Growing up, my family put the most effort into transforming cheap ingredients into flavorful eats. I didn’t realize it until looking back, but the only real wealth we ever had was through our culture.
They would use traditional throwaway cuts and apply traditions, history, and technique to make something amazing. We didn’t always have money, but we were always rich through food.
Coming from East LA, my mother worked in fast food, barely speaking English. I remember sharing all my ideas with her to pass on to Jack, from Jack in the Box <haha>. I thought it was so cool that she worked in a kitchen. But when we visited her sister in Mexico, the family dollar could stretch much wider. We’d go out for tacos, and she’d say, “Eat as many as you want, order whatever you’d like.”
I remember that first feeling of liberty, to eat as much as I wanted without any limits, no parameters. And we were eye level with everybody there – I wasn’t Mexican or American, I was just another brown face in the crowd. I feel very connected to those experiences and the gastronomy.
As I progressed throughout the years, I ended up a punk rocker. And when I was about 18 or 19, I moved to San Francisco to play in a band. Within my first few months out, a roommate stole a bunch of money from me, so I stole some speakers from him to get it back… Put them on Craigslist, and got scammed. I got by working mornings at a moving company, but at night, I had to take any extra job I could find. So thanks to a Nigerian prince, I picked up night shifts at pizza places.
I think I became good at it because nobody judged me. I was in the back, practicing behind the scenes, and wasn’t bad at taking night orders on the phone. They liked that I was a hard worker, and my passion for food developed through making pizza.
After a while, a friend and I decided to move to Europe to be punk rockers in England.
We started living in squats, at one point in the Duke of Westminster’s mansion. I went from working all my life, barely getting by with two jobs in San Francisco, to having all the time in the world in England while broke. Eventually, I got restless enough and moved to Germany with the help of an old punk rocker with a big grey mohawk named Sven.
I started renting in a housing project called Tommy Haus, which is a huge tenement building. It had 40 apartments, taken over by radical left-wing people in the seventies in Kreuzberg, West Germany.
I did catering for the bands that played at the theater on the first floor. Before long, I made enough money to get some partners, and we opened a little semi-legal Mexican restaurant.
I hosted buffets on Sundays to get rid of all the food we didn’t sell, because Germans were not ready for Mexican food at the time. I had to remix the names of things: Milanesa, I called schnitzel, because it’s basically the same process. Refried beans were bean mousse, because that was the closest reference <haha>.
After 5 years, I got in a little trouble… I didn’t kill anybody, but some bottles got smashed one night, and I had to leave Germany at midnight on a Wednesday.
The friend I originally came to England with was living in Montreal; Johnny had fallen in love with a French Canadian girl. So I made my way from Germany to Paris, stayed there for a few days, and ended up moving to Canada with my buddy.
At that point, food had become my passion in life and a means to making a living for myself. So I tried doing the same thing; I went to work in almost every Mexican restaurant in the city, but now I had to learn French after learning almost perfect German. Eventually I ended up studying fine dining and French cuisine.
I was pretty much illegal for four years in Canada. Not being able to leave a place is just… Misery. You have a routine you can’t change. There are certain places you can’t go, and if somebody insults you, you can’t have the responses you would in your neighborhood. The community that you have isn’t what you were born into, so there’s no backup for anything. I became isolated and depressed.
I got so sick of the cold <haha> that I started looking at places that had punk scenes and were hot. I figured out a… colorful way to get my Social Security number in Canada, which allowed me to leave. I made my way to Australia and, overall, did not mesh well. After a year or so, I began applying for cooking jobs on boats, to continue exploring while doing what I love.
After a few sous-chef gigs, I started making really good money working on private yachts. I got to see many parts of the world I wouldn’t have otherwise. It refined my skills, too; having unlimited access to high-end, gourmet ingredients, I was able to practice & experiment. I think that was the highest time in my life, culinarily. But I had to change my accent, change my habits, to fit in. I feel like I lost myself at sea.
On leave in Colombia, I started researching what was wrong with my head, why I couldn’t stay in one place. I got sober for a bit to reconnect and make peace. Then I packed everything up and moved back here, to East Los Angeles, with all the money I saved up. Private chef & catering jobs were not consistent enough, so I decided to do this pizza pop-up.
I wanted to use pizza as a platform and add fine dining Mexican food on top of it.
I wanted to take the slice as a vessel and extend that to everyone in the neighborhoods – the day laborer, the kids from public school. It’s elevating the culture, merging a fine dining aspect with the reach of real communities.
I think cultures stop evolving their food after a point because they don’t want to lose tradition, or the soul of their meals. I wanted to exaggerate, but not on a platform where it’s only for the privileged few.
Everything I serve is from scratch. And I set out to have the most expensive option be under seven bucks. I think that’s available to everybody right now. I only wanted to create something honest and affordable to share.
-MANNY “CHORI” VASQUEZ.
