During his childhood, Alex Garcia would look forward to his family’s Christmas meal as much as opening the gifts under the tree.
“The smell would infiltrate the entire house,” said Garcia of pernil, a Puerto Rican dish of oven-roasted pork shoulder stuffed with garlic and spices that was the centerpiece of the holiday every year, either at his mother’s house in Atlanta or his grandfather’s house in Ohio. “As I was growing up, people would say to me in passing, ‘When is your mom going to make that pork roast?’”
Pernil serves as a springboard for Madre Garcia’s (instagram.com/madregarcias), the Atlanta pop-up that Garcia launched in March as an homage to the single mother who raised him and the grandfather who was a pivotal figure in his life.
Garcia, who works for an air conditioning manufacturer, pops up weekly at the East Atlanta and Piedmont Park farmers markets with appearances at Eventide Brewing in Grant Park. While he doesn’t have formal culinary training, he’s continued to make his family’s pernil for holidays and gatherings.
Garcia looked into opening his own business more than a decade ago when food trucks became omnipresent in the city. He was attending seminars on buying a truck and developing a business plan when his mother suffered a stroke that left her in a vegetative state and eventually took her life. He put his plans on hold to care for her, and not long after got married and started a family.
Credit: Courtesy of Madre Garcia's
Credit: Courtesy of Madre Garcia's
“I had a full-time job and a mortgage to pay,” he said. “I had resigned myself to waiting until the kids (4 and 6) graduated from high school to pursue my dream.”
About a year ago, he made his family’s pernil at a neighborhood cookout in Oakhurst, where a friend convinced him that he had to bump up his timeline.
For the past eight months, he’s focused on perfecting the San Juan Cuban sandwich, using his family’s recipe for pernil and “adding a curveball.” After he stuffs the meat with four cloves of garlic and spices, he smokes it for six hours and sous vides it overnight. He also makes his own ham, using pork shoulder brined for a week then smoked for six to eight hours. The bread, the only component of the sandwich Garcia doesn’t make, is sourced from Bread Works International in Stone Mountain.
“Once I went down the path of making a great Cuban, I broke it down and said, ‘How can I make this unique? What can I do that no one else in Atlanta is doing?,’” he said. “I decided I wanted to make everything from scratch as much as I could. I knew I had the pernil down, but everything else I needed to perfect.”
Along with elevating his cooking game, Garcia also wanted to ensure that his business plan was in place. He connected with the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center, an organization that pairs aspiring small business owners with advisers. Jason Bitar, who has worked for more than 30 years as an entrepreneur and small business owner in the food service, business consulting and real estate industries, mentored Garcia and guided him to start by selling at farmers markets rather than launching a food truck or brick-and-mortar venture.
“This was a less capital-intensive way to nail down the concept and figure out my target demographic,” Garcia said. “Jason said, ‘It’s a lot better to make hundred dollar mistakes than thousand dollar mistakes.’”
Credit: Courtesy of Madre Garcia's
Credit: Courtesy of Madre Garcia's
In addition to the Cuban, the Madre Garcia’s menu offers two other options. Vaca Frita, a Cuban dish that Garcia fell in love with during his travels to Cuba and Miami, sees beef marinated in mojo sauce with lime, lemon and orange juices, garlic and spices piled on bread and topped with Swiss cheese.
The vegetarian Cubano took Garcia five months to get right. He experimented with vital wheat gluten and red food coloring to make a faux ham before a couple of vegetarian friends convinced him to turn away from a processed product and focus on using vegetables. The result is a sandwich made with roasted sweet potato, black bean puree, and a mixture of jackfruit and tofu marinated in the same garlic and spices Garcia uses for his pernil. Toppings include dill pickles and cheese (which can be omitted to make the sandwich vegan), as well as pickled Hungarian wax peppers he calls poncho peppers, a nod to his grandfather, Francisco, whose nickname was Poncho and who grew them in his garden.
Sandwiches are put in a press, with the outside of the bread of the Cubano and Vaca Frita sandwiches brushed with lard rendered from the pork shoulder “to create a beautiful, flavorful crust,” Garcia said. All sandwiches are served with Gigi sauce, a creamy cilantro garlic lime sauce made with a recipe from a family friend and perfected by Garcia’s mother-in-law, whom his kids call Gigi.
Eventually, Garcia hopes to open a brick-and-mortar location of Mama Garcia’s. In the meantime, he’s content to build his pop-up following, consistently selling 70 sandwiches within three hours at each event.
The tight menu allows Garcia to focus on fine-tuning his product while continuing to grow his business and pay homage to his heritage. His mother, whose maiden name was Garcia, kept her married last name of Lynch after the end of her first marriage in the 1970s, thinking she would have an easier time getting job interviews with a traditionally Caucasian name.
He also grew up with the last name Lynch, but decided to legally change it to Garcia before he got married. “In terms of my history and who I considered my family, the Garcia family has always been the family that I know, and I wanted to make sure I passed that name on. Madre Garcia’s is a way to pay homage to that, and to the Garcia family recipes. I know my Mom would be smiling and looking down and be happy.”
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