1 of 2
Monkfish tacos with avocado crema and pickled white onions
2 of 2
Asparagus with salsa macha and jocoque, a fermented Mexican dairy product reminiscent of buttermilk combined with sour cream
“I’m the only one that was actually born here,” 27-year-old chef Eduardo Silva-Martinez says of his family, “but I grew up in a very, very immigrant household, and I didn’t speak English until I started going to school.”
The childhood of the sous chef at The Lobby Bar inside Quirk Hotel was dotted with lessons in preserving vegetables and butchering animals and time spent with his hands in the dirt. Most Sundays meant stopping by El Sol bakery just beyond Richmond's southern border to pick up bolillo bread with his mom, followed by hours of hand-pressing tortillas with her while watching morning cartoons.
A son of Mexican farmers, Silva-Martinez has helmed local restaurants from The Roosevelt to Grisette and Lolita’s, and through the summer, his pop-up Hueya is in residence at Quirk’s Q Rooftop Bar, a dedication both to his heritage and his upbringing in the South. Pronounced way-ah, the name translates to “growth” or “to grow” from the Indigenous language Nahuatl, spoken by more than 1.5 million people in Mexico.
“It kind of meant a lot to me and was fitting of everything I want to do [with the pop-up], and keeping it seasonal,” he says. “Everything has different stages and has to grow."
That connection to cultivation is natural for Silva-Martinez. Both his mother and grandfather were farmers in Guanajuato, Mexico, and in the ’80s, when his family moved to the United States around the time of the Reagan administration’s immigration policy overhaul, they were migrant workers for nearly a decade. Residing in Texas, South Carolina and Florida, he says, his family was always part of the local Latin community.
“It was like our own little world until we moved to Richmond,” Silva-Martinez says of relocating to the city when he was 12. “We were one of the few Latino families in the East End at the time.”
Often traveling to South Side, Silva-Martinez and his family found solace in places such as Panaderia El Sol, Taqueria Panchito, longstanding market Arco Iris, the Jefferson Davis Flea Market, where they would get horchata, and Tortilleria Los Comales for freshly made tortillas.
At 17, he got his first industry gig as a dishwasher at Metro Grill in the Fan.
“I just kind of realized, 'I like this, I like the culture, the type of people [in the dining industry],' ” he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are, you can come from anywhere and work in the kitchen, and you can go really far.”
After graduating high school, Silva-Martinez moved to West Virginia for a cooking apprenticeship. A foraging-friendly state known for its ramps, mushrooms and freshly mined salt, it was a culinary playground. It is also where he began to home in on his style of cooking, find his footing as a young chef and eventually launch a pop-up called Mountain Cantina, an early iteration of his current venture.
“That small-town culture and all this mining culture that had been there forever, it was so family-oriented,” Silva-Martinez says. “I grew up in Latin communities, and it made me miss the food I grew up with. Every young chef comes out of the game and says, ‘I want to learn everything and work in a Michelin-star restaurant and do this super fancy food,’ but working in that environment made me miss all the simple food I grew up with. That’s when I started dipping my toes really back into Mexican food, and I wanted to do more of that.”
Spending the past five years in Richmond, Silva-Martinez officially debuted Hueya last year, making appearances at The Coop and Grisette.
A small collection of rotating items, the menu features barbacoa tacos made with adobo leg of lamb slow-braised in plantain leaves, and beer-battered monkfish brightened with zippy avocado crema and pickled white onions — all served on hand-pressed tortillas that are made daily, a point of pride for Silva-Martinez. He also bakes a Mexican sourdough using a harissa- and lime juice-spiked levain that results in an aromatic and sweeter bread, which is then topped with a miso bean spread, tomatoes and queso fresco; the combination is called mollete de birote.
“It’s really simple and rustic, and it reminds me of stuff I grew up eating, that was lunch — the piece of bread with beans and cheese,” Silva-Martinez says.
Other items include rockfish ceviche, along with recently added bunuelos, a sweet fried tortilla dusted in charred cinnamon sugar, a dessert Silva-Martinez ate often during his childhood. He stresses that Hueya is not about replication, but of showcasing dishes embedded in his culinary memory bank and showcasing the regions that produce the ingredients.
“I’m Chicano, I was raised here,” he says. “I grew up with as much as food and recipes from Mexico that my mom brought, as much as I did with Tex-Mex food that I love to this day. I’m not going to act like I know everything about Mexico, that’s not the world I grew up in, but I did grow up being Mexican American, especially in the South.”
Hueya is open Tuesday through Saturday at the Quirk Hotel Q Rooftop Bar, with service available from 5 to 9 p.m.
