Last Abuela serves some of Philly’s best Mexican food out of a Fishtown hoagie shop takeout window | Craig LaBan

The secret to making great sopes begins with the delicacy of those flat masa cups, their sides pinched up with the divots of fearless fingertips that press ever so gently, even if the scalding-hot dough still radiates the plancha’s heat.

And if those fingertips belong to Mariana Hernandez, you’re in luck.

“She’s the boss, she’s got the magic hands,” says her husband and partner at Last Abuela, chef Julio Rivera, who, of course, is biased. But he also speaks the truth. I can attest to that, having marveled at the beautiful array of sopes — seemingly simple, but each bursting with vividly layered flavors — that they’ve been serving for takeout at their biweekly Sunday pop-ups from a former water ice stand behind Castellino’s Italian Market in Fishtown.

And those fresh masa rounds are only the beginning — griddle-toasted corn canvases that get embellished but never overwhelmed by Hernandez’s various toppings. There’s a fine layer of creamy frijoles flecked with jalapeños that gets topped with a vibrant-green salsa verde that pulses with tomatillo tang and herby cilantro stems. There are the salsa roja-blushed picaditas — the name Rivera, 46, grew up calling sopes in his native Southern Puebla — scattered with crumbled cheese and the porky crunch of chicharrones.

And then there are the sopes topped with chicken in deep brown, rancho-style mole Poblano, a luxuriously complex sauce that exudes a rustic whiff of smoke from the charcoal-fired anafre grill Hernandez uses to toast her ancho, mulato, and morita chilies. Once they’re blended with almonds, sesame seeds, canella, cloves, fried plantains, raisins, and Abuelita chocolate, that mole simmers slowly in a cauldron — also over that open-fired grill, accompanied by a ceremony of blessings and burning rosemary sticks. When it’s done, it achieves a profound shade of balanced darkness imbued with fruity sweetness, earthy spice, and the spirit of her own abuela, Victoria Sanchez, who taught her the recipe before Hernandez left her Puebla town of El Mirador Ixtacamaxtitlán in 2006: destination Philadelphia.

“I like making sopes because it’s a grandmother memory. But it’s also a memory of mi mamá,” says Hernandez, 44, who lost her mother to cancer in 2013 without being able to return to Mexico to see her. “Making sopes makes me think about her in a good way.”

It’s little wonder Cara Jo Castellino and Matthew Barrow fell in love with those sopes, which Hernandez would bring for lunch to her work at Castellino’s Market, the couple’s corner deli, specialty food store, and sandwich shop where Hernandez sliced meats, stocked shelves, and made some of the exceptional hoagies.

“What are these Mexican pizzas?! I became obsessed. Her soups are incredible, too,” said Castellino, 33, whose experience with traditional Mexican cuisine was limited where she grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania. “These were some of the most incredible things I’ve eaten.”

“[Mariana’s] way too talented to just be slicing deli meats,” agreed Barrow.

And that’s how the seeds of Last Abuela were first planted, at shared meals among colleagues turned friends that evolved into a business in 2019 co-owned by the two couples, with Hernandez owning the largest stake. The spotlight is on her family recipes, which roam beyond sopes to memorable soups (from soulful tortilla to festive calabaza), incredibly moist tamales, and specials like chile relleno stuffed with ground beef, potatoes, and peas, a filling Rivera likened to a Mexican shepherd’s pie tucked inside an egg-battered poblano with melty ribbons of Oaxaca cheese.

For Castellino and Barrow, who serve customers at the window and handle the social media and accounting, it has been an opportunity to make good use of the garage behind their deli. But, especially, it’s been a chance to help “an angel that happened to be in here helping us, and [for whom] we are super grateful,” says Castellino. “We’re excited to be able to offer a platform for her and Julio to do what they’ve wanted to do this whole time ... If we can be the people they know and trust to help them with a business they’ve always wanted to pursue, we are totally down to be that.”

For Hernandez, “it is a dream come true and it’s really difficult for us — even now — to accept it as something that is possible. We’ve been working so long for other people.”

“We’re always skeptical,” concedes Rivera. “It’s just something that’s in our past histories, of people always having taken advantage of us ... But we all [the two couples] depend on each other now for Last Abuela.”

