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10/27/2017 El Molino Central in Sonoma delivers Bay Area’s best Mexican food - San Francisco Chronicle

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By Chris Ying | May 10, 2017 | Updated: May 10, 2017 4:26pm

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Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

El Molino Central in Sonomadelivers Bay Area’s best Mexicanfood

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Lamb barbacoa tacos at El Molino Central in Boyes Hot Springs.

Life is frustratingly resistant to order, which is why we find comfort in generalizations. People

need to make sense of things by taking what we’ve experienced and extrapolating some tidiness

from it.

Now this is more of a statement than a generalization, but it’s based on my not-negligible

experience: El Molino Central in Boyes Hot Springs serves the best Mexican food in the Bay

Area.

A molino is a place where nixtamalized corn — that is, dried corn that’s been simmered in an

alkaline bath, washed and hulled — is ground into masa, the life-giving dough that’s used to

make tortillas, tamales, gorditas, sopes, panuchos and other maize-based wonders.

Nixtamalization predates Columbus and has been employed for centuries to unlock nutrients in

corn that our bodies can’t reach on their own. It’s a tricky process to get right, and there are

relatively few places that actually bother to do it from scratch. More often than you’d hope,

“fresh tortillas” are made with Maseca: powdered, instant masa.

Thankfully, the name El Molino Central is not just decorative. Stone-ground, organic masa is at

the heart of the food here.

If you’ve browsed the tortilla section at nearly any San Francisco grocery store, you might

already be familiar with the corn-grinding work of El Molino’s owner, Karen Taylor. Her

company, Primavera, has been selling ready-made tamales, tortillas, chips and salsas around the

Bay Area for more than 25 years. And on Saturday mornings at the Ferry Building, her stand

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offers hefty plates of chilaquiles — thick chips cooked until crunchy-tender in red or green salsa,

with soft scrambled eggs and refried beans — that have pulled me and many others back from

the brink of hangover-induced ruin on numerous occasions.

Taylor opened El Molino Central seven years ago as a place where she could serve a wider range

of freshly prepared food, along with a decent cup of coffee. I first chanced upon the restaurant

while passing through the area, desperate for a caffeine bump. Back then, the coffee was Blue

Bottle. Nowadays, they’re using beans from Jewel Box in Oakland. Taylor says she likes them

because they’re not overly fussy about how their coffee should be brewed. El Molino Central is

not fussy.

IMAGE 1 OF 18Exterior of El Molino Central in Boyes Hot Springs.




You order your food from a register in the front. There’s a refrigerator behind you where you canpick out beer and wine by the bottle. And there are often a few paper-wrapped to-go stacks ofwarm tortillas on the counter, which I always find hard to pass up, if only so I can breathe in theiraroma while waiting for my food. You walk into the kitchen, then through a swinging screendoor to get to the dining room, which comprises a covered patio and a gravel lot furnished withpicnic tables, gas heaters and a relatively new pergola.

The cooking at El Molino veers toward slowly cooked meats, stews and sauces paired withvarious manifestations of fresh masa. Taylor is a disciple of Diana Kennedy, the famed cookbookauthor and prevailing English-language authority on Mexican cuisine. She’s known Kennedy foryears and shares her fascination with — and rigorous approach to — understanding the regionalcooking of Mexico.

There are always two or three tacos on the menu, but not the sort one polishes off while hunchedover beside a street-side stall. The tacos here feel somehow gentler and more deliberate thanthose of a taqueria, like the difference between barbecuing and grilling. In fact, my favorite of ElMolino’s taco fillings is the barbacoa: shreds of lamb pulled from a whole animal cooked at aleisurely pace over maguey leaves and under charcoal in a Caja China roasting box.



El Molino’s tortillas are large and thick, bouncy and bewitchingly fragrant. They’re moister and

more tender than your typical corn tortilla, without being mushy or too soft. Sopes — hand-

formed masa cups shaped like shallow ashtrays — are made from the same dough but have a

griddled crispness that persists even when buried under shredded chicken and doused in thin

salsa. Chips and tostadas are made from different batches of masa where the corn has been

washed more thoroughly, producing a satisfying, shattery crunch. Of all the masa preparations at

El Molino Central, the tamales move me least. I tend to find that the delicacy of fresh masa is

lost when you wrap a brick of it in a banana leaf and steam it. I recognize that this is probably an

unpopular opinion, and I’m OK with that. Maybe I’m just not a tamale guy.

But hey, we can all agree on the beans, right? Everybody flips out about El Molino Central’s

beans. Sometimes they’re pinto, sometimes they’re black, but they’re always refried in freshly

rendered lard with onion and either fresh or dried chiles or chile adobo. Be advised: If you

choose to order family style, the beans will disappear first.




El Molino Central owner Karen Taylor (left), Alfonsina Juarez and Alma Blanco at the restaurant in Boyes Hot Springs.

