How La Tejana survives the Saturday rush
So many breakfast tacos.
Welcome to part two of this special expanded edition of “The Most Interesting Person People in D.C.,” featuring Ana-Maria Jaramillo and Gus May, co-owners of the excellent Mount Pleasant breakfast taco joint La Tejana. In part one, they told me about how the development of the business paralleled their early romance, breakup, reunion, and eventual marriage. It’s an epic story, and they shared their challenges and successes with a refreshing level of candor and openness. There’s so much real life baked into La Tejana, and I think that’s a big reason why it feels specific and special.
In part two, we’ll get into work-life boundaries — as we learned earlier, launching the business meant a lot of 3 a.m. wakeups and 7-day work weeks — and Ana-Maria and Gus break down the technical aspects of churning out breakfast tacos at high speed. They’ve also shared their favorite spots to eat in the D.C. area, shouting out a number of their industry friends along the way.
This, by the way, is why I started my “Most Interesting Person in D.C.” series: Not only is it fun getting to know the people who make this city exciting and cool, but I like learning about the connections between those people. Gus worked at Ellē, a coffee shop and restaurant a few doors down from La Tejana that happens to sell the best sourdough bread I’ve ever had; he and Ana-Maria met their landlord through the chef at Martha Dear, a popular pizza place down the street; and they’re friends with Eric Moorer, a previous “Most Interesting Person,” because Eric and Gus both worked at the wine shop Domestique.
Am I just describing “community”? I guess I am. And as I’ve started to immerse myself in D.C.’s unique network of creative people, it’s made the city feel more and more like home.
Now, back to Ana-Maria and Gus.
I’m curious about work-life boundaries. You obviously are partners in life and business, and you live a block away from La Tejana. I could see it being very easy for work to bleed into everything else.
Ana-Maria: I think I have — no offense —stronger boundaries than Gus does, because I have another full-time job [as a speech pathologist and founder of the Voz Institute]. The healthcare industry is similar to the restaurant industry in that the margins are nonexistent. In my field, at least.
Gus: She’s not a plastic surgeon.
Ana-Maria: Unfortunately. But I think that most healthcare providers would agree that it's a really hard time to be in private practice. Insurance in this country is horrific. I got my doctorate shortly after we got married and opened the restaurant [in 2022], and I kind of self-imploded. I had a really horrible year.
Just from everything you were trying to do?
Ana-Maria: It was too much. I didn’t know myself anymore. I went to therapy, and my therapist helped me start saying no to things just for the accolade. I’m a Leo, so I’m very into the spotlight and getting people to say my name. I started to say no to more things — for instance, professional speaking gigs.
My own team members at the Voz Institute were like, “What are you doing? You can’t keep giving La Tejana everything.” All of 2022 was La Tejana. Basically all of 2023 was La Tejana. It wasn’t until last year that I started to tell Gus that I cannot be at [breakfast or dinner] service anymore. Speech therapy is my dream, my baby, and what I went to school for.
Now there’s no expectation for me to be at La Tejana. Ever, ever. I still cover shifts. I was here all weekend this past weekend. I help Gus on expo. I do accounts at the end of the day. We had a pop-up yesterday. But people are now grasping the concept that Ana-Maria is not La Tejana’s face. She’s the co-owner, and she’s married to Gus, but she has a whole other job. I think that took a long time for me to wrap my head around, and for Gus to wrap his head around.
Gus: I got used to her being here.
Those are two very intense types of work. You can give a lot to them, and they can take a lot.
Ana-Maria: The work is so fulfilling, but it came at the cost of my sanity. So I’ve developed those boundaries. And then the pregnancy — we are very open about the fertility struggles that we had over the last two years. We went through IVF in the fall. Mentally, all I cared about was getting pregnant. When that happened, I was like, “I really can’t go to the restaurant.”
Right, I’m sure you didn’t want to stress your body out.
Ana-Maria: It forced me to slow down. I’m only in the clinic Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Monday is our day as a couple to get coffee, talk about the week. We spend pretty much the whole day together. And Friday is my self-care day. I get a facial, do my nails, go for a run. Gus has also been very good about boundaries. He doesn’t work expo Wednesdays or Thursdays anymore. But the weekends are really a grind. Sunday night, he’s dead. We’ve worked hard on making time for us as a couple.
And that’s a tough thing to balance.
Gus: We’re trying to think about it holistically. If we’re in a better spot in our [personal] lives, we’ll be in a better place to be leaders for other people. We’ll be in a better emotional state, and we’ll have more energy to support our staff.
Ana-Maria: And to be parents. Hello-o!
Gus: I remember [when I was] working in catering, the owner took the grind to another level, to his own detriment. Zero work-life balance. I completely understand that now, because I feel like I did that, too. Over the last year, I’ve tried to make it a little more sustainable. Our staff sees me having gone on a run before service, or talking about therapy.
How we can create a workplace that’s as sustainable as the restaurant business can be? Is our staff burnt-out or not? I think it starts at the top. I haven’t perfected it, by any means. But it’s something we both feel really strongly about. I’ve taken a lot of lessons from Ana, because she prioritizes her rest.
Ana-Maria: I sleep so much.
You’re also pregnant.
Ana-Maria: Even before. I have zero issues sleeping.
You’re hitting on something I wanted to talk about, which is that the vibe at La Tejana is so good, even though service can move really fast. I imagine that when you create an environment where people feel taken care of, the energy of the place improves.
