AN INSPIRING JOURNEY HOME

Chef Dionicio Jiménez’s visit is shaping a bold evolution for Cantina La Martina — and Kensington.

CHOLULA, Mexico — Dionicio Jiménez bounds with joy through the mounds of dried red chiles and fragrant green herbs that bloom from the market stalls around us.

“Look at this flowering wild cilantro and these pápalo leaves! Can you smell it?” he says, pausing on his tour of the Mercado Central de Cholula to grab a bunch of greens. “The pápalo is more citrusy and mellow than what we get back home.”

At every turn, another food brings a smile to the chef and owner of Cantina La Martina in Kensington who, fresh off his nomination by the James Beard Foundation as one of the best chefs in the Mid-Atlantic, has returned to his home state of Puebla for the first time since before the pandemic. He beams at the cellophane-wrapped packs of candied squash and fruit. The myriad shades of intricately spiced moles. The earthy aromas of menudo and pozole simmering in earthenware pots over live fires. Fresh chicharrones emerging from hot vats of molten lard puffed up into crunchy sheets as big as sails. And then there is the fresh quesillo, hand-shredded into fistfuls of white cheese strings that get tucked inside the crusty, sesame-speckled round rolls of the region’s overstuffed signature sandwich: the cemita. Jiménez covets his filled with the zesty pickled cow’s foot salad known as pata de res.

“There are a lot of childhood memories here, which is why it’s always the first place I stop on my way home,” says Dionicio, whose family used to come on weekends to trade for goods with the walnuts, fruit, and beans they grow on their small family farm in San Mateo Ozolco.

The village he left at age 14 is located 45 minutes to the west on the side of an active volcano, and it is our next stop. But the toasty smell of blue corn masa wafting over from the comal at a neighboring stall is already making him eager: “I cannot wait to taste my mother’s tortillas.”

First, there was a final errand. Dionicio buys a floral arrangement so enormous it practically obscures his entire body. Is it for his mother, I ask? “No,” he pauses. “It’s for my brother’s grave.

‘I knew I’d been gone too long’

Dionicio’s younger brother was the reason he moved to Philadelphia to begin with 25 years ago. Adrian Jiménez had come to the States first and told him it was a land of opportunity.

“He said, ‘Come to Philly because the restaurants are good and you can make your own food!’ ” Dionicio recalls.

They became part of the first wave of newcomers primarily from San Mateo Ozolco that would seed the rapid growth of Mexican immigration to South Philadelphia over the past quarter century. They both worked in restaurants — Adrian as a food runner at Buddakan, Dionicio at Vetri, where he quickly rose from dishwasher to pasta chef. They saw each other almost daily for a dozen years and danced together in Philly’s annual Carnaval de Puebla celebrations until Adrian decided to return to Mexico in 2010 to launch a gym in Chimalhuacan, just northeast of Mexico City.

Adrian was killed there in 2018 in an unsolved robbery gone wrong outside a friend’s house that Dionicio could only explain as “wrong place, wrong time.”

“I thought about moving back to Mexico then because I worried about my parents,” he says.

But Dionicio had already become so deeply rooted in the fabric of Philadelphia, where he has four children, three siblings, a dozen cousins, and as many as 80 extended family members. He’d been the executive chef at Stephen Starr’s El Rey since its opening a decade earlier. And his youngest brother, Arturo, was still living with his parents and taking care of the family’s little grocery store, San Francisco de Asis. So Dionicio stayed put.

But when the pandemic hit and Dionicio’s mother, Celia Sandoval del Rosario, contracted a serious case of COVID-19 that landed her on a ventilator for a month in 2020 at hospitals in Puebla City and then Mexico City, her son felt helpless and frustrated from afar.

“When my mom got sick, I knew I’d been gone too long. I felt so disconnected from this place.”