Taylor will be the first to tell you that both El Molino Central and Primavera are wholly

dependent on her crew: mostly women, all Latino immigrants. Almost all of them hail from

different states of Mexico — Guerrero, Oaxaca, Jalisco, Michoacán — and several have been

working for the company for decades. People will often comment to Taylor about the loyalty she

inspires in her employees, pointing to the times she’s helped them with medical bills and paid

leave, watched their dogs, granted time off, attended quinceañeras and christenings, and raised

money for organizations that offer support to the local Latino community. But Taylor is quick to

insist that that’s not the whole story.



“I feel like I’m a fair employer,” she says. “But at the same time, I’m benefiting from my

employees. I benefit from the fact that a lot of them learned to cook from their mothers.”

The mole on the menu at El Molino is listed as Zoraida’s mole, but it’s actually Zoraida Juarez’s

mother’s recipe. It’s everything you want in a mole: complex earthiness, faint sweetness, an

evasive color that “brown” or “burnt umber” don’t do justice to. But Zoraida’s sister Alfonsina

Juarez says it’s not quite the way mom used to make it. In the coastal part of Oaxaca, where they

grew up, their mother would cook the mole over an open fire, giving the sauce a whisper of

smokiness. And the breadcrumbs they sometimes used to thicken the mole came from bread they

baked themselves.

Taylor says that recipe development at El Molino usually unfolds in three stages. First, she

comes up with something she wants to try, usually drawn from a memory of eating in Mexico.

She’ll ask around to see if anyone on staff has experience making what she has in mind, then do

some research on her own. Then they’ll start experimenting. Most of the time, the women aren’t

cooking food they grew up with. (When I ask them, their favorite dishes tend to be ones that

don’t come from where they do.) Taylor values their regional expertise, but she also pushes them

to join her in learning about food from other parts of the country.




Fresh homemade tortillas at El Molino Central.

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Liliana Calvario and Maurilia Pineda have both been working for Taylor for more than 20 years.

I ask them how much thought they’ve given to Taylor, a white woman from California, cooking

Mexican food. Calvario says it crossed her mind in the beginning, and that it still comes up from

time to time, but the conclusion is always that Taylor is the real deal. They’ve learned a lot from

her, she says. Pineda agrees. She and Taylor have worked side by side on recipes, and she knows

that Taylor is not like other gabachas dabbling in the Mexican hustle.

Still, Alfonsina Juarez points out that the people in her neighborhood in Boyes Hot Springs don’t

eat at El Molino. They have simpler tastes, she says, but their bosses come here. It’s not that they

don’t think the food’s legit — they’ll often ask if Taylor is Mexican — but they imagine it’s too

expensive. Many of her friends and family are employed in the filas — “the rows,” i.e. the

vineyards.

The population of Boyes Hot Springs is

mostly Latino and the economy is largely



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dependent on tourism and grape-growing —difficult, inconsistent industries. It’s a small,quiet area 10 minutes from Sonoma Squarethat’s recently seen a number of infrastructureimprovements: new sidewalks andstreetlamps, and a plan for a town plaza. ButTaylor’s been robbed three times in the pastyear. Twice, someone broke into her car whileshe ducked into Primavera, stealing the bag ofcash from the farmers’ market. The thirdtime, burglars ransacked her house in searchof money they knew she was pooling forvarious construction projects and a newrestaurant’s liquor license.

I won’t get too deep into the details of the whodunit. Suffice it to say that investigators haven’tbeen looking more than a couple degrees beyond Taylor’s current or former employees to findsuspects. The perpetrators knew where she kept her money, and how to get to it.

I ask Taylor if this makes her feel betrayed. I wonder if she sees the robberies as a rebuke fromthe community she’s been working with for 30 years.

She says she was naive, but not about the community. She shouldn’t have left anything in the car,or told anyone she had money at her house. She should have installed security cameras andmotion sensors earlier. But people get robbed everywhere. She looks at the responsible parties asindividuals. It’s not a community that victimized her — it was probably some punk kids.

We make generalizations because that’s the best way we can manage the flood of informationbesieging us these days. We hear about “bad hombres” and we either accept it as truth or reject itwith our own generalization: “Immigrants are good, hard-working people.” Either way, I thinkit’s too simplistic.

The only way to make any satisfying sense of the world is to engage with its disorderliness. Idon’t think El Molino Central is a paragon of perfect racial integration. Nor do I think Taylorshould be seen as exceptional for her generosity. She is, however, commendable for showing up.Doing so is never simple, but delicious things can come from trying.



Chris Ying is a writer, editor and co-founder of Lucky Peach. Email: [email protected]: @chrisyingz

El Molino Central: 11 Central Ave., Boyes Hot Springs. (707) 939-1010.www.elmolinocentral.com. Open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. daily.

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