Barrio Café — the legendary 16th Street Mexican restaurant that transformed our preconceived notions about Mexican food — is closing its doors on May 31. The sad news has been disseminated by various media and social outlets over the past 20 hours, including chef-owner Silvana Salcido Esparza’s own emotional Instagram post about her reasons for shuttering the 22-year-old restaurant.
In her usual no-BS style, she says, “It’s true. I did get a little old and I am very sick. Without me there is no Barrio, so Barrio has to close.” She chokes up during her message, expressing her love and gratitude and apologizing to those who know her well for not letting them know about the restaurant’s closure sooner. She regrets that the word got out before she could tell her staff or her friends who “needed to hear it personally from me.” Still, she’s throwing her staff a goodbye party, and they have a few weeks to plan their next steps.
In her Reel, she also muses on the irony of Barrio surviving COVID and closing for other reasons, explaining that she’s wanted to retire for years and now her health and well-being demand it. She has suffered with a debilitating inflammatory disease called sarcoidosis for eight years now, but it’s never stopped her from being badass. As you may know, Esparza helped feed people in need during the pandemic, dispensing 50-80 family-style meals every day from a van she parked behind the restaurant, taking money from her personal bank account to do so.
Obviously, there’s a lot more I could say about what Esparza has done to feed the community (and I don’t mean the well-heeled white folks who have frequented her restaurant over the years), but I’d rather talk about how she changed Phoenix’s Mexican restaurant scene forever when she and her partner Wendy Gruber opened Barrio on 16th Street near Thomas Road (not a prosperous neighborhood; she wasn’t going for that) in 2002.
There are a few things I remember about my early visits there as a critic, one of them being that the tiny place was packed (it has expanded over the years), and the vibe was warm and convivial. The first surprise at the table (well, after the white tablecloths) was the lack of chips and salsa. Instead, Esparza served warm, soft baguette-like bread (she came from a Central California family of bakers after all) to signal that this Mexican food experience would be vastly different from anything we’d known before. And it was.
There was guacamole, studded with pomegranate seeds in a tableside preparation, and the menu was rife with regional specialties such as cochinita pibil, chiles en nogada, chicken en mole, grilled fish topped with a white wine-splashed cream reduction and churros, rich with cajeta (goat’s milk caramel). She taught us, bite-by-bite, that Mexican food was so much more than the AZ-Mex food we already knew and loved. She coaxed us into seeing that Mexican cooking was rich in history and sophisticated in technique. The regional Mexican restaurants that now dot our restaurant landscape all took a page from Esparza.
She was the first restaurateur I can recall who featured wines from Mexico, and probably the first to offer a vast selection of tequilas. The restaurant’s walls were not hung with Mexican restaurant stereotypes. There were no sombreros or serapes but rather the modern and often edgy work of emerging Chicano artists. The restaurant’s mural-splashed exterior celebrated both Chicano art and culture in one eye-popping swoop. She took pride in her heritage and her community, and she wanted everyone to see that, white people and people of color alike.
Esparza has been a James Beard Best Chef Southwest semifinalist seven times, also making it to semifinalist last year for the Outstanding Chef award. I’m sure she’d love to get a Beard, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say her goal in life has never been some award from New York. Her legacy is bigger and more important than that.
She has never been reticent about taking stands on issues that matter to her. I remember being thrilled to see her in a commercial for Biden during the 2020 election and learning (not through her) that she served on Biden’s Latino Leadership committee. She’s also a passionate activist for LGBTQ+ communities.
The woman is a force, and just because she’s closing Barrio doesn’t mean we’ve seen or heard the last of her. In fact, she’s publishing an autobiographical book entitled La Hija de la Chingada: Chronicles of a Mexican Chef in the U.S.A., available for pre-sale as of May 5, 2024. Like everything else she does, it’s bound to be eye-opening.
So hurray for Esparza, who’s forging a new path for herself as a writer, but this grim fact remains for the rest of us: We’ll sorely miss her comida chingona (effing good food).
