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Leading up to Cinco de Mayo, we are sharing the food, culture and stories of Mexican New Yorkers for Cinco to Celebrate. So far, we have featured how this musician uses mariachi to connect with his culture and how to support this longtime Mexican folk art store that is in danger of closing. Today, we are sharing the story of Mayahuel, a family-owned, first-generation Mexican immigrant-run eatery that grinds and mills its own corn in the basement for its masa-centric fare.
Leonila Cazares and her husband Carlos Vazquez can often be found underground in an Astoria basement. Over a two-day period, they boil down dried kernels of corn, before straining it and grinding it, all to make the cornerstone of Mexican cuisine: tortillas. But this isn’t the inner workings of a tortillería. This is just the day-to-day operation of the Mexican restaurant Mayahuel.
Opened in 2022, Mayahuel is a family-owned and -operated restaurant in every sense of the phrase. The restaurant was dreamt up by Leonila and Carlos’s sons: Ivan and Marc Vazquez. As a child, Ivan grew up in restaurants, watching his parents work various jobs after they immigrated from Mexico to New York, landing in Astoria and then moving to Jackson Heights. His parents eventually became the owners of Puebla Seafood, a deli-turned-restaurant which they’ve operated for 26 years. Watching them work seven days a week at a time, Ivan remembers it was their love for hospitality that kept them going.
“My mom used to always say that work was more of a hobby,” he recalls. “[She] didn’t enter the business saying, ‘I'm going to make money.’ It's a business of taking care of customers and making sure they leave happy.”
Continuing on the family legacy, Ivan began his career working at restaurants across New York including Tavern on the Green and Westlight, the rooftop bar atop the William Vale Hotel. He soon envisioned opening a restaurant of his own, and immediately turned to his family for guidance.
“To have somebody that's already been in the game for so many years—they give you more insights,” he said about working with his family, citing that his parents were able to withstand the recession and even the COVID-19 pandemic. “If they could have done it together, just imagine how strong our bond will be.”
And so it was decided—Ivan would oversee the front of the house, he recruited Marc, fresh out of college with a marketing degree, to run social media, and his parents would help out in the kitchen. As for the location, the brothers went back to where it all started, finding a home in Astoria. And so, the restaurant debuted the week after Thanksgiving in 2022.
In the early days, the restaurant stayed within the realms of what they called “general” Mexican cuisine—tacos, nachos and queso fundido. Yet the brothers knew they wanted to push themselves further. They received that push with the introduction of executive chef Eduardo Santos. With a global background working in Michelin-starred kitchens in Argentina, Spain and Peru, chef Santos worked with the family to bring forward a new focus: exploring the coastal cuisine of northern Mexico with a Oaxacan touch.
Part of that vision included making their tortillas in-house. Starting with corn, the brothers tried working with product from America, but quickly noted that there was quite a bit of difference in terms of taste and even smell when compared to the Mexican variety. So they began working with Tamoa, a distributor that sources corn from small farmers around Mexico. Depending on the availability and the fluctuations of the season, the family receives yellow, red and blue corn from around the country, including Oaxaca and the central state, Tlaxcala.
“Every strain has its own taste, depending on where it's farmed,” said Marc. “One of my favorites is red tortillas, because it tastes very volcanic and very salty, even though it doesn’t have any salt. While the blue is sweeter and chewier."
Once they settled on the product, they turned to their mother for the recipe. With memories of making tortillas as a child, she began calling family members and friends back home in Puebla, Mexico, to fashion a recipe all her own. Now over a two-day period, she stands over stainless steel vats that boil with a mixture of water and calcium hydroxide, referred to as slake lime, which helps break down yellow, red and blue dried kernels of corn. After a night's rest, the corn is drained and then ground down in their electric molino to make masa. The molino yields 60 lbs masa an hour—making 150 lbs over the course of the week—which then gets portioned into balls, weighed and eventually pressed to make tortillas. It wasn’t a steady process according to Marc, as it took about five months to truly perfect it.
While chef Santos left the business in 2024, chef Gerarde Duerte (previously of La Mano, The Black Ant, and Enrique Olvera’s Michelin-starred ATLA) ushers forward this masa-centric cuisine. A mentee of chef Santos, chef Duerte uses the tortillas as the base for tostadas plied with chunks of octopus, shrimp, chile manzano and sweetened tiger's milk and tortillas filled with beer-battered fish and salsa morita. Not only that, but the chef released a masa-centric dessert menu. The rotating cast has included blue corn, sugar-dusted churros and the Oaxacan corn pudding, Nicuatole, with a meringue on top.
Always evolving, the family is finding new ways to keep things fresh. Every other month, the restaurant hosts mezcal dinners, showcasing their well-stocked collection of over 100 bottles—the restaurant is named after the goddess of agave, after all—alongside chef Duerte’s corn-centric cuisine. Later this year, the family is planning a trip to Sonora with chef Duarte to further explore and add dishes from his hometown. Among its constant push to solidify its identity, Ivan wants Mayahuel to be known for its food, the hard work his family puts into the cuisine, and, most importantly, their hospitality.
“I want people to feel like they are home,” he said. “We always want to make sure people feel happy and warm.”