We’re a totally small batch scratch kitchen, meaning we prepare everything in small batches all day long from scratch. We decide the batch size by the shelf life of the product, making the batch size small enough so that we use all the product before there is any quality deterioration.
We buy high quality ingredients, almost regardless of cost.
Small batch scratch cooking takes a lot of good people to make the food, which is also expensive.
This method of small batch is unaffordable if the restaurant does not do a lot of sales volume, which is why almost all restaurants either make items in large quantities or use prepared ingredients prepared off site.
About Our Margaritas
Until the 1990s we made margaritas like most restaurants do, using either a powdered sweet & sour mix or frozen limeade from the grocery store, or making a moderately strong margarita with the goal of having margaritas being a major profit area for us. We never drank our own margaritas until one week we did and we decided this had to stop. This was 1995.
This was also about the time we switched everything to be higher quality, so we decided to squeeze fresh limes and make the margaritas out of fresh lime juice and make the margaritas much stronger. We did experiment after experiment and came up with the current recipes.
Margaritas are now generally our best selling item and are a very high cost item for us because of the high labor and raw materials cost. But once you’ve had the real thing, there is no going back.
About Our Guacamole & Salsas
All our food is prepared in small quantities many times per day. For example, we make Spanish rice and guacamole probably 20 times per day. We buy avocados direct from Mexico in order to reduce costs and we ripen these avocados ourselves (which is a real, but necessary pain). We never use any kind of pre-prepared pulp.