Can you taste the difference between red and blue corn; pink and yellow corn; and white, purple, and beige corn?
“I feel like your yellow tortilla is… cornier?” I say, feeling a little ridiculous as I grope for language while talking about flavors with Nixta owners—and heirloom corn wizards—Gustavo and Kate Romero.
“Yes,” Gustavo says with a nod, laughing. “Cornier. Exactly.”
I feel vindicated. Nixta’s yellow corn tortilla is indeed made with cornier corn! Emboldened, I plunge along, inventing even sillier sentences. “And the reds and pinks are sweeter? The blue is…flintier?”
“That’s what I think, too,” says Gustavo. “Colored corn has the same antioxidants you find in blueberries or strawberries, so it makes sense that we taste them as fruity. Flinty can be how you perceive starch.”
Nixta Tortilleria and Mexican Takeout in Northeast Minneapolis is a two-pronged way of getting heirloom corn in front of the people of the Twin Cities. As a commercial tortilleria, Nixta sells bags of tortillas from its own storefront and also supplies 20 groceries and other businesses with tortillas, especially co-ops and restaurants like south Minneapolis’s Petite León. As a Mexican takeout spot, it posts menus midweek on its social media, and people can come pick up an ever-changing menu of tacos, tostadas, soups, tamales, chips and salsas, and more on Fridays and Saturdays.
Nixta does this all from a long, narrow kitchen with a narrow street-front counter space. This spring, possibly as soon as late March, it will expand into an adjoining space with Oro, a 60-seat counter-service spot with tables that will start as a simple extension of what it’s already doing—Nixta takeout, but eat-in, with tables. As time goes on, the Romeros plan to slowly and organically add elements, such as beverages, dinner hours, patio seating, and so on. So, Oro will start small, and if all goes well, soon—say, by summer—it will be its own thing, maybe a little like an artisanal tortilla–focused Sea Salt, with food runners and table bussers.
Looking around the pumpkin-seed-tinted room soon to hold Oro, I can practically feel the Romeros’ big dreams populating the space with tacos and the taco pilgrims from far and wide coming to taste what a great chef can do within a humble frame.
Gustavo Romero is that chef. He has a goatee and penetrating dark eyes; he looks like the sort of chef who might be tapped for food TV, and it turns out he was, winning a round of Chef Wanted on the Food Network and racking up big-news reviews at big-dollar destinations like San Francisco’s Credo before settling down to devote himself to making tortillas. He ended up in Minneapolis for the usual reason: to settle down with a beautiful woman in a place anchored by family, parks, and affordability—though, in this case, the beautiful woman also had elite cooking chops of her own as a veteran cook from Surly’s Brewer’s Table and Travail. Enter Northeast’s Polish, no-nonsense, green-eyed Katarzyna Kiernoziak, now Kate Romero, who is co-owner and president of the best corn-tortilla maker in the state.
In the country, maybe? That’s Gustavo Romero’s dream. He might be there already. No one really seems to be flying around the country as the official tortilla critic, and even for the makers, the shared vocabulary of tortilla connoisseurship is still evolving as we experience these ancient yet hard-to-describe tastes.
Corn wasn’t always simply yellow, uniform, patented, and exhausting out of tailpipes of Chevrolets.
“I feel like the first time I had one of our tostadas, I thought, It’s like one giant piece of popcorn. Thick, crispy popcorn,” adds Kate, her long dark hair catching the light from snowy 2nd Street outside the windows. “Popcorn, but filling popcorn,” she says with a knowing smile. “People are always telling me when they order, ‘I can eat 10 tacos.’ I say, ‘Of ours? These are food. All the fiber, three ingredients: corn, salt, water. They’re practically a vegetable. Three tacos in, I’m super full. I bet you can’t eat 10 of our tacos.’”