As we drove west from Cholula, we passed through five little villages and the narrow road turned steep and wound upward through switchback vistas that revealed valleys full of walnut trees, and peach and apple orchards. Ahead loomed the fuming majesty of Popocatépetl, an active volcano and Mexico’s second highest peak. San Mateo Ozolco is perched on its base.

We threaded San Mateo’s narrow streets and slowly pulled up to an iron gate a block from the city’s central church and Dionicio was finally home. He was an American citizen now, at last the owner of his own restaurant, and one that was earning both local and national acclaim. But when the gates opened to reveal a narrow property with two low-slung buildings framing a farmyard full of rambling animals, he saw his parents and glowed with the giddy enthusiasm of a teenage boy who once left thinking he’d never return.

“¡Esta es mi mamá!” he said, hugging his mother and introducing his father, Dionicio Jiménez-Aparicio, to Cantina La Martina’s manager, Tina Stanczyk, me, and Inquirer photographer Jessica Griffin. They had already met his fiancé, Mariangeli Alicea Saez.

“Stop taking pictures and come eat!” says Celia as she led us into a spacious kitchen where long tables had been set in anticipation of our visit. Smoldering coals beneath the round clay comal in the corner scented the room with oak wood smoke.

A wide bowl filled with steamy corn husk bundles stuffed with tender chicken mixiote is passed around followed by colorful nopales salad and rice. A tall stack of fresh tortillas made from the blue corn the Jiménez family grows out back is still warm inside its linen-bundled basket.

“I’ve been up cooking since 5 a.m. waiting for you,” Celia said to her son. It was nearly 2 p.m. and we were late. “Where have you been?”

‘I wanted people to know about Mexican food’

Dionicio worked 12 years for Stephen Starr at El Rey, and more than a few times thought about leaving. But it was not until he was temporarily laid off at the outset of the pandemic that he was finally done with corporate restaurants. His longtime girlfriend, Saez, was an entrepreneur and restaurant consultant who encouraged him to take the leap to work for himself: “I’d always tell him: You need to go on your own, you’re not creating with your heart. … But he was so afraid. His girls were small and he wanted the security of a paycheck.”

But he was turning 47 and knew she was right: “I saw the Cantina as my last shot to do something in my own style, to express what I wanted people to know about Mexican food beyond a taqueria.”

The location he found, however, was supremely challenging. The space itself is beautiful, a festively colorful barroom with exposed brick walls and a coffered ceiling renovated by the landlord, developer Shift Capital. There’s an expansive fenced-in backyard where Cantina regularly hosts events. But its corner location at D Street and Kensington Avenue across from the Somerset El station also sits at the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis in a neighborhood that has become an example of continuing failures by the city to address Kensington’s drug and poverty problems.

Dionicio was undeterred. He sold all his superfluous belongings, settled his credit cards, rented out his home in Mayfair, and moved into the restaurant’s third floor with Saez. After investing in more improvements, they had $6,000 in the bank: “I was technically broke before I even opened and we were just hoping the first day would be good enough to at least make enough back to keep running the place.”

One year later, Cantina La Martina is thriving. His small team, led by Stanczyk in the dining room, was determined to become an integral part of the community, keeping affordable taco specials on the menu to balance Dionicio’s more ambitious entrees, and hosting fundraisers like a holiday meal giveaway that has helped endear them to neighbors.

“They’re great partners and we all try to support them,” says Bill McKinney, executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corp. (NKCDC). “It’s a meeting place now, and it’s become a critical space. Because we don’t have many of those.”

And Dionicio’s joyful cooking, from vibrant aguachiles to his signature machete quesadilla stuffed with al pastor negro, huitlacoche-filled ravioli, and duck carnitas, has drawn fans and critical praise from far beyond Kensington. He was named The Inquirer’s chef of the year for 2022.

“I knew it would take someone like Dionicio who’d be willing to go and open in this spot, because it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s one of the most challenged corners in the city,” says Shift Capital CEO Brian Murray. “But I didn’t expect the food to be as ambitious as it’s become. ... He’s the hardest-working guy I’ve ever known and he deserves everything.”

