It’s two in the afternoon on a Thursday and Luis Mota, the owner of La Contenta Oeste, asks me if I want to do a wine tasting. Ignoring the better part of my judgment, I say yes and we spend the next two hours chatting and drinking delicious Mexican wine. Luis discusses which wines are most popular in Mexico (L.A Cetto, a Nebbiolo grape) and describes the different areas of Mexico the wines came from, how some of them come from areas close to the ocean, giving the wine a slightly salty taste. He believes that the way wine tastes is extremely personal.
One of his goals in opening La Contenta is to introduce New Yorkers to Mexican wine. “Mexican wine doesn’t have the history,” he laments. Unlike at a typical wine tasting, our sommelier pours us healthy portions.
Next, we eat. La Contenta’s enchiladas have a mouth-watering layer of a tomatillo sauce on top and tender, melt-in-your-mouth chicken inside. Luis explains that all five senses should be utilized when enjoying food, including touch. He demonstrates the best way to hold a taco, insisting that tacos should never, under any circumstances, be eaten with a knife and fork.
Luis Mota grew up in Mazatlan, Mexico. Originally, he thought he would have a career in the army. “I wanted to be a hero,” he says, recalling Rambo as his source of inspiration. But after three years of burning down marijuana and opium poppy fields—a major preoccupation of the Mexican army at the time—he decided life in the army wasn’t for him. When he looks back at this time, he laughs at the irony of how marijuana is now legal in many parts of the US. “I almost died over there in the mountains trying to destroy the marijuana,” he recalls. While in the army, he met his wife, a New Yorker, who was on vacation in Mexico and happened to stop by his hometown. After traveling around Mexico for several months, the two decided to get married and live together in New York. It was here that his journey as a cook and restaurateur began.
Luis started out as a dishwasher at Carmine’s in Times Square, choosing the job so he could be fed and be around other Spanish speakers. “It was just a necessity, something to survive,” he claims. But after spending enough time in the kitchen and learning to do prep, he wanted to take cooking on seriously. He saw a magazine ad for Le Cordon Bleu and decided to take a 12-week course in Paris, and even spent time cooking in bistros for free after the course ended. During this time, he learned a lot about classic French cuisine and about the importance of conserving resources, from ingredients to water to electricity, an ideology he strives to pass on in the United States. “It’s the way you appreciate what you have,” he says.
Still, after returning from his training in Paris, he was only ever planning on being a cook. After working steadily as a cook for a private club on Park Avenue for some time, a manager approached him with an idea for starting a restaurant. “I didn’t have this ambition to open a restaurant, it was just destiny,” he remembers. The rent in the West Village was high but they went for it. “We had a lot of energy, so we decided we’d risk it,” he says. And so Luis’s first restaurant, Café Condesa opened in 2005, utilizing all of his knowledge of cooking up until then, Mexican, French and even Asian influences, to create a “New York Style.”
Later, in 2009, it was Luis’s turn to spearhead the opening of Ofrenda, a more traditional style Mexican restaurant—one with a menu that did not include guacamole. “That was my idea, ‘Mexican cuisine is not about guacamole only,’” he remembers, laughing at himself back then. “It was a really bad idea, because in the end, eighty percent of people order guacamole.” Luis reflects on the many lessons he’s learned through the course of his career, and how he’s still learning today with La Contenta Oeste.
As it turns out, even in downtown Manhattan, New Yorkers have very different preferences. While patrons of the original La Contenta on the Lower East Side love the flavors of the modern Mexican dishes, West Villagers visiting La Contenta Oeste seem to have trouble with the heat. “Mexican food is all about the use of peppers,” Luis explains, describing how different peppers make different dishes distinct. Today, he still strives to find the balance between making a more sensitive palate happy while sticking to his Mexican roots.
But La Contenta is about more than its modern take on Mexican food. One of Luis’s biggest goals is for his restaurant to feel connected through all of its moving parts. When he first started cooking, there was always tension between “the front of the house” and “the back of the house,” the waiters and the cooks. During his experience as a pastry chef for Union Square Café, he learned how it could be different. There, everyone was friendly with one another because, as he learned, everyone in the restaurant was a team working towards one goal: to make the customer happy. “We work for the people,” Luis reflects. “We try to create an experience, to create something you can enjoy the moment you are in the door.” To make this happen, it’s important that everyone in the restaurant is comfortable with one another and working together. La Contenta’s logo is based on this idea of bridging the divide between the different parts of the houses. In the logo, the back of the house, the front of the house and the bar are represented as a cook, a maitre d and a bartender, coming together in one being.
The team mentality is very apparent as we chat. Even as he talks, he consistently checks up on guests, waiters, the bartender, the hostess. He greets the employees that are starting their shift and teases the waiters. He talks about how for family meal, he makes sure that everyone’s needs are accounted for. A waiter named Victor prefers egg whites, so he makes sure he gets egg whites. After seeing him interact with his employees, it’s not surprising to learn that Luis participated in the “Day Without Immigrants” last year by closing La Contenta for a day in support of his immigrant employees.
In addition to standing in support with his staff, Luis also supports local elementary schools by hosting cooking classes for the kids from PS41 across the street and students coming down from the Bronx, teaching them how to make tortillas, chocolate, and churros by hand. This, he says has been one of his most gratifying experiences as a restaurant owner, “because it’s the most honest,” he says.
So what’s next for Luis and La Contenta? “What I really want to do is go to another country,” Luis says. Now, he’s looking toward international destinations to open his next restaurant, places like Berlin or Dubai. By the end of our conversation, I’m pickled and full of food. When I ask for the check, Luis says not to worry about paying, yet another example of his generosity.
Learn more about Luis and La Contenta here. Follow their gorgeous photos on Instagram.
Featured image by Lisa Kaplowitz.
Felicity is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity enjoys writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic
Comments are closed.