I Fucking Love This Restaurant features writers’ favorite places that feed communities around the country.
Almost 12 years ago, I pulled up to a storefront with hand-painted signage in Chicago’s southwest side Archer Heights neighborhood. My friends and I heard something about roasted goat, “birria tatemada,” a super specific regional variant of the more widespread braised stew originally from the Mexican state of Jalisco. That’s all we knew about the place, and it appeared that it was all we’d find out that afternoon since it had closed hours earlier.
As we peered through the window, a head poked out from the kitchen behind a five-seat counter, and before we knew it, we were ushered inside by a young cook named Jonathan. He’d run out of goat for the day, but he let us try the roasted tomato and arbol salsa he’d just pounded and scraped out of a molcajete. He told us his dad had opened the place a few months earlier, after years of perfecting his birria tatemada recipe in a cement oven he’d built in their family’s backyard.
