For Oscar Villarreal, a great taco is all about what’s on the outside.
“My biggest thing was the tortilla had to be good,” said Villarreal, the chef/owner of Migrants, a new taco spot just off the Beltline.
While many restaurants use tortillas made in Chicago, Villarreal opted to make his own. It took him a while to perfect the recipes, adjusting temperatures, switching flours and experimenting with new fats.
“I think we’ve got the tortilla down,” he said of the corn version, though he’s still tweaking the recipe for the flour tortillas. His latest change: Instead of vegetable shortening or lard, he’s using avocado puree, a trick he borrowed from his mom.
Migrants is just four months old, but Villarreal is no stranger to Madison’s restaurant scene. He was the chef at Fuegos on Williamson Street until the restaurant closed in December.
Tacos run in his family. Until Villarreal was 7, his family worked as migrant farmworkers, traveling from Texas to Wisconsin — where they’d work in potatoes (Delavan), beets (Racine), cherries (Sturgeon Bay) — to Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and North Dakota, before returning to Texas to harvest watermelon, oranges, grapefruit, spinach and onions.
Tacos were a flexible food his mom could always make, ranging from eggs and beans with onions to chicken with potato. It was “never the same,” Villarreal said, recalling “all these combinations she came up with so I wouldn’t get bored.”
Later, when his uncles bought a farm in Turtle Valley (about an hour southeast of Madison), tacos were a way of looking out for the migrants who traveled to their farm. His mom would send him into the fields with about a dozen tacos he could share with others.
“She wanted to make sure that I could feed the people that weren’t taking something, some people that were just getting there,” he said, noting that migrant workers often need to work for a while before they have any money to spend.
“A lot of families came up here and they were dirt poor,” Villarreal said. “I remember this one kid. He wanted to swap tacos with me and I did. But, man, that’s the first time I ever heard a train,” he said, referring to the sound cartoon characters hear when they eat very spicy food.
The boy’s taco was all jalapeños and onions. For some, Villarreal said, meat, beans and even vegetables were luxuries.
At Migrants, Villarreal serves tacos 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday in the former home of Silver Mine Subs, near Todd Drive. The space is cozy and colorful, with 10 green booths and four two-person tables. Like at Chipotle or Qdoba, customers order at the counter and customize their tacos — corn or flour tortilla, meat of choice and toppings — but the menu at Migrants is all it’s own.
Villarreal knew from the beginning he wanted the menu to go beyond the usual choices.
“You can make tacos out of anything,” Villarreal said. As a kid, he ate goat, lamb and duck tacos, which are “very typical in Latino families.”
Migrants’ menu includes tacos with borrega (lamb, $3.25 each), pato (adobo-seasoned duck, $3.25 each) and tinga (shredded chicken breast seasoned with chipotle, $3 each). There’s also the more familiar barbacoa (slow-roasted shredded beef, $3 each), and chorizo (Mexican sausage made from beef and pork, $3 each).
Tacos can be ordered individually or on a three-taco plate, served with a choice of rice and beans, salad or chips and guacamole.
Villarreal takes pride in Migrants’ vegetarian options. His mom was a “stickler” for not eating meat during Lent, he said, and since she didn’t like fish, Lent was a time for veggie experimentation.
In that spirit, Migrants offers just as many veggie fillings as meats, including coliflor (roasted cauliflower, $2.75 each), brocoli adobo (broccoli, carrots and onions seasoned with adobo, $2.75 each), and papas y rajas (cumin-roasted potatoes with bell peppers, $2.50 each).
He’s even created a fully vegetarian “quinoa chorizo,” cooking the protein-rich grain with farro, chickpeas, black and pinto beans, chia seeds and vinegar in the style traditionally used to flavor Mexican sausage.