How ambitious?

“We’ve gone through 20 pounds of chicatanas [ants] and 15 pounds of chapulines [grasshoppers] in the past six months,” said Dionicio, who prides himself on showcasing pre-Hispanic dishes, like the chomorro pork shank that features bugs.

It was not until Cantina La Martina celebrated its first-year anniversary in February that Dionicio and Saez finally took a pause from their 18-hour workdays: “We haven’t had a break for a year,” said Saez over a pizza and pasta lunch in Chipilo, a town near Puebla known for its Italian immigrant roots.

“Hey, it’s Italian food cooked by Mexicans for Mexicans,” joked Dionicio, referring to the multitude of Mexican workers who now fuel the kitchens of Italian restaurants in Philadelphia, including, at one point, himself.

Cooking is a natural direction

This trip to Mexico was their reward, but also a quest for inspiration. And they found several such sparks during the first couple days in Oaxaca, where we discussed the finer points of pit roasting with a barbacoa master in the town of Tlacolula de Matamoros, then toured the smoke-filled halls of the market there, where grills flared with longaniza sausage, chile-spiced tasajo beef, and smoldering spring onions right next to the butcher stalls where they were bought.

We sampled fresh roasted and fermented cocoa beans whipped with masa into a chocolate-atole froth by a whirling, hand-spun molinillo. We admired the intricately carved displays of mamey and other fruits, the women seated on the ground deftly shaving nopales paddles of their prickly spines. We inhaled fragrant piles of cumin and multihued bags of fresh saffron.

“Mezcal?” said an old lady who tapped me on the shoulder to offer a tiny medicine cup sip from the clear plastic jug of alcohol on her shoulder. No thanks, I said politely, there would still be plenty of time for mezcal.

We wandered into an atole tasting at Olga Cabrera’s charming Tierra del Sol in Oaxaca City, where the astonishing array of multicolored hot masa beverages, infused with everything from floral cocoa blossoms to liquified tortillas, could someday make a cameo at Cantina’s brunch.

Dionicio hovered jealously at the market over the tall baskets of multicolored chiles that are largely inaccessible in Philly — the chile de Árbol Indios, chipotle rojos, pasilla mixes, and smoky sweet chilhuacle negros that are essential to mole negro: “That’s why you can never make it taste quite the same back home,” he said.

We sampled a remarkably refreshing range of alcoholic pulques with third-generation fermentation master Reina Cortés Cortés at her A & V La Casa de Pulque in Santiago Matatlán, then went into the field to drink the unfermented nectar called aguamiel, effortlessly siphoned up into a hollow gourd from the heart of an agave with a deep inhale by Dionicio. He’d grown up doing this daily with his grandfather in San Mateo Ozolco.

Dionicio rarely eats in upscale restaurants when he returns to Mexico, gravitating instead to street food and home cooking. But we were all delighted by Criollo in Oaxaca, where chef Luis Arellano and Enrique Olvera (of Mexico City’s Pujol) serve a tasting menu with modern twists on classic Oaxaqueño flavors in the courtyard of a colonial mansion with a series of outdoor kitchens that Dionicio admired while a strutting rooster named Claudio crowed throughout our meal. (“We’ve got roosters in Kensington,” Saez says.)

Dionicio’s touristic curiosity, though, turned to pure nostalgia once we arrived at the city of Puebla and sidled up one early morning to a mobile tamale stand run by Israel Zuñiga in El Barrio del Artista. He sold us hot cups of chocolatey champurrado and handed Dionicio a green salsa tamale tucked into a delicately crusty torta roll for a hearty sandwich known as a guajolota.

“I used to eat these every day as a kid because they’re so cheap,” said Dionicio, who, as a 14-year-old, was a promising student sent to Puebla for advanced studies in the hopes of someday becoming an agricultural engineer.

