‘The reward of the cook’
Don Lucho’s Jose Luis Mejia has been making carnitas for nearly six decades and draws a devoted crowd.
When the manteca has melted, it is still dawn. Six o’clock on a Saturday morning.
Manteca is pig fat, lard. It is one reason why we adore the pig. Bought by the bucket, it melts in cauldrons at the kitchen of Carnitas Don Lucho at 565 W. Lincoln Ave., morphing from a wheat hue to a cola one.
At Don Lucho, the manteca is used to cook carnitas, cuts of pork simmered in their own fat until they are delectably tender. Jose Luis Mejia, the carnitero at Don Lucho, begins to add in the pork when the manteca has begun to simmer. Espaldilla, the upper shoulder of the pig, goes first. Thirty minutes later, the ribs are added — then the buche, the pork stomach and cueritos, the skin. With each piece dropped into the cazo — a Mexican cooking pot, jets bubble into existence.
The broth’s tone shifts to lighter shades of brown. The air around the 70-year-old man becomes thicker.
Mejia stands back, waits, stares at the 100-plus pounds of pork in front of him. He stirs the cazo with a long steel paddle. Under his cap, everything around his eyes sweats; his smile is crooked but near constant, his beard half-shaven and unsymmetrical. To his left, the restaurant’s other employees reach around each other, shouting directions. The restaurant has been open for two hours now.
The calls of Mejia’s son-in-law for more handmade tortillas, the quick steps of a server trying to assemble tacos, the back-and-forth between kitchen staff moving ingredients around, create a tense jumble of noises.
“This is why I don’t get involved with the rest of the kitchen,” Mejia jokes, in Spanish. “For me, only
the carnitas.”
But then, more seriously:
“You have to be constantly reviewing” the carnitas. Perhaps it is this attention to the process that has allowed the carnitas at Don Lucho to lay claim to the stage they hold today, prized by a loyal following that adheres to the restaurant’s selective schedule: from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays and Sundays, and to 4 p.m. on Saturdays.
It could also be Mejia’s almost six decades of experience making carnitas. Years of toying with the foundations of a recipe he learned as a butcher’s assistant have produced a concoction that can sustain a family’s ambition, its dream.
At age 70, Mejia is the star of the unpretentious gastronomical production that is Don Lucho.
After all, Mejia is Don Lucho himself, father of coproprietor Maria De Leon and the original inspiration for the family’s restaurant. Lucho is a nickname for Luis in Mejia’s native Mexico.
Late night becomes early morning
Sales at Don Lucho begin before Mejia arrives to cook. De Leon and her husband, Abel, arrive before 3 a.m. on business days to prepare for the restaurant’s 4 a.m. opening.
At opening hour, most is quiet at West Lincoln and South Chase Avenues, where the restaurant sits. In the early morning, the air is as light as the blue haze of the dawn sky.
Light, too, is the traffic on a generally busy section of Lincoln, between St. Josaphat’s Basilica and I-94. Besides the occasional car, noise comes from the bang of the wooden door of the white brick building with blue trim that Carnitas Don Lucho inhabits.
Inside, the early morning clientele at Don Lucho is as unpretentious as the restaurant itself — a group of factory workers leaving the night shift and a nightclub owner treating his employees. Others, including Milwaukee police officers and middle-aged couples, stop by to order for takeout.
Banda, grupera and norteña take their turns on the speakers.
Angel Gonzalez, who works at a nearby vegetable processing factory with some family members, said he and his family stop by Don Lucho regularly after the night shifts. At this hour, he said, there is little more open than McDonald’s.
Besides, the tacos and the menudo that he orders “remind us that we are from Mexico,” he said.
Across the room, Julio Cesar Maldonado, owner of Snifters Tapas & Spirits in Walker’s Point, said he often brings his employees after closing the bar of his latenight restaurant.
Maldonado said he supports Don Lucho because he values the family’s immigrant story. Immigrantowned businesses like Don Lucho, he said, reinforce “the values of hard work, leadership, integrity and the need or want to work” into the community.
Maldonado said he always orders a plate of carnitas surtidas with beans and rice, an order the staff knows.
