Catching Up with Danny Mena

It’s the night before the grand opening of his new restaurant, Sembrado, and Danny Mena isn’t sleeping.

He isn’t running through a final pre-opening checklist—Were enough menus printed? Did someone remember to put toilet paper in the bathroom?– or giving his new kitchen crew a pep talk or having a last-minute conversation with Fany Gerson about Sembrado’s dessert menu, which he has put entirely in her capable hands.

Instead, Mena is cooking a four-course, goat-centric dinner for the supper club at Haven’s Kitchen. “We’re really glad he didn’t cancel,” says Julia Sullivan, Haven’s’ operations manager and the evening’s hostess. The supper club’s 21 guests, each of whom has paid $165 for a place at the communal table, are unanimous in their praise of Mena at evening’s end. “How did you cook the goat?,” asks one guest. “It’s so… tender,” she says, clearly in awe of Mena’s talents. Sullivan, who moderates the Q&A following the meal, observes that there have never been so many questions for a guest chef at the supper club. One woman declares she will be first in line at Mena’s new restaurant when it opens the next day at 11 AM.

“That lady actually did show up,” Mena tells me when we meet a week after the supper club and Sembrado’s opening. So did a steady stream of customers, many of whom know Mena and his particular interpretation of Mexican cuisine from his slightly larger Bowery spot, Hecho en Dumbo. Just a week old, Mena says Sembrado already has neighborhood regulars and he’s pleased that guests “get” Sembrado’s onda.

Next, how Sembrado came to be and what’s next…

The concept for Sembrado is different from Hecho en Dumbo, which started as a Brooklyn pop-up in 2008 before moving to its permanent residence in Manhattan in the spring of 2010. Whereas Mena and his team focus on contemporary interpretations of traditional Mexican plates at Hecho– think birria and cochinita pibil—Sembrado is a taqueria, though Mena is ambivalent about this word, since he thinks it’s misused and misunderstood in the U.S. Fast food chains have popularized tacos for Americans, but in doing so, they’ve also corrupted the fundamental idea of what a taco really is.  

Mena, who was born and raised in Mexico City and studied and worked as an engineer before attending culinary school in New York, has vivid memories of the Mexican capital’s tacos al carbon. “Handmade tortillas. The grilled onions. The meat slow-cooked on the vertical spit….” I’d snap my fingers and bring him back to New York, but I’m right there with him, watching the smoke waft up from a round grill at a taqueria in Mexico City’s Centro. Mena wanted to bring that kind of taco– “just the right amount of grease, just the right flavor of salsa”–to Manhattan. “You can get tacos al carbon in Sunset Park, in Queens, but not in Manhattan,” he says. “That’s what I want to do with Sembrado.” Mena sees his new 42-seat restaurant as the first in what he predicts will soon be a colony of “real” taquerias in Manhattan. 

Though he’s been mulling the idea of a taqueria for several years—even before Hecho en Dumbo’s establishment– it wasn’t until about eight months ago that everything fell into place for Sembrado’s creation. When the seed of the taqueria idea was planted, Mena and a couple business partners considered the possibility of a roving taco truck… until Mena realized that he’d be the one always in the truck. As with all New York food ventures, finding the right place at the right time and for the right price was key. The place-time-price trifecta didn’t coalesce until this year, but Mena still thinks he’s just ahead of the curve with respect to what’s next in Mexican cooking in the U.S. 

Though he’s looking a little sleep-deprived, the young chef is also visibly excited about the possibilities Sembrado opens up for him and for New Yorkers. A veritable evangelist for authentic tacos, Mena is stoked about having two distinct restaurants where he can begin to expand understanding of Mexican food through what’s served on the plates coming out of his kitchens. And if the guests at the supper club are at all representative of the diners who will be passing through Sembrado, he’ll soon have a loyal army of authentic taco evangelists in his thrall.