But money was short, requiring him to sell camote candies on the street to supplement his income between school hours. And it still wasn’t enough. His father got sick, and he needed to return home to help on the farm. He left before his first year in Puebla was over. His engineering dreams were over, too.

A tough journey

“Everyone has a story to tell about trying to get here, but some of those stories are sad,” Dionicio says. “There are memories you might want to forget.”

Dionicio’s journey was a bumpy one long before he made it to the border. Once his father recovered from his illness a few months after his son had returned from school in Puebla, Dionicio, who’d tasted the world beyond the farm, had decided he could not stay in San Mateo Ozolco, where work and extra income was scarce after logging near the volcano was banned by the government.

Still just 14, he left with two shirts, one pair of pants, and just enough money to take a bus to Sinaloa: “I thought I’d never come back,” he said.

But he failed to find the hotel work he had anticipated, and before long he found himself living on the streets of Mazatlán, scrounging for bits of cast-off tortillas and bread. After three weeks, he was easy pickings for a recruiter from the Mexican Navy: “ ‘You want food and a warm bed?’ he asked. I lied, said I was 15, and joined up.”

It was the beginning of a four-year stint in the military that found him patrolling remote villages across Mexico and sparking his interest in the country’s diverse regional foodways. He also found a love of cooking, something he was discouraged from in San Mateo where the kitchen is the province of women. Dionicio’s unit hiked often and hunted for its food — usually rabbit. He was the one tasked with roasting the meal over a campfire, marinated in wild anise herbs alongside a wild mushroom stew.

Cooking felt like the natural direction when he left the Navy for Mexico City, where he learned to be a line cook at an Argentinian steak house. But he also found himself agitated by the boisterous city, and intrigued by his brother Adrian’s promise of Philadelphia.

It would take two months to make it happen. The first time Dionicio crossed the border near Cananea, he and a friend from San Mateo wandered the Sonoran desert for seven days before they were caught by U.S. Immigration, badly beaten, and sent back.

“I tried again the next day,” he said, “because I’m persistent.”

This time crossing near Pomona was easy, but their transportation did not show up on the other side. So they practically froze during that chilly October night in 1998, 15 wet strangers huddling together by the side of the road trying to stay warm until the morning, when their ride finally appeared.

One week later, Dionicio was at the posh Locust Club in Philadelphia where he’d begun to wash dishes for chef Philippe Chin. A still-unknown chef named Marc Vetri walked in to ask Chin for advice. He’d purchased Chin’s restaurant at 1312 Spruce St., now called Vetri. Suddenly Dionicio had a second job.

“He was just this scared little boy who spoke no English, but he was always smiling, always curious,” Vetri recalls.

Before long, he rose from washing dishes to the salad station. And then the pasta station after a big break: Vetri’s Italian noodle maestro was unable to return from his August vacation to Europe due to a lack of work papers.

Dionicio, known as “Nicho” to his friends, turned out to be a gifted cook.

“He caught on fast, learned the meat and fish station, as well, but he was really the pasta guy. And his pasta was always perfect,” said Vetri. “His gnocchi were fluffy and light. Never needed a recipe.”

In the intensely collaborative environment of a restaurant that created new tasting menus every two weeks, Dionicio was a key player.

“He was an integral part of all the food there during those early years,” says Vetri, who included Dionicio in a picture of some key Vetri alums, including Michael Solomonov and Joey Baldino, on the cover of his first cookbook, Il Viaggio di Vetri.

Vetri helped Dionicio acquire his official work papers after eight years, which eventually led to a green card to allow for permanent residency after he paid a $10,000 fine and wrote an official letter apologizing for his illegal entry. He was finally able to visit his family in 2009, 11 years after his departure, when he was working his first head chef job at Xochitl and cooking Mexican food professionally for the first time. In 2015 he became an American citizen.

“I’m not a victim, I’m here to do something and contribute to this city and this country,” Dionicio says of his arduous path. “But after all I went through to get here, I was determined not to go back to Mexico until I could do it the right way.”

