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TBT El Gallo owner Carlos Ordaz-Nunez has been offering tamales via preorder since an extended visit by his aunt from Mexico.
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Sylvia Ordaz uses a wooden tortilla press she brought from Mexico.
As of a few months ago, Carlos Ordaz-Nunez has started to measure time by tamales. “Fifty minutes have gone by — no, that’s actually 40 tamales,” the tattooed, gregarious owner of TBT El Gallo says with a chuckle.
He has his aunt, or tia, Sylvia Ordaz to thank for that. He can also thank her for helping him become a self-proclaimed “masa master.” Prior to her recent visit from Mexico, he had only ever made about 100 tamales, and now he’s crafted over 6,000 of the holiday staple.
Within a week of his aunt’s arrival on a two-month visit to the states, Ordaz-Nunez says she called him, bored, and asked if she could come work at his Cary Street taqueria. Instead, he suggested they make tamales.
“Tamales are such a nostalgic, visceral, core part of being Latino; especially for Mexican Americans, it is that Christmas core memory,” Ordaz-Nunez says. “It’s a labor of love/hatred and loathing. You’re in there with all your tias and cousins, and everyone has a job, and you’re making tamales, and it takes the whole morning.”
In November, he posted an order form online offering tamales by the dozen, in flavors including chipotle sweet potato with Oaxacan cheese, chicken and green chiles, red chile pork, and guajillo chile with red miso mushrooms, all with pickled escaveche (onion, carrot and serrano chiles) and potatoes and enveloped in the cornmeal dough known as masa.
“I thought maybe four or five, maybe 10 people would order, and me and her would just make them at the house one day,” Ordaz-Nunez says.
Nearly 100 people placed preorders for about 1,300 tamales. What Ordaz-Nunez originally envisioned as an afternoon of playing loteria (Mexican bingo) and appeasing his tia has evolved into a reconnection with his own culture and the successful unlocking of a level of the business diners had been yearning for.
“For me, I get a special kick out of it when young Latino people come out and they’re kind of like, ‘I really identify with this,’ or ‘These tamales taste like my grandma made them,’ or ‘This reminds me of my childhood,’” he says. “I never realized how much I missed that.”
During their first order-filling foray, Ordaz-Nunez and his family members, including aunts Sylvia Ordaz and Amparo Villarruel; his mother, Rosa; and uncle Mario (husband to Ordaz); along with a couple of TBT El Gallo team members, hunkered down at Hatch Kitchen — hand-making tamales and stuffing masa-laden corn husks with meats including red chile pork and green chile chicken — until 1 a.m. as Mexican music played in the background.
“It was one of the most traditional things I’ve done in a hot minute,” Ordaz-Nunez says.
Traditional isn’t a word the restaurateur typically uses to describe himself. Born in Nayarit, Mexico, he’s spent most of his life in the United States, his parents first coming to the country as H-2A migrant workers before landing in Hanover County, where he grew up. Today, they operate the produce stand Rosa’s Garden in Mechanicsville. Through his pop-up turned brick-and-mortar restaurant, TBT El Gallo (touted as a Totally Badass Taqueria, though its logo also features tacos, burritos and tortas), the 33-year-old has earned a reputation for cuisine rooted in heritage but balanced by a fresh and unique perspective, and for being authentically himself, serving dishes such as pork belly al pastor or hosting flash tattoo events, taco tats and all.
During the time they spent in the kitchen making tamales, Ordaz-Nunez says, the generation gap between him and his aunts was revealed. They moved methodically with earned ease, using a pinch of this and handful of that, even breaking out a wooden tortilla press Ordaz had brought in her carry-on from Mexico. Aiming to hone the process and maintain consistency for the future, Ordaz-Nunez and his team members were using scales for accurate measurements and taking their time to fully grasp the art.
“[It has been] a lot of fun mixing not just the culture, it’s so traditional, but the perspectives of it,” Ordaz-Nunez says. “My new-age-immigrant, born-in-Mexico, grew-up-in-the-states identity, with [my aunts’ mindset of] this is how we do it in Mexico and how it’s supposed to be. I told my tias, we’ll make the masa super traditional, but I’m going to do the fillings. The masa is such a sacred kind of process, you have to do it a certain way.”
Despite the warning, when he pulled out a red miso paste to mix with the mushrooms, or certain chiles for marinating the pork, his tias raised their eyebrows, but he urged them to trust the process. Ordaz-Nunez and his family clocked in five tamale-making sessions together before Ordaz returned to to Mexico a few weeks ago. Preorders for the latest batch are currently live through Dec. 19 for a Dec. 21 pickup at Second Bottle Wine and Snack Shop in Church Hill. Ordaz-Nunez says he hopes to continue selling tamales, and he will definitely continue using them to measure time.
“It’s been a lot of fun, being an immigrant and celebrating this Mexican heritage of mine and being able to offer a product that is so inherently Mexican and purely traditional and profound,” he says. “Every Latino and Mexican person has a connection to the tamale; it’s such a humble thing, and to be able to offer that and have people be excited about it, or people who have never tried a tamale come out, they are definitely something we want to continue doing.”
