Sandwiched between Hop Chaos Brewing Co. and Mac Daddy's in North Spokane is a little bit of Mexico City. Los Habaneros, a family-owned taqueria, has colorful flags with intricate cutout designs — papel picado — hanging in rows from the ceiling and mariachi music filling the air.
Raul Vega, co-owner and lead chef of Los Habaneros, has been cooking since he was a kid in Ciudad de México, where he was surrounded by taquerias selling authentic tacos, tortas and sopas.
Vega moved to the U.S. when he was 14 and began working in the restaurant industry, from Florida to California. However, both states boast large Hispanic populations — something he says the Northwest was lacking.
"When I came over here I never found really good Mexican food, and I didn't see much Hispanic population either," Vega says. "That's when I was thinking we should make a taqueria here so we can offer good options for people."
And that's exactly what he did. Vega brought over all of his favorite traditional foods to Los Habaneros' menu — even the most complicated and time-consuming recipes.
One of these dishes — birria — requires much more time than others. Vega dedicates more than five hours to boiling the beef that makes the dish. Luckily, he has his recipe — or, we should say, his mother's recipe — down to a science.
Most of the food he cooks at his restaurant comes directly from his mom's cookbook, which adds another layer of tradition to his craft.
"She loves to cook," he says. "When she heard I was going to have a restaurant she was so excited."
There may be familial meaning to the recipes he uses, but like many traditional foods, the history spans generations. For example, birria hasn't always been made with beef.
The dish actually started out as a way to cook goat meat. While legends say that this is because some goats got cooked to perfection in a cave after a volcanic eruption, the more plausible reason leads back to the Spaniards.
Goats were brought from Spain to Mexico more than 500 years ago and integrated into the Mexican livestock system, according to research from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Historical accounts say that the Spaniards thought goat meat was too tough to eat, and relegated it to the Indigenous population.
While the latter is more probable, it's easy to imagine how a volcano inspired the juicy, flavor-explosion beef melting in my mouth right now.
While Vega wouldn't reveal everything about his top-secret recipe, he did share an overview of his birria process.
First, he grills peppers — guajillo and ancho — with onions, garlic and tomatoes, then he boils all the veggies in water. Eventually, Vega blends the mixture and adds seasonings like cumin, cinnamon, thyme and black pepper to create the perfect broth.
Once that's ready, he boils the meat, usually beef ribs, top round or skirt steak, in the broth for five hours to let the meat become as tender and marinated as possible. However, instead of spending hours each day to prepare the dish, Vega makes a large batch every other week that weighs more than 80 pounds.
Leave it to chefs and powerlifters to manage this much scrumptious food. Get a manageable portion for yourself served as a stew, a taco or a quesadilla, with onions, cilantro, lime and extra broth on the side.
Regardless of how you eat it, you'll be joining a celebration bigger than yourself. This birria is the perfect dish to celebrate Vega's one-year anniversary since opening the restaurant. So, we say: ¡Feliz cumpleaños, Los Habaneros! ♦
Los Habaneros • 10115 N. Newport Hwy. • Open every day 11 am-9 pm • 509-315-9001