Ozolqueños’ sister city

As we linger over the mixiote feast with frosty cans of Victoria beer in his mother’s kitchen, Dionicio says he’s one of the lucky ones.

“During COVID we lost a lot of people — every day someone was dying [in Mexico],” he says. “My cousin’s father passed away, and he couldn’t be there. A lot of families back in Philly had to say goodbye to their parents here during the pandemic. And now they have nothing to go back to.”

He’s so grateful Celia was able to recover in his absence.

“I’m happy that he remembers his parents exist!” Celia says, teasingly giving the eldest of her eight children a poke in the ribs.

“I’m glad I can remind you I’m your son!” he says, nudging her in return as the two burst into giggles.

Thinking back to those early days after the departures of Dionicio and his younger brother, Adrian, and eventually three other siblings who went to Philadelphia, Celia recalls being worried, but also resigned to the reality of migration due to their economic circumstances. Dionicio’s father had also migrated to Los Angeles in the 1970s before returning to marry Celia and farm this land.

“I was sad to see Dionicio leave,” Celia said. “But it’s a risk you take as a mother because you want for them to have a better life. You have to accept that you don’t know if you’re going to see them again.”

The broad strokes of Dionicio’s story are not unique. About 350,000 Mexicans have immigrated to Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Jersey over the past 25 years, a third of them from the state of Puebla, according to Carlos Obrador, the Consul of Mexico in Philadelphia. The population has grown by 60% in the city over the past decade, and though the official count is much lower, there may be as many as 37,500 Mexicans in Philadelphia now, according to estimated data from the 2021 U.S. Census. The majority live in South Philadelphia, and the largest percentage of them come from San Mateo Ozolco.

By 2012 as much as one half of San Mateo Ozolco’s adult population had made the journey to Philadelphia. Today, there are now more Ozolqueños living in Philadelphia than in San Mateo Ozolco itself, where the population was estimated at just under 2,900 in 2020.

After two decades behind the scenes in Philly kitchens, Dionicio’s generation has produced a wave of San Mateo-born chefs who’ve blossomed into restaurateurs. Carlos Aparicio at El Chingón and Eladio Soto of El Mezcal Cantina both opened their restaurants in the past year. Dionicio’s cousin David Piña owns Tamalex, and another cousin, Aaron del Rosario, was one of the pioneers of South Philly Mexican-style pizza at Rosario’s Pizzeria, which he co-owns with wife Margarita Jeronimo. (They recently opened a second branch in Cheltenham.)

As Dionicio leads us on a walking tour of his hometown, through its quiet narrow streets to a central plaza bordered by a festive church and school, the sister city connections become all the more vivid.

A car pulls over and a man gets out to welcome Dionicio back. It’s Augustin Mateo, who lived in Philadelphia until 2003, where he worked at Tangerine and Brasserie Perrier. Half a block away we’re greeted by another man whose sunny smile and broad cowboy hat I immediately recognize: “I delivered food to your house in Center City,” he tells me.

Of course! It’s Pedro Ríos Hernandez, who launched Mole Poblano on South Ninth Street in the Italian Market in 2012 with his wife, the chef Ines Sandoval Perez, whose fluffy tamales and mole-stewed chicken have long been among my favorite South Philly flavors.

After nearly two decades each in Philadelphia, working first as street vendors before opening the restaurant with their sons, Javier and Pedro Ríos, the two needed to return to Mexico to care for Ines’ sick mother in January 2020. They never made it back.

“I am feliz y contento,” says Pedro with a shrug of serene resignation, welcoming us through his gated front door into a yard whose every inch is occupied with strutting, pecking chickens. The birds, along with rabbits and a flock of sheep in another nearby yard, are the current livelihood for the couple since their attempt at another restaurant in Mexico City, Mole Poblano II, fizzled after a few months under the strain of the pandemic.

