♪♪ -♪ Maíz ♪ ♪ Dulce maíz ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Abundado ♪ ♪ Listo pa' la tierra cultivar ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Dulce raíz ♪ -[ Laughs ] -[ Laughs ] No?

-The Taco Mafia, at the core of it, is just friends who really care about each other and want to see each other succeed.

-Instead of having that unhealthy competitive energy, we're competitive but together.

-Si necesito algo, entonces ellos me echarían la mano, ¿me entiendes?

Porque se creó ese ambiente que era como colectivo.

-They're making sure one of us doesn't get caught behind that we're all coming, you know, eating together and coming up together as a whole and as a unit.

-Also, like, give back to the community at the same time and not rely on anybody but ourselves.

So that's -- I think that's pretty unique.

-When I hear "Taco Mafia," I think "family."

I think, "We have your back."

-Taco Mafia started coming together and -- and show the rest of us, like, this is what we do.

You need a plate of food that's hot, we got you.

And it inspired.

I think it turned into a trickle-down effect, right, where it set the standard of what we really need to do in times of need, which is cook, make food for people that are hungry when they need it the most.

It's a funny thing of, like, calling it a mafia, but it's like a mafia for the good, right?

-Their success and everything that they get out of what they put in is a shared experience.

It's for the person furthest away from you and the person closest to you.

-These guys are looking outward without being full of themselves.

They fill themselves by helping others.

That lifts everyone up.

-The story of the Taco Mafia is the story of people who have overcome so much adversity and, despite that adversity, really bring us all ahead, and if you're better off, then we're gonna be better off too.

♪♪ ♪♪ -"Sin maíz, no hay país".

♪♪ Corn is such an integral part to Mexican society as a whole.

You can make a tortilla if you want.

You can make a sope.

You can make a chalupa.

You can make whatever your heart's desire.

I ended up finding out some really interesting things about my lineage, and great-great-grandma was a molinera.

I'm very fortunate enough to be honoring, like, my family's legacy in doing that now.

That's wild to believe in, you know, that you are continuing a legacy of generation for matriarchs that has been passed down from generation to generation.

-Come on, go up at the same time... sweet angel.

What family means to me is -- I don't know if you ever watched the "Fast & Furious" franchise, and Vin Diesel just says "family" in it like 400 times each movie.

It's the sense of, like, people who are your ride or dies.

They're there to show you love, they're there to show you support, but more importantly they're there to help you grow.

The Mardanbigis are boisterous, serious, silly, and, like, kind of terrifying sometimes.

It's more of like a motivational thing, and that's what my family has always done.

It's like, "What else?

Like, you got this.

You can do it."

-All right, y'all.

Welcome to Wednesday.

It's a nice early summer day.

I think we're gonna be having a good service today.

-My parents are from Iran originally.

My dad received a student visa and scholarship to go study at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and so my mom followed along.

They lived there for a few years.

Eventually, my dad wanted to study agricultural engineering, which led him to Arkansas.

Yeah, definitely get that.

Did you say that it has...

So I was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the NWA -- northwest Arkansas.

Just a really beautiful place to grow up as a kid.

My parents were one of the only immigrants from Iran for a long time.

[ Hip-hop music playing ] -Grab another...single fork.

-Sarah as a baby, my God.

So she actually, of my daughters, you know, she was the most, you know, active, basically, let's say.

She was a tom-- a tomboy.

She was very good in school.

♪♪ -Sarah was just always independent, always doing her own thing, you know?

It was just, "I can do it.

I can do this.

I can do that."

I said, "Okay, you can do this."

Very independent, very fun.

Yeah, she is... she was just amazing.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Start it off with some manteca for the discada.

Family is very important to me.

But I also -- I don't think family is only blood.

So I have a lot of very close friends that kind of I grew up with when I was going through rough patches with my personal family.

And I think I carried that through the rest of my life and built important connections with people like Xosé, who I consider my family.

And Chef Chuy, he recommended this place called Enriquez.

I was like, "Okay."

We walk up and it's like, you know, in the middle of Monterrey, like, kind of in like the outskirts.

And it was some of the best mariscos I've ever had.

And it's like in Monterrey, which is crazy, because it's not next to the ocean or anything, Coming from an Italian family, we're very proud.

We care a lot about loyalty.

So when I meet other people that have similar characteristics, I'll share more of myself with them and more than likely will become what I consider family, and I would do anything for them.

[ Laughter ] Nowadays I'm very, very close with all my family.

My dad lives here in Austin.

He's, like, one of my best friends.

Definitely keeps me proud of my culture, where I'm from.

[ Metallic clanging ] [ Scraping, clanging ] [ Items thud ] I'm self-taught, but also I learned to cook with my family.

My dad is always a big cook.

Cooking with my dad was like us following our actual old, like, grandparents and our family from Italy, all their recipes.