Rivera and Hernandez have been such steady behind-the-scenes fixtures on Philly’s food scene, it’s quite possible you’ve already eaten their food without knowing it. Hernandez was the garde-manger at Cuba Libre before moving to Rosa Blanca, where Jose Garcés nicknamed her the “Empanada Queen” because she made all the dough for the restaurant’s renowned turnovers. She also worked at Philly’s most coveted chicken pho stop, Pho Ga Thanh Thanh, before landing at Kraftwork in Fishtown, where she and Rivera cooked alternate shifts so one of them could be with their two sons, Christian, 10, and Juan, 6, at home nearby.

Rivera, meanwhile, has worked nearly a dozen Philly kitchens over the past quarter century, a career that was on a promising trajectory early, when he helped launch Guillermo Pernot’s ¡Pasión! as sous-chef then became chef de cuisine at El Vez, where he was instrumental in creating the tortilla soup, among other signatures. But a series of admittedly poor and impulsive career moves was compounded by his struggles with addiction. They kept Rivera’s talent off track until, at his worst moment in 2015, he ran his bicycle off a busy road on the way to work. He’d burned though his cash savings on his habit and had nowhere to go. He checked himself into rehab.

“Everything I do now has a healing purpose,” says Rivera, whose “new style of living” includes proudly working for his wife. “She always supported me through my troubles, and now it’s my turn to do it for her: She’s the chef. I do all the chopping and I’m the dishwasher. Nobody moves her from the stove.”

“Life hasn’t been easy for us and we’ve been through hard times,” says Hernandez. “But I chose [Julio] as my husband from the beginning, and I haven’t changed my mind. We finally got married in 2019 — and here we are.”

That’s a beautiful thing if you’ve tasted her food, which has a refined balance of flavors and textures that elevates these dishes above similar versions I’ve tasted elsewhere. Her recent creative riffs on vegetable-infused masa add both color and subtle back notes to some of her tortillas, from the soft sweet potato tortillas that came with the chilled beef salpicón salad to the potato-parsnip tortillas served alongside the chile relleno. The sweet potato tortilla was even more memorable crisped for the tostada, piled high with a vegetarian treasure of black beans, kale, and basmati bound with cilantro-lime dressing dappled with smoky streaks of morita salsa.

Hernandez’s tamales are just as special because she stuffs them with raw meats and salsas then steams them, rather than using precooked stews. The technique infuses an extra juiciness into the masa cakes that recalls the bone-in meat tamales she grew up with— even if they’re boneless here for Fishtown’s takeout crowd.

Each has its own distinctive personality, with hoja santa scenting the guajillo salsa for the red chicken tamale; a smokier chipotle fueling the salsa roja for the pork tamale. Even Hernandez’s vegetarian rajas tamale has an extra something, its punchy jalapeños and Oaxacan cheese sparked by a wedge of tomatillo.

In a city with plenty of great Mexican options, Last Abuela stands out. The only question, it seems, is where does this collaboration goes from here?

The team had Last Abuela running nearly four times a week until it hit the pandemic, which greeted Castellino and Barrow with a shock just days after returning from their Jamaican honeymoon in March of 2020. They subsequently laid off their small staff, including Hernandez. And the pop-up was pared back, too, to a biweekly event. The shift to the efficiency of online preordering has been one positive thing from the pandemic that they plan to keep, says Castellino, who unfortunately, along with Barrow, suffered a bout with COVID-19 a month ago, resulting in a temporary two-week closure for the deli.

Hernandez and Rivera are understandably eager to get their business rolling at a more frequent pace. And a move to weekly hours is imminent, says Castellino, as citywide vaccinations increase and they can begin hire immunized staff to expand and rebuild their business.

But the end goal, the partners agree, is for Last Abuela to evolve into a proper restaurant, whether that means rehabbing their current space or some day moving out of the hoagie shop’s garage into a separate location where, as Rivera says, “we can show our full potential.”

Having already seen what Mariana Hernandez’s magic hands can do with sopes, I can’t wait to taste what’s next.

The next Last Abuela pop-up is scheduled for April 25, at 1255 E. Palmer St. behind Castellino’s. Menu goes live online for preorders at noon on Tuesday prior to the event.