They have plenty to ground them here with eight grandchildren in Mexico.

“But I still miss Philadelphia,” Ines says. She has nine grandchildren there, and also thinks constantly about her restaurant, still run by her sons. She sends them corn husks every Wednesday from the family farm to make their tamales. “I take pride in what we’ve built there.”

Just outside, a group of young men scrambled in a heated soccer match, kicking a half-inflated ball through the middle of one of San Mateo Ozolco’s eerily empty streets: “I recognize most of them,” Dionicio says. “They used to live in Philly.”

We drive over the hill on the southeastern side of town, and meet another former Philadelphian, Dionicio’s cousin Claudia León. She worked at Xochitl, Zahav, and Davio’s over the course of three years, “and I loved Philadelphia, such a pretty city, and I would have stayed,” she says. But her husband got sick with a brain tumor: “We decided that if he was going to die, he was going to die in his own country.”

Returning to Mexico brought a happier result. The two focused on his prescribed organic diet, started an apiary in San Mateo Ozolco called Zihuatlán, and began producing wild honey and bee pollen, a teaspoon of which he eats every day. He’s now been in remission for 12 years, and their honey business is booming, though Claudia remains reluctant to export it because she wants to make sure it remains accessible to her neighbors: “I want them to remember the importance of bees.”

Dionicio watches with admiration as Claudia stands in front of a wall of active hives effortlessly balancing her baby girl on one hip and a frame of honeycomb in the other hand while bees lazily circle above. The look of pride and belonging on his face was not unlike the one I’d seen a little earlier as he surveyed his own family’s small farm with his father.

The two strolled through the barnyard, past the giant turkey, the penned-up pig and sheep, and wandered out beyond onto the two-acre field that has anchored the Jiménez family here for at least four generations. The spiky agave plants they grow for pulque traced the sloping contours of the land perched on San Mateo Ozolco’s northern edge that overlooks the valley. It was otherwise bare of the blue corn and apple and plum trees that had been harvested in the fall, soon to be replanted in the spring. But it was quiet now — aside from the gunshots that frequently echoed through the air as neighbors practiced with muskets for the upcoming Carnaval festivities, during which Celia would brew a massive cazuela of green pozole. It would nearly coincide with Adrian’s birthday, when the family would march to the church with his picture to mark his memory.

As Saez and I watched Dionicio and his father sharing a moment in the field, she whispered in my ear: “Dionicio’s son Beto looks so much like his grandfather.”

She was referring to Alberto, the oldest of Dionicio’s four children and a 25-year-old chef who at that moment was holding down the kitchen at Cantina La Martina back in Philadelphia. The city where Dionicio has now spent most of his life could not have felt farther away as he soaked in the sunny landscape of his birthright in San Mateo Ozolco, the volcanic smoke from Popocatépetl’s peak streaming steadily across the blue horizon.

“If I forget about this place, I’m going to forget my identity, and you can’t do that or you lose your soul,” he says. “This is our heart. It’s built into you, and if you lose that you have nothing.”

Planting seeds for Kensington and Cantina

The earth has been freshly tilled in Kensington. It is just over a month since the Cantina crew returned from Mexico, and dozens of children, parents, and volunteers from the neighborhood have gathered on a crisp Saturday morning in early April to plant the seeds of tomatoes, jalapeños, chilacayote squash, and cilantro in the 1,000-square-foot garden that lines the fence inside the sprawling patio behind Cantina La Martina.

“Welcome to Finca La Martina!” says Saez.

A native Puerto Rican whose consulting company Elévate helps Latino entrepreneurs, Saez, 45, has taken the lead in Cantina’s efforts to engage with community groups to support the neighborhood. They held a tamalada tamale competition to support street vendors. They gave away free meals around Christmas. The garden initiative stems from a cooking class Saez helps run with the NKCDC at the McPherson Square Library. She was expecting 15 participants for the planting, but instead nearly 40 showed up, ready to clean, paint, and plant the raised garden beds.

