Breakfast dish meshes Mexico, Niagara
Eh José’s take on Huevos Rancheros becomes popular menu item
José Granados remembers being hungry those first few years he slung tacos at the St. Catharines Farmers Market from his eponymous Mexican food stall.
He was hungry to make a go of serving the dishes he knew growing up and living in Cancún before moving to Canada for love some 20 years ago.
But Granados was also eager to eat, especially on slow days when business wasn’t brisk enough to take his mind off his grumbling tummy.
On one of those days, Granados decided to make himself something that wasn’t on his focused menu of tacos, beans and rice, and quesadillas.
He made a couple of over-easy eggs, draped them atop a bed of his staple black beans and rice, splashed them with green salsa, sprinkled some cilantro on top, tucked in some corn tortillas and called it a meal.
Actually, he called it Eh José’s Huevos Rancheros, a nod to both the traditional Mexican breakfast and the necessity of making do in that moment.
Soon after, he would have no time to eat like that at the market again because people started to request he make the same thing for them.
“A lot of people said, ‘If I see a chef eating their own food, it must be good,’” Granados recalled.
His revamp of traditional huevos rancheros, which is fried eggs served atop fried tortillas and soaked in salsa with beans on the side, would become one of Granados’s most popular menu items. His version would fast become the calling card of the hungover and the hungry on Saturday mornings.
I was among them — the hungry, not the hungover. And for years until Granados shuttered his stall in 2018 at his family’s behest, it was my fuel for those weekend market visits.
I would wait patiently — nervously — in the long lineups that required two cases of eggs in the few hours Granados cooked at market square on weekends. I only hoped he still had enough ingredients by the time it was my turn to order.
It was my own fault for sleeping in too long if he didn’t. But it was bliss those days I could break the soft, lava-like yolks of his perfectly cooked over-easy eggs and have it mix with green salsa, hot sauce added at my request, and Granados’s brothy beans soaking the bed of rice and tortillas that completed the melange.
“It’s hangover food. You go to a party on Friday and Saturday morning you eat greasy huevos rancheros with spicy green sauce or red sauce on top,” Granados said. “I have lots of customers saying, ‘I’m hungover.’ I say, ‘Let me make this for you.’”
Staying true to the MO for starting Eh José in 2009, which was to give Niagara a glimpse of the Mexican food Granados was reared on, he offered customers the traditional version. They always preferred his.
They still do since he opened his bricks and mortar Eh José Taqueria on James Street in St. Catharines with his business partner and friend Jesse Barraza late last year.
Granados wanted to keep his huevos rancheros as the Saturday morning special — a nod to those market days that birthed the culinary phenomenon. But requests for the substantial morning meal came every day he was open.
He happily obliges, offering them alongside the made-toorder tacos that are the crux of his and Barraza’s business plan.
Opening a restaurant to feed people six days a week was an unexpected plot twist for Granados, who missed many moments watching his daughters, Alice and Maya, grow so he could make a go of Eh José’s previous incarnation.
They were 15 when Granados shut down his market stall, exhausted from working events and the market while also putting in full-time hours as a restaurant supervisor for Niagara Parks.
“They said, ‘I think it’s time to finish,’” Granados remembered. “I like to give 100 per cent of my person to a job. So I said, ‘OK, it’s time to semi-retire.’”
Because of that, it was a surprise when he decided to open Eh José Taqueria with Barazza. It was also a culmination of Granados’s life’s work, starting with spending time as a boy helping his grandmother in the kitchen back in Cancún.
His family worked in hospitality, too, and as a tween, Granados landed a dishwashing job in a friend’s restaurant. He spent his earnings on candy and driving go-karts.
“I was in love with that job,” he said. “They were always feeding me. I loved eating everything.”
He also loved cooking and worked his way up the kitchen ranks only to discover he wasn’t fond of the egos of the chefs he worked under. So he decided he’d work over them instead and studied hotel management at university.
“I said I wanted to be the boss … It was too much ego, but it’s how you learn,” Granados said. “Now as a manager, I can go do the dishes. I can go do the cooking. I can go do the cleaning. I’m not sitting in the office. I’m not that guy.”
It was while overseeing the operations of two hotels in Cancun that he met a Canadian woman named Robin. She was part of a team of accountants sent by head office to work in the chain’s Mexican operations.
The two reconnected when Granados later visited Canada for a wedding. She was from Niagara, home to a college that offered a hospitality management program. Granados applied, got accepted and got a student visa.
He landed a supervisory role at The Pillar and Post in Niagara-on-the-Lake, married his sweetheart and, with his employer’s support, laid the groundwork to become a Canadian citizen.
He loved life here, but if he missed anything, it was Mexican food. There were plenty of Tex Mex menus to be found, filled with burritos and their deep-fried cousins, chimichangas. But those left Granados befuddled.
“There are no deep-fried burritos in Mexico, no, no. Tex Mex is tasty but there are lot of differences,” he said. “I said if I can cook, why not make my own food?”
So he did, cooking for his friends as a teaching tool about Mexican cuisine.
“I think that was the beginning of Eh José,” Granados recalled. “The real Mexican food is about flavours — the spice — but it’s not spicy. I showed people how simple Mexican food is.”
They appreciated it and still put in requests for chimichangas. He’d oblige with a respectful caveat that it wasn’t Mexican food but a Texas-Mexican hybrid.
Granados eventually found himself at a career crossroads. With the support of Robin, he decided to go into business for himself and sell his food at the farmers market.
The first few years were long hours and little money, but enough time to create his made-in-Niagara Mexican spinoff dish that now beckons the hungry and hungover to his and Barraza’s taqueria.
“People ask for huevos rancheros every day, so every day we have huevos rancheros,” Granados said. “I’m still eating them, too. I will never stop that.”