vibrant murals at the mezcal-stocked bars, and nopales (the fruit of the cactus) as the base of a comforting stew topped with creamy burrata. “We have this saying in Mexico that’s like, ‘Tienes un nopal en la frente,’ which means, ‘You have a cactus on your forehead,’ if someone is über-Mexican,” she said, her voice rising in a crescendo. “Because it’s like, what could be more Mexican than a f*#%ing nopal?”
That deep sense of identity is manifested loudly throughout the space—in all of the painted ceramic pots brought back from Mexico, nichos (little tin windows with folk art in them), reliquaries, vases, and even the bright embroidered dress Dávila was wearing. The patterns on the floor and the painting on the walls, too, are multicolored and mismatched, meant to mimic the chaotic, creative energy of the street food scene in San Luis Potosí. It also helps that the restaurant is perennially packed.
When Dávila was growing up, she said, “people in Mexico who wanted to be a chef would go to Europe to Le Cordon Bleu, and I wanted to be like, pendejos, why are you going there and learning someone else’s food when everything you need is right here?” After finishing her stint at Hacienda Jalapeños, Dávila decided to set off for Oaxaca to educate herself even further on Mexican cooking, a decision she said was invaluable to making Mi Tocaya what it is today. Now she points to Kie-Gol-Lanee and Antique Taco in Chicago, both of which have been successful in channeling the hyper-regional roots of their owners, not wanting to soften their bracing flavors to appeal to generalized Western palates. “They are honoring their food, learning about it, and getting in touch with it,” she said.
“I hope Mexican cooks will take our rightful place in showing all that we have to offer as a culture. Let’s discover ourselves. Let’s share that. Let’s be proud of who we are.”