And it kind of taught me like, okay, less is more.

There's certain things that you can replace with just using a fresh ingredient.

And then it got to the point where I just liked cooking all the time and wanted to cook for everybody.

♪♪ ♪♪ -[ Tecnocumbia playing on the radio ] ♪ Nos acompaña ♪ ♪ pa' allá, pa' acá ♪ ♪ pa' allá, pa' acá ♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] -Hey, how's it going?

I know.

Dakota, right?

-Yeah.

-Your dog isn't with you?

-No, I left him at home.

-Oh, okay.

Right on.

-I'm bringing my mom down.

-Oh, nice to meet you.

He's been following us since we were back on Airport and Manor, like, from the beginning, from the beginning.

And I always tell José, which he used to be with me all the time, is that, for some reason, like, as much as I try for it not to happen, I remember for some reason, like, we would have -- we would get backed up and your order would take a little bit extra longer for some reason.

I hated that for you, but, like, it just ended up happening almost all the time.

-I loved when you guys were -- I was sad when you guys left, but I'm glad you guys make more money now.

-Oh, appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

-Can we do... -My mom is from Matamoros, Tamaulipas.

My dad is from a supersmall town called Oyama, Tamaulipas.

-[ Tecnocumbia playing on the radio ] -They met in Brownsville, and then once they got married, they moved to Austin together and then settled on the east side of Austin.

My mother was stay-at-home for the most part.

My dad, from around me being like eight or nine, that's when he started doing construction work.

He just, like, quickly became a maestro and had his own crew.

Around the age of 10 is when I started going with him, like on spring break and summertime when I wouldn't be at school, wanting to learn how to use a hammer, how to use a shovel, how to use a pickax.

That was the start of my work ethic, for sure, through my dad.

-Can we do one of each taco?

-One of each?

Yeah.

All right.

And they come with onion and cilantro.

Is that okay?

-Oh, yes.

-Whenever I wouldn't be with him, that's when I started paying more attention to my aunts, my grandmother, my mom, when cooking.

There would be those times before the holidays where my grandma would be making tamales to get ready for Christmas.

She would grab a couple of us to, like, help her knead dough or work something, and I would be the one that would kind of stick around for a little bit.

There would be those moments where I would try to think that I know something a little bit more, and she would, like, smack my hand and be like, "Move," or, "Stop."

And then she would, in her way, show me.

Unknowingly, I would keep notes of all those things that have later on, you know, tied to -- to being the cook that I am today.

I remember I was like 17 or 18 when I made myself a promise of, like, no matter what I end up doing later on down the road, I don't want to end up working for somebody else for the rest of my life.

-Like us and Cuantos are more on the same kind of tier.

-Yeah.

-I was born in -- so, Mexico City, there's like a small city next to it.

It's called Texcoco.

That's where my mom was born as well.

My dad was born in Chihuahua.

I grew up all the way till I was, I think, 12 in Mexico City.

Por eso, cuando terminen el día, bórralo.

Después llenas y picas la orden.

Marcas "picked up", y ya, y la quitas.

-Got you.

-Pero eso lo hacemos en un ratito porque nos vamos a tardar.

Pero sí, cuando terminen el día, límpialo.

-Okay.

-Clear the board.

♪♪ -Después, pues ya con el tiempo, se dieron situaciones complicadas de varias cosas, y decidimos venirnos a vivir acá a Estados Unidos, a Houston.

♪♪ -Whenever you move from -- from somewhere else, it's a cultural shock.

Especially because, like, the kids are different.

Like, all the stuff that we -- that we used to do over there, everything that you know, changes.

So you feel like you're not really a part of it.

So trying to, like, get yourself embedded into a new culture, it's very hard.

And it gets to a point where it's difficult because it's like, "Oh, I don't feel like I'm from here, but I'm also not from over there anymore."

[ Hip-hop music playing ] -All right, y'all.

Aaron Franklin is in the backyard.

We're gonna just course him out.

We got a sikil p'aak and a winter citrus salad walking in for him.

-I got this.

-Thank you.

I was born in West Covina, California, but then my family, we ended up immigrating to a little town called Visalia.

All right, all I need are those two migas to finish off table three.

Beautiful.

That is where I ended up being raised and spent the majority of my childhood.

It is this beautiful place that is also known as the "salad bowl of America."

I was very fortunate enough to be exposed to a lot of great Mexican food, being in that part of California.

Different little hubs of Mexico are all represented in this vast Central Valley region.

[ Mixer whirring ] -I grew up in this very beautiful little house, one older sister with two immigrant parents that migrated to this country to just give their children a better life.

-Somos de San Luis Potosí.

Allá fue en una feria de su pueblo, fue donde lo conocí.

-Y dijo Flor: "Pues ya me quiero casar".