In the sport of ordering carnitas, carnitas surtidas includes all of the pork cuts available. At Don Lucho’s, that’s a mix of the shoulder, rib, stomach and skin. The shoulder and rib meat are soft and greasy. Pork stomach offers tougher chewiness; pork skin, a gelatinous and salty addition. An order of maciza includes only the shoulder and rib meat.
Carnitas, tacos and montalayo
The menu at Don Lucho is mostly constant, with fewer than a dozen options of meats and accompanying dishes.
Food trends do not carry weight at Don Lucho. Clients do not stop by for the latest vogue in Instagrammable Mexican food. There is no birria or quesataco on the menu. Here, the phone does not eat first.
At the counter, the meats are cut fine and sold by the pound. They are $9.99 a pound when ordered for takeout or $21.99 for dining in. The latter comes with salsas, handmade tortillas, cilantro and lime. A pound, when enjoyed as served at Don Lucho, can feed two to three.
Tacos — at $3.75 each — are also available. At Don Lucho they’re big; “the largest in Milwaukee,” per De Leon, who said the restaurant includes almost half a pound of meat in each one.
Central to the menu are the restaurant’s signature carnitas. They sit in heaters in and behind the counter, crisped into a golden color.
The restaurant sells about 1,500 pounds of carnitas a weekend, making up the majority of the restaurant’s sales, De Leon said.
There is also menudo, the spicy beef stomach soup, and chorizo, a Mexican sausage served relatively intact and less greasy at Don Lucho in comparison to its mass-produced cousin. A small order of menudo is $10.99.
Barbacoa, goat or beef steamed over a variety of spices, is also popular, especially when served in consomé, a broth made of its own juices.
Quick to sell out is the montalayo, marinated goat stomach, stuffed with goat heart, and seasoned with a chile paste. De Leon said the the dish sells out quickly because it’s hard to find in Milwaukee.
On a Saturday when the Journal Sentinel stopped by, the menudo, montalayo and chorizo were sold out by 11 a.m. There was no more barbacoa by early afternoon.
There were still some carnitas left, proof of just how many batches Mejia prepares each day.
A butcher and pizza maker
Mejia remembers well when he learned to make carnitas. He was 14, a year into working as a butcher.
The second of 10 brothers in a family of farmers in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, Mejia would eventually move to Ciudad Hidalgo, a small city 40 minutes from the Mesa de Guadalupe ranch where he was born. Michoacan is renowned for its carnitas, but in Ciudad Hidalgo, furniture is king. The production of tables, chairs and dressers is a vital engine for the local economy.
Most of Mejia’s brothers would become furniture makers. Yet Mejia wanted to do something else. And, the butcher shop fascinated him.
He remembers that the pigs and cows were simply cut in quarters, more work left to the butcher than is common in the United States. Working in this environment, he said, provided him a strong foundation in butchery.
With time as a butcher, Mejia began to learn about cooking meats, including carnitas.
A man named Marciano who worked at the butcher’s shop taught him how to watch the flame and boiling broth to check the heat, how to decide how long to cook each cut of meat.
The process intrigued him, but Mejia believed he would be a butcher for life. He continued to learn and enjoy the work, yet he struggled to get his license to become a full-fledged butcher. The city’s butchers union at the time kept a tight grip over who could practice the profession, Mejia said.
Unable to move up, Mejia left for the United States alone in 1978 for more steady work. He was 24, with a wife and three children, including De Leon, at home.
Mejia eventually settled in Chicago, where he found the work he wanted as a butcher in grocery shops. He took work in the grocery kitchens making carnitas, which made him realize he was more interested in cooking. Kitchen work brought higher wages and allowed him to be more entrepreneurial.
Mejia would go on to work as a cook in an American restaurant. In 1993, he bought a pizza shop in the Rogers Park neighborhood on Chicago’s north side.
He taught himself to make pizzas. His wife and now eight children, who moved to the U.S. to join him beginning in 1989, helped run the joint until 2000.
While working at the pizzeria, Mejia began to sell carnitas, barbacoa and other Mexican fare alongside his menu of pizzas.
“That’s what really stuck” with customers, De Leon said.
Yet the family businesses were hard to keep up, she said. It was difficult for her father to keep his youngadult children interested enough to stay around and help with the pizzeria.