“I’m so glad they came here because this is my neighborhood,” says participant Rosalind “Roz” Pichardo, 46, an activist who leads community engagement for Prevention Point, a Kensington-based public health organization. “Just look at this vibrant place. It has delicious food and now they’re planting a garden!”

Dionicio says he couldn’t find any investors to join him in opening Cantina, including a couple of relatives who refused because of the location. He took the leap solo nonetheless, because he could afford it, and then quickly realized that becoming a transformational part of this neighborhood’s future inspired him.

“When people start looking around Kensington, all they see are the problems, but nobody sees the families that live here who have kids. … You see how much it means to all the families here to have a place to come hang out and have dinner and be safe. That changes everything,” he says.

Already, the sidewalks that a year ago were littered with used needles are noticeably cleaner. And Gloria “Smooches” Cartagena Hart of the NKCDC, who also attended the seed planting, says Cantina has had a dramatic impact.

“This used to be an old bar, and we did not feel safe here but now they have made it pop with bright colors,” she says.

McKinney of the NKCDC agrees.

“As Cantina rises, I’m hoping all the water rises and speaks to the identity of what this community’s food scene really could look like. Hopefully they can be a model for other people coming in here on how to do that.”

Even so, Cantina La Martina’s business remains fragile.

Dionicio says they must pay more in an already strained labor market to lure and retain servers at this location. He routinely pays more than Center City restaurants for essential services like trash pickup, with providers adding surcharges due to fear over contact with needles. And then late last year, their insurance company dropped them after reassessing the risks of the neighborhood.

“Insurance went up 40% on all our properties,” confirms Murray of Shift Capital, who calls such added fees “the Kensington Tax,” which makes succeeding for small businesses there even more difficult.

That has not slowed this team one bit. Energized by their trip and the boost of Dionicio’s recent James Beard nomination, Saez says “we got back from Mexico and hit the ground running.”

And planting seeds. And digging, as evidenced by the pair of 5-foot deep brick firepits for barbacoa de hoyo similar to ones we saw in Oaxaca. Dionicio plans to begin using them in the coming weeks to slow roast whole goats and sides of beef wrapped in maguey leaves and spices. A pergola-topped outdoor cooking hearth is soon to be constructed in the backyard, inspired by the al fresco comal we saw at Criollo. Dionicio plans to source heirloom blue corn from his friend, chef Jennifer Zavala of Juana Tamale, as Cantina plans to begin nixtamalizing and grinding its own masa to press fresh tortillas. Bee hives may be next.

“We already had a spring menu planned before this trip, but now it’s going to change,” Dionicio said, bursting with the excitement of new ideas.

His mole trio has expanded to five, featuring the addition of a green pipián and a rose- and pistachio-infused pink mole we tasted in Puebla. He’s been experimenting with a chilaquiles bisteco and a refreshing gazpacho disguised as a “fruit salad” we encountered in Oaxaca, as well as a tostada topped with fish marinated in tamarind and a chile-shrimp paste called chintextle. And just as Dionicio has begun ramping up plans to help organize the revival of Philadelphia’s first Carnaval de Puebla since the pandemic, he’s brewed a pozole special at Cantina La Martina that has a vibrant emerald hue, green with epazote, chayote leaves, tomatillo husks, and other green herbs — similar to one his mother made.

Ultimately, Dionicio and Saez believe they need to buy this property to secure their long-term stability, a subject Murray says they’ve yet to formally discuss. But he’s open to it.

“We’re very much about exit strategies in benefit of the neighborhood,” he said. “An exit strategy where [Dionicio] becomes a long-term owner would be a win for everyone.”

If it happens, Cantina La Martina’s garden should — by then — be in bountiful bloom.

“When we put these seeds into the ground, yes, it is symbolic,” says Saez. “We’re committed to this place, to help till it, grow it, and nourish it. Hopefully it can nourish us, too.”