Gus: One of the things I liked most about the restaurant business prior to opening La Tejana was the internal kitchen chemistry. I liked how much people joked with one another. Front of house is more of a performance, where you’re having customer-facing interactions. There’s a certain level of theater that you have to provide. In the kitchen, the work is probably more physically grueling. It’s hotter. But there’s a chemistry and bond and camaraderie that comes with it. It feels like people can be themselves.
All that is to say, we celebrate people and their individuality here. We want to cultivate that. I think that balance of joking around, but knowing when it’s time to lock in, is something that we’ve done a really good job at. Our GM, Sal [Rubio], and our front-of-house team are really good at wrapping up a conversation so they can get to the next person in line without making anyone feel rushed.
Okay, so I want to understand how you keep that line moving so fast. Because the speed with which you get tacos into people’s hands is really impressive. What are you prepping ahead of time? What’s happening in the moment?
Gus: Our kitchen is really small, so we have to be smart about how we operate in there. We make our tortillas at night. We package them, let them cool down, and then we reheat them in the morning.
Ana-Maria: We tried making them to order one time, and it was a disaster.
Gus: They came out so good, though. But it’s unrealistic. We’re closed [to customers] Monday and Tuesday, and Tuesday is a big prep day. We cook off all the bacon for the week — 150 pounds of bacon. We make chorizo in house, 20 pounds at a time, and then we cook it off on Thursday because it has to rest for two days. We make all the salsas on Tuesday. We crack all the eggs in advance. For tomorrow, Wednesday, we have four cases of eggs cracked, whisked, and strained in 22-quart Cambro plastic tubs. We dice something like 30 quarts of onions, tomatoes, and poblanos, which will last us for a few days. We cook the beans.
Every morning, the first thing we do is refry the beans, reheat the tortillas, and get our proteins ready. Reheat brisket, bacon, chorizo. We buy the potatoes frozen and cubed, and we just drop them into the fryer and season them. We’ll make eggs in batches, doing 30 or 40 eggs at a time. We have three types of eggs: chorizo eggs, regular cheesy scrambled eggs, and migas eggs with the onion, tomato, and poblano mixed in. Then we’ll make batches of tacos. Anywhere from five to 50 at a time, of each type of taco, and then put them in a hot hold oven.
Ana-Maria: A warming oven.
Gus: We start making tacos 30 or 40 minutes before we open. It’s the only way we can do it, because once we open up, we just grab and go. The flour tortillas hold up so well and allow us to have that speed of service. The model only works if we do it that way.
When we were first opening up, Chef Demetri at Martha Dear was like, “Dude, you should make everything to order.” That’s how chefs think. I’m not a trained chef.
Well, you come from catering, which is more of a prep mentality, no?
Gus: It’s about volume. But chefs value the utmost quality of their product. We tried that for the first few pop-ups, and we just couldn’t keep up.
Ana-Maria: We have to be ready for war. We’re cranking, and we can’t afford for people to be waiting 20 minutes for tacos. People would never come.
And I know it’s your hard work making it happen, but it genuinely feels like magic when you order and your taco comes out in like 30 seconds.
Ana-Maria: And then you bite into it, and you’re like, “Oh my god.”
Is making them to order that much better? The product is already so good that I’m guessing it’s marginal gains.
Gus: It’s marginal.
Ana-Maria: My favorite taco is the Frijolito. We eat that at every service. I have had a Frijolito that’s freshly made, and the cheese hasn’t melted yet. The best Frijolito you can have is one that’s been sitting in its own grease, inside its tortilla, for at least 15 minutes. It’s a noticeable difference. When you leave it in the warming oven, in the aluminum, and it all blends together and the cheese gets gooey — that’s it! The quality improves when things have time to sit. I stand by that.
Gus and Ana-Maria’s favorite places to eat
Before wrapping up our conversation, I asked Ana-Maria and Gus to share their top spots around the city. But they also wanted to shout out the suburbs, because, as Gus told me: “I will ride for the ‘burbs. I think there’s more interesting food as far as ethnic diversity goes.” Don’t sleep on the DMV!
Crown Bakery: “A Trinidadian bakery and restaurant. All homemade pastries. Best spinach patty of my life.” — Gus
Rose Ave Bakery: “They have the most incredible pastries. They have a Crab Rangoon puff pastry, and they have these mochi powdered sugar donuts that they stuff with passion fruit, pandan, and ube. Oh my god.” — Ana-Maria
Meats and Foods: “A true mom-and-pop shop in the sense that there are two people who work there, a married couple. She works the kitchen, and he works the register and does prep work. They do homemade smoked meats — chorizo, half-smoke — and chilitos, which is like homemade chili in a homemade flour tortilla. It’s so good.” — Gus
Z&Z: “Their food is incredible. [They sell] manoushe, which is a Middle Eastern flatbread. They put labneh, za’atar on it. They sell Arab soaps, chocolate, baklava.” — Ana-Maria
Yellow: “I’m a sucker for Yellow. On Thursdays, I have to make the rounds and pick up some stuff from our wholesalers. One of them is right next to Yellow, so I always pop in and pick up a six-pack of pita. We make family meal with the pita from Yellow.” — Gus
Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream: “It’s so good, and I don’t even like ice cream! I like the Oreo [as an ice cream sandwich] with two chocolate chip cookies. Sarah is so creative and thoughtful.” — Ana-Maria
Downstairs in the kitchen, Ana-Maria and Gus’s team were busy making tortillas for the next day’s breakfast service, filling the shop with the comforting scent of cooking dough. Gus dipped into the back and handed me a paper bag containing three hot tortillas. As soon as I got home, I summoned Alex, and we demolished them in about a minute. The perfect afternoon snack.
But give your Frijolito time to sit,
Eliza