Edgar Rico Wants to Change the Way Americans Think About Mexican Food

It was clear from the beginning that Edgar Rico was going to be a chef. At the age of 11, after watching a few too many hours of Food Network, he decided he was going to make Thanksgiving dinner for his parents. For his high school graduation present, he didn’t want a trip to Cancun, but instead dinner at Nobu in Los Angeles. He eventually started working at a steakhouse in his hometown of Visalia in California’s Central Valley before attending The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

Rico was in the middle of a six-month sabbatical, traveling and eating his way through Mexico, when he had a revelation. The trip was the first real break he had taken after spending years cooking in some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants, such as the now-closed Trois Mec and beloved daytime café Sqirl. He found himself at a corn farm outside of Uruapan, Mexico, where he took one bite of the fresh tortilla made by the farmer’s wife from the corn all around them. At that moment, he knew that he had found his calling: to protect and proselytize the message of maize. More specifically, he was going to make vegetable-forward tacos (inspired by the sweet potato taco at L.A. institution Guerrilla Tacos) served on brilliant corn tortillas. Corn runs through Rico’s DNA — his uncle taught corn science at Tecnológico de Monterrey. (“It’s the Harvard of Mexico,” says Rico.)  

Before his Mexico trip, Rico had visited Austin with his father. He knew in his bones that the city would be a great place to open up that dream taco spot: “The thing I remember about Austin, my first couple days, was just how obsessed people were with tacos,” he says. The only problem was that the tacos the city loved were always made with flour tortillas and the standard meat fillings. Rico was determined to change that. In 2019, with just $65,000 in funding, he opened his visionary taco restaurant, Nixta Taqueria.

The Nixta menu has evolved over the four years it has been open, but one thing remains constant: “Without tortillas, there is no Nixta,” says Rico. He and his team nixtamalize corn they source from Oaxaca before transforming it into dishes like the enchilada potosina taco, a specialty from Rico’s family’s hometown of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The white corn masa for the tortilla is infused with guajillo chile, so you get the heat and flavor in every bite. It’s then topped with the restaurant’s signature duck fat refried heirloom black beans and a rich potato puree with savory chorizo before being crowned with shredded purple cabbage and a generous amount of aged cheese.

Then there’s the ridiculously tender duck carnitas taco, which arrives on warm, pliable corn tortillas, the meat cooked in the fat that’s been rendered out of the duck and mixed with Mexican Coke (“It has real cane sugar!”), oranges, condensed milk, Baileys Irish Cream, onion, and garlic. The result is a rich, deeply savory bite with a hint of sweetness that hits all the right notes. For Rico’s brilliant beet tartare tostada, finely diced beets flavored with salsa macha, microgreens, and lots of shallot are piled on a crispy tostada. The beet tartare has the look and texture of beef but the freshness of a vegetable dish — just one of the restaurant’s many vegan and vegetarian items. The restaurant also has a growing fermentation program: Rico likes to make his own lacto-fermented hot sauce and says they are working on tepache and fermented masa beverages.

To Rico and his business partner and wife, Sara Mardanbigi, it was important to keep Nixta approachable and not too fussy so that everyone is able to eat well. “I want it to still give you those same feelings as you sitting at my mom’s table, but in a sexier manner,” says Rico with a laugh. He also hopes to shift peoples’ “convoluted picture of what Mexican food is” through the restaurant. The menu doesn’t have margaritas or queso or beef tacos. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any beef on the menu at all.

Now that Nixta is nearing the end of its fourth year in business, with lines still consistently around the block for their food, Rico and Mardanbigi are dreaming about what’s next. The couple recently launched an affordable pop-up tasting menu restaurant on the patio of Nixta, Flor Xakali, and took a trip to Iran to visit Mardanbigi’s family and do R&D for the Iranian café they plan to open in the near future.

Rico hopes his and Mardanbigi’s story of opening Nixta will inspire others to open spots that push their own cultures forward. “We are just two people who had very little money, who have a vision and a dream, and we stuck to it. I want people to be inspired to go do their own thing,” he says. “More than anything, I want to see more taquerias out there selling veggie-based tacos, and for there to be more nixtamal, more heirloom corn, and less of the low-quality corn that is ruining our soil in America.”