Talking Tortillas and More with Sue Torres

It’s all about the tortilla for Sue Torres, chef/owner of one of New York City’s most-acclaimed Mexican restaurants, Sueños. As she gears up for the New York City Wine & Food Festival, where she will be one of two dozen chefs cooking at Bobby Flay’s popular Tacos & Tequila on Saturday, October 19, she shared some wisdom in making the ultimate taco.

“A good taco, to me, has a nice textural difference–whether that be in the onions, on the salsa on top, or some other crunchy element. And the tortilla has to be perfect in order for it to be a successful taco,” Torres says.

“Tacos & Tequila is my favorite event at the festival,” she goes on. “Who doesn’t love a taco, first of all? And you have a different variety of chefs representing with their version of a taco, which, to me, is always very exciting because you have French chefs and Italian chefs and Spanish chefs doing their own creations. All of these chefs know how to braise meat. All of them know how to sear something up right. But who can make a great tortilla?” At the event, Torres will be serving up her barbecue beef tacos with pico de gallo and queso fresco, a signature item at Sueños.

Torres’s own mastery of tacos and Mexican cuisine wasn’t exactly innate, however. Born and bred in Long Island, Torres’s heritage is Puerto Rican and Italian, and she claims that she didn’t even know what Mexican food was growing up. “The only understanding I had of Mexican food was ‘Ortega taco night,’” she recalls, laughing. “It wasn’t until I traveled to Mexico that my eyes were open to what it is.”

Before making her name in the world of Mexican cuisine, however, Torres cut her teeth in some of New York City’s finest kitchens, including The 21 Club, La Grenouille, and Arizona 206. She counts Michael Lomonaco, who she worked under at 21 while she was at the Culinary Institute of America