[ Both laughing ] -Y pues nos vinimos acá a Estados Unidos.

-They are my parents, and you know, people I forever am in gratitude for, for, you know, giving me a life that, you know, that let me pursue whatever dream I wanted to do.

And if it was something as crazy as cooking, they were like, "Yeah, go for it."

-De niño, él siempre me decía: "Mom, no le pongas esto a la comida", o "Ponle esto".

"¿Y tú dónde aprendiste?"

"Es que yo lo veo en televisión".

-Through food media, it exposed me and opened my eyes to this curiosity that became an obsession with cooking.

We didn't have cable, so PBS was literally on the TV all the time.

♪♪ As I continued watching and became more comfortable, I started, you know, as early as probably like seven or eight kind of doing little things like cooking eggs or, like, doing -- watching my mom.

-En noveno grado comenzaba que él quería hacer algo de Food Science, y ya al último fue que dijo: "No, yo me quiero hacer chef.

Mira, yo quiero irme a esta escuela".

-I definitely wanted to go to culinary school.

I just didn't know where at that point.

¿Saben si todavía tenemos...?

There's this really great school called the Culinary Institute of America.

No, lo tengo aquí.

I applied online, got accepted... Yeah, I recommend using your hands, but you can fork it if you want.

Careful, though.

It is hot.

Cheers, y'all.

...and they were like, "Hey, we can give you so much discount off, but you have to start school in New York in two weeks."

♪♪ Walking into the campus at Hyde Park, I'm like, "Whoa!"

Like, this place looks like Hogwarts.

It's just this beautiful campus that's -- it's right on the Hudson River.

Walking into Roth Hall, you open up these humongous doors.

It's just this magical place that breeds some of the best chefs in the country.

Being around that atmosphere of other attendees who are also just as passionate as you, like, I'm very fortunate that I was able to receive training, and where I'm at today is, you know, because of going to that school.

♪♪ -Once I got to high school, when I started working at KFC, a manager moved to a store I was working at, and she was halfway into Le Cordon Bleu here in Austin, and she would bring her books to work to study and I would just pick through them.

I would ask her questions about it.

I looked it up myself, set up a schedule to meet with one of the counselors.

I went straight to orientation like a month later.

Things that I didn't know that I was taking notes of when I was younger started to unpack.

Yeah, that's where I knew, like, this -- this was it.

This is what I wanted to do.

Uchi, at the time, would come and do demos at Le Cordon Bleu.

We were seeing and learning so much at culinary school, but the final product of the cherry on top of education was seeing an established restaurant like that coming into our school and cutting things the way I've never seen cut before, seeing things served the way I've never seen served before.

We had to take an internship class.

I started asking him and kind of bothering him, like, "Hey, you know, you think you could talk to somebody?

I could just, like, prep or just, you know, wash dishes or do something."

And then a couple days went by, he told me that they're actually about to open Uchiko.

For those five to six months that I was at Uchiko, that was where the Japanese cuisine got embedded into everything that I do cookingwise.

♪♪ -Some green apples.

-Yeah, I got puya and I -- I got puya and I got árbol.

-Okay, I guess if you want to ask your mom, like, just what she wants me to use.

-I mean... -Oh, dude, this is totally enough.

This would have been totally enough.

-That's half a batch.

Measure.

-[ Whistles ] -Con mis hijos fue muy padre.

Estaban en escuelas.

Eran tremendos los dos hombres.

-Eran tremendos.

-Pero... -Pero nos la pasábamos bien.

-Eran chavitos.

-La verdad nos la pasábamos muy bien.

-Así, no te preocupes.

No estoy trabajando acá.

-Yeah, me neither.

-[ Laughs ] -I'm just doing nothing, right?

-Yes.

-Hold on.

Actually... -Not!

Ya, cabrón.

-I was born in Spokane, Washington, but my parents divorced when I was two, and my dad moved to Texas.

So I would go fall, winter, spring in Washington with my mom and her side of the family up there.

I spent every summer in Texas.

So I would have kind of two -- two lives, right?

Every time I came and visited my dad, he was in a different part of Houston, so I've lived all over Houston in every area.

I moved in with my dad full-time.

We landed in The Woodlands area.

That's where I met him, and I went to high school there with him.

[ Whirring ] -Para mí, o sea, mi familia... No es que sean importantes.

Es lo más importante.

¿Me entiendes?

Yo le debo todo a mis papás.

Está cabrón.

Pica esta madre.

Desde la persona que soy hasta el negocio que cargo.

O sea, es todo -- Todo es la receta de mi papá, todo eso, pero yo creo que más que nada, lo que les debo más es el tipo de persona que logré ser, ¿entiendes?

Yo estoy feliz con quien soy y yo creo que eso se lo debo a ellos.

Mi mamá siempre me apoyó en todo.