Sitting in the future home of Oro, the three of us try to unbraid the various strands of Gustavo’s obsession with the Western hemisphere’s core food: corn. First domesticated some 8,700 years ago, corn became the pillar of Indigenous food from Peru to Maine. Corn today is in our gas tanks and our Cokes, and in 2021, it was planted on 92.7 million U.S. acres, which is about 150,000 square miles, or a little larger than Germany and Belgium combined. Imagine all of Germany and Belgium, edge to edge with no cities, no mountains, no rivers and only corn.
Corn wasn’t always simply yellow, uniform, patented, and exhausting out of tailpipes of Chevrolets. Corn used to be something else, something of various heights and sizes, various colors and flavors, each variety as different from the next as apple varieties are different, like Red Delicious and Honeygold. Today, in the front window at Nixta, you can see display jars of ancient heirloom corn varietals that Gustavo and Kate import: bright bolita blanca from Oaxaca, nearly black-blue Chalqueño azul from Estado de México, wine-red rojo Xitocle from Milpa Alta. The Nixta crew takes this heirloom corn and cooks it with the contemporary, food-grade version of the ancient Aztec limestone grinding bowl—that is, pure calcium hydroxide—in a step that nixtamalizes it (makes it both more nutritious and able to hold together as dough for tortillas). Finally, they grind it and run it through a tortilla-making machine.
Gustavo tells me he’s so immersed in the nuances of corn flavors that he’s pretty sure, at this point in his corn journey, he could tell a red corn tortilla from a white or blue one blindfolded.
This lifelong corn journey began when Gustavo was a kid in Tulancingo, a historic corn and fabric hub not too far from Mexico City. There, he did what all the other kids did: come home for the midday lunch break, pick up money from Mom, and use the time to go stand in the long, snaking line at the nearest tortilleria with all the other kids. “You could see every step,” recalls Gustavo now. “The truck delivering the corn, the people grinding it, the tortilla-making machine, everything like a show about tortillas.”
For 15 pesos a kilogram, he’d get a bundle of warm, just-made tortillas wrapped in butcher paper. He’d pull the top tortilla from the stack, shake on some salt supplied by the tortilleria, and walk home munching a salt taco, the reward for patience.
When he left home at 17, and for the next dozen years, Gustavo’s corn journey went underground. During that time, he turned himself into a club-kid DJ and salsa-dancing instructor, then into an Atlanta Le Cordon Bleu cooking school star, and finally into the protégé to bigwig Italian chef Mario Luigi Maggi. Maggi was so impressed with his young cook that he sent him to cook in Florence, then deployed him as chef de cuisine at Maggi’s then-latest, San Francisco’s Credo, an elite restaurant of the sort that flings around amuse-bouches and micro-herbs.
You can see this fine-cooking finesse, this four-star American restaurant culture training, all over Nixta. Spring tacos last year included ramps and soft-shell crab, and when Gustavo does pop-ups around town, he will dot plates with an artful hop-skip of glossy sauces fit for a Michelin-star judge. More than a stepping stone in Gustavo’s career, Credo would prove fateful for both the Romeros, and Minneapolis taco culture, for this is where the two cooks met.
Kate had also trained at Le Cordon Bleu, but here in Minnesota. She followed a boyfriend out to San Francisco, but after that blew up, she stayed to prove she could cook with the best—and did. Kate and Gustavo fell in love, with each other and with a shared vision that food should be nurturing and wholesome as well as artful. The couple lived and worked all over the place for a few years. Eventually, Kate decided that Minneapolis was the best city for her. Gustavo still wasn’t sure, and he went to the Bay Area to cook at Calavera, focused on New Mexican cuisine. Suddenly, everything in his mind seized on one question: How did he know so much about Italian food and almost nothing of the cuisine he was born into?
“All of these old ladies ran circles around me,” recalls Gustavo now. “They’d overcook the corn and ask me if it was right. Then laugh. They were not easy on me, but I learned a lot. It made me realize I didn’t know anything about my food, almost nothing. I started reading a lot. No more Thomas Keller. Now it’s Enrique Olvera, Mexican food history, reading, reading, reading. I reconnected with my mom. I called her on the phone: Why this? How that? And the deeper you get into Mexican food history? Corn. Corn. Corn.”