De Leon herself moved to Milwaukee in 1999 to look for work as a dry cleaner. A year later, she married her Milwaukee-born husband, Abel. The couple started a family. Maria took notice of one thing in the city’s food scene.
Then, like today, Milwaukee had very few restaurants that specialized in carnitas.
“From my perspective, there weren’t any carnitas the way he was making them,” she said.
She told her father. Mejia and one of his sons moved to Milwaukee, where they started the first version of Don Lucho on South 16th and West Mineral streets. There, De Leon taught his daughter how he made carnitas. Previous to that, she said, he had considered it work only for men, and hesitated to teach her and her sister.
The restaurant trudged along, but De Leon’s brother wanted out, tired of the irregular schedule and demands of restaurant ownership.
“We can’t go to parties. We can’t go to family gatherings. You get stuck to it,” De Leon said.
In 2011, the business reorganized, with Maria and Abel taking charge and moving to the West Lincoln Avenue location.
De Leon said she and her husband were motivated by an understanding of the uniqueness of Mejia’s recipes in Milwaukee. Besides, De Leon wanted to prove to her father that she, as a woman, could build one of his businesses.
At the West Lincoln location, the couple learned how to run a business from scratch, how to change things on the go.
With time, they trimmed their large menu of Mexican offerings, which included burritos and tortas, and began selling meat by the pound. This, De Leon said, proved successful in helping the restaurant brand itself.
Today, the restaurant’s menu remains limited. Mejia said he is grateful his daughter and son-in-law have honed the restaurant’s options. Preparing the meat, he said, is a laborious process that benefits from all the
attention one can give it.
The carnitas, barbacoa, montalayo, and menudo are all made with Don Lucho’s recipes and prepared only by a member of the family — most often Meija himself, but at times Maria, Abel or their son, Diego.
“The quality has to be constant,” Mejia said.
Tortillas and salsas too
These days, the restaurant’s signature is its carnitas, which remain comfortingly soft and crisp, between tortillas, with a squeeze of lime and spoonfuls of salsa.
The tortillas at Don Lucho’s are made in the kitchen by a line of five or so tortilleras. There are tortilla kneaders and pressers, and those who flip the tortillas onto the flat stove top. From 3 a.m. into the afternoon, they toil to meet demand.
The restaurant serves 700 to 800 dozen tortillas a weekend, De Leon said. They sell at $5.99 a dozen.
Customers cluster immediately past the ordering counter to wait for their dozens, bags of steaming carnitas, barbacoa and menudo in hand.
De Leon said she prepares the halfdozen varieties of salsa on Thursdays and Fridays, before the week busies. Red, burgundy, green, purple, and orange: each salsa is made with a unique combination of chiles.
By midmorning, the line at Don Lucho is steadily out the door. The restaurant’s service keeps the wait brief. The small outdoor patio fills with families of several generations. Most of the indoor tables are occupied, too.
Business is good, admits De Leon. Mejia agrees. He takes breaks in his process to greet customers, before returning to the cazos in the back of the kitchen. By this point, he is three batches in. The aura of the boiling carnitas is almost buttery. It puts one at immediate ease.
Yet, meeting popular demand has its tolls.
Mejia said he sleeps little on the weekends — about three or four hours a day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, when he must wake in the early dawn to cook and stay up late into the night to prepare for the next day. To work at Don Lucho, Mejia drives to Milwaukee from Chicago for the restaurant’s workweek and back to his home afterward. One’s body grows accustomed to the demands of the work, he said.
The week, too, is filled with the preparation required to operate the restaurant, De Leon said. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are prep days for the work weekend.
Yet along with the sacrifices, father and daughter agreed that Don Lucho offers them an opportunity to continue to master something they love, to forge a legacy and provide a high-quality product for others.
“I like to feel like I have done justice to what my father has taught me and do it well,” De Leon said.
Time has allowed her to prove herself to her father and herself. The restaurant’s success has also helped.
For Mejia, seeing his carnitas disappear into orders adds to his satisfaction.
“When I see a lot of people outside, I want to see that people are enjoying my work,” Mejia said. “That is the reward of the cook.”