Desde chiquito, yo creo que mucho de la persona que soy son cosas de mi papá.

La manera en la que cocina, la manera en la que lidia con las cosas de vida, todo eso se lo aprendí a mi papá.

-¿Dónde están?

Allá abajo anda.

-So this is gonna be in order from the top, so the last one being the mushroom.

-Got it.

-So the first one will be brisket, and then the last one will be the mushroom.

And they're in that same order.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

Thank you.

93.

Alrighty, man.

-Appreciate it.

-Thank you.

-Is there salsa in here?

-Salsa and limes.

-Awesome.

-Yeah, yeah.

-94.

-Yep.

-Alrighty, man.

-Awesome, dude.

-Thanks.

Have a good one.

-My family, they've been very supportive.

They've -- They've helped me out in so many ways.

But I knew that this is what I'm gonna, like, really, really pour my all into.

My family would help.

My dad, he knows how to build things, and that was a very, very big help for me, especially moneywise, because, you know, trailers, food trucks are so expensive.

♪♪ The original Cuantos truck that started off with was from my previous business in the past, so I repurposed that same trailer.

It's a 1967 Ford step van.

The inside clearance was probably like... not even six feet tall, and I'm 6'6".

I had to cut out like a seven-foot-long strip [Chuckles] and put -- a friend of mine made me a cool, like, steel box, like a shell box, to screw on top to give it another foot and a half of clearance for me to just literally walk to use the kitchen in there.

My sisters brought up the idea of me doing soft openings at my parents' home, and I ended up doing three of those before opening up Cuantos.

My family would bring their friends and so forth, and it just kept growing a little bit and just gave me that extra push and motivation, because after serving those, my aunts, my grandmother, and my mom, you know, they were all there at those -- at each one of those times.

And they would advise me on certain things and give me some notes about some things.

But that gave me more ease moving forward into opening up, day one.

-Carnitas.

-Yeah.

-Onion, cilantro okay on everything?

-Yes, please.

-Cool.

And I'll just do two suaderos, please.

-Do you want me to start slicing them all and then... -I'll go do it.

-I'll help you.

I'm already frying the onions right now, though, too.

-Okay, that's fine.

Fried?

Good.

Caramelize it.

-Go through there and then to your right, please.

-[ Laughs ] [ Indistinct conversation ] -Hola, ¿cómo están?

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Hello.

-Got you a knife.

-Okay.

-If you want, you can do it... -[ Speaking indistinctly ] -It's important for me to represent my family and my culture because it's something I'm still trying to figure out what it is exactly.

And opening this restaurant, it more than anything was a challenge to myself to prove to my parents that this is something I do to make them proud.

-I told her, you know, it's difficult, you know, industry, you know?

But I mean, once they put their mind to it, I said, "Go to it.

Get it done."

-I was telling Sara, "Are you sure you want to do this?

You know, it's big, big step."

-This is all the mint I got.

-You got some.

-Plenty.

-The things and the careers your children do are a direct reflection on who you are as a parent.

It took my mom several years to come on board.

-They're not burned.

-That's good.

-I had to prove over a three-year period that what I was doing -- -She didn't come until the week before we got married, for the first time, to the restaurant, like, at all.

-Yeah.

She was like, "Oh, this is really good."

-Yeah.

I don't think she understood, like, the magnitude of what Nixta was until she was in it.

-¿Es todo o tienes más?

-Both of us are very conscious that we're children of immigrants.

I think we both have that same understanding that our parents went through a journey to get to the United States of America, for one -- not knowing the language, not having a community of people around them, like, essentially going into a foreign world.

No cheese, but it's a good canvas.

It's a good dip bread.

It's very heavy when I think about it.

-This is for your koofteh.

For your meatball -- koofteh.

-Okay.

-This is mixed up too.

It's marzeh and tarragon.

-Okay.

-Tarragon and marzeh.

-Yeah, this one I need.

-All right, Farhad, they're ready to go.

-Are they ready?

-You know, a restaurant, in a linear sense, is, yeah, you're just cooking for people.

But I think what we do at Nixta is a lot deeper than that because we try and, you know, pull from, you know, our personal experiences.

It has to be something that I have to honor because, like, I don't know, I just know the struggles that they went through.

-I'm not sure when was it the first time I come in, but that place was packed, and I knew they're gonna get it, you know, going good.

-They are doing good, you know?

I-I just have to take back what I said because, you know, I was wrong.

I can say I was wrong.

You know, they are doing so good.

I know they work hard.

-It takes a while for them to come around.

But once they do, like, the full support is there.

Onion.

Got to get the onion and stuff done, too, so... -I'm hoping that my experiences will allow someone to say, You don't have to be a doctor or an engineer or, you know, kind of the more stereotypical Persian jobs to make your parents proud.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