He moved to Minneapolis for good. He partnered with the Travail crew for Kua, the Mexican pop-ups, and felt like he was cooking his own food, for real, for the first time in his life. “I got two Bib Gourmands,” he reflects now, on the prestigious Michelin awards he snagged during the California part of his life. “But before Calavera, I never made a good tortilla. How crazy is that?”
Kate pivoted to catering, finding she was now more interested in cooking healthy food in a sane way than she was in creating fancy food. In 2019, the two made their cooking partnership and love paperwork-official, flying to Mexico City to get married surrounded by family. Gustavo took a job with Marin Restaurant in the downtown Le Meridien Chambers hotel, his cooking ambitions trained on Taco Tuesdays in the bar, built on hand-ground tortillas. Marin imported giant 50-pound sacks of Mexican corn. Then life brought March 2020, with all its disruption.
“I reconnected with my mom. I called her on the phone: Why this? How that? And the deeper you get into Mexican food history? Corn. Corn. Corn.”
Gustavo Romero
“When the pandemic came, we had 400, 500 pounds of corn on hand,” recalls Gustavo. “They were like, ‘Take it home; who knows what’s going to happen.’ We stashed it in our apartment, Kate’s sister’s house, Kate’s mother’s house. We had corn everywhere.”
After a bit of bouncing off the walls, Gustavo started grinding this corn by hand in the backyard behind their apartment, cooking for friends and family in their apartment kitchen. Kate’s sister dashed off an email seeking friends who wanted food, and by the end of the day, they had four families. The next week, eight families. The next, they declared the week’s food sold out at 75 orders. Nixta was born.
“I was working at Chowgirls, which was perfect because I was pregnant, and we needed health insurance,” remembers Kate. “I’d be leaving for work; corn dust would be blowing through the backyard, and I was like, ‘I’ll keep this job with health insurance; you go follow your crazy tortilla dream. See you later!’”
The first time I tried Nixta’s food, the thing that leapt out at me was how Romero’s food bears a much more obvious kinship to Bib Gourmand food than to Grandma’s home cooking. A tostada is covered with a satiny puree of avocado, segments of pith-free orange and grapefruit, lightly dressed baby kale, and a pretty geometry of half-moons of roasted beet. Tacos dorados, rolled and fried, are filled with a puree of hibiscus blossoms and butternut squash and dressed with two creams, white and green, and radishes sliced thinly enough to read through. A taco holds finger-long young carrots, braised carefully so they show the brown sugar of Maillard reaction on three surfaces, with the carrots resting on a slippery hummus stuck with bright greens. A bowl of pozole verde is made with heirloom Peruvian hominy corn that has an almost scallop-like sweetness and minerality. But it was the pork broth that was attention-stealing: so deeply flavorful but also clean, un-muddy, un-home-like, it tasted of someone in chef’s whites standing next to the pot and skimming and straining, straining and skimming. You must get the simple chips and dips of salsa verde and salsa rojo; they’re each astonishing. The salsa verde, made with fresh, ripe (not roasted) tomatillos, lime juice, cilantro, scallions—it tastes like a sunbeam made of the idea of salsa verde, so bright, so fruity, so alive. The salsa rojo is its own sunbeam, but through fires at sunset.
So try this. Get the Nixta salsas and a bag of the Nixta tostadas—that is, Nixta’s tortillas, fried, which makes the various flavors easier to tease out. Now, sit down and try to taste the differences in this rainbow—corny, fruity, flinty? The salsas help, bringing out different notes, resetting your palate.
As you go, consider: The story of corn is nearly 9,000 years old and still being written. Each of us can only add a dot or a paragraph as we go, and right now, two great chefs are bringing their professional best to add their own bit to the tale. Wouldn’t it be great if we all figured out some corny, fruity, flinty vocabulary so we could all read and write it together? 1222 NE 2nd St., Mpls.