SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The tortilla arrives at the table still warm, its aroma filling the small dining room of Californios. It’s perfectly crafted, earning immediate praise from ABC7 reporter Karina Nova.
“Thank you so much,” Chef Val Cantu responds with a smile.
It’s a simple exchange, but it captures what drives the chef and owner of this two-Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco. His passion for Mexican cuisine began early, growing up around his father’s Mexican restaurant in Texas, and today it manifests in every dish that leaves his kitchen.
“The corn is so delicious on its own. We want it to taste like Mexican cuisine. We want it to taste like summertime,” Cantu says.
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His 24-seat restaurant focuses on ingredients from California farms, including the corn for those memorable tortillas. “It’s almost harvest time. We’ll take the team to Santa Rosa and we’ll harvest the corn ourselves,” he explains.
From the tortillas to the mole, Cantu incorporates Mexican tradition into his modern dishes. One features local quail, cooked on a charcoal grill and served with his house-made mole.
“And moles are just these sauces that the mother or grandmother would make, again, to celebrate a birthday, celebrate a quinceañera, celebrate all these different moments in our lives,” Cantu says. “And, you know, so much of Mexican cuisine is time-consuming and difficult, and needs to cook for a long time, needs to grind in a special grinder.”
That commitment to classic technique and local products comes partly from an unlikely source: a cookbook written by Encarnacion Pinedo in the late 1800s.
“It’s such a great book and I like to share it with my young chefs and have them find inspiration in these books as well,” Cantu says.
He discovered a translated version online, but the original eight-hundred recipe book is preserved in the archives at Santa Clara University. It’s California’s first and most extensive cookbook written in Spanish.
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Earlier in the day, Cantu visited the university to photograph the book and learn more about Pinedo from Nadia Nasr, head of archives and special collections.
“What I have pulled here for you today are materials from the Pinedo family papers. Most central to that probably is Encarnacion Pinedo’s El Cocinero Español, the cookbook that she published in 1898,” Nasr explains. “And then we also have a 2003 edition published in English with a selection of only about 200 of the recipes.”
Pinedo’s family was among the first to settle in Santa Clara. “According to her reminiscences, her father built the first residence in the city of Santa Clara on the mission grounds,” Nasr says.
Among the archived documents is a letter Pinedo wrote in English, expressing hope that her labor would not be in vain. That labor included compiling hundreds of recipes that Cantu studied closely.
“And then over here, she’s cooking with squab, pichón, which is, you know, was also brought over by the Spanish,” Cantu notes, pointing to a recipe. “I didn’t grow up eating squab or quail, but, you know, there’s certainly really, really special things that we have available to us here in California.”
Because Californios is in California, Cantu can source many of the same ingredients Pinedo used over a century ago.
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“Yeah absolutely,” Cantu says. “We incorporate them in our cuisine and people, you know, I think that’s one of the interesting things about our restaurant is people think that we’re avant-garde or nouveau but you know here she was using it over a hundred years ago. To me what I want to do with the restaurant is extend tradition and continue tradition. If she was doing it over 100 years ago, is what we’re doing new?”
It’s new enough, with Cantu’s contemporary approach, to earn Californios two Michelin stars.
Back at the restaurant, the awards hang on the wall as daily reminders. When asked how it feels to see them every day, Cantu reflects on their meaning.
“Yeah, the awards are reminders of what we’ve done, what we have accomplished,” he says. “And certainly, we’ve had two stars since 2018. And we’d love to, I would love, I have this huge respect and admiration for Mexican cuisine. I would that there would be a three star, whether it’s us, Quintonil, Pujol, in Mexico City. I want to see it elevated for sure.”
A toast to three stars.
“That’s very kind,” Cantu responds.
And to a labor, not done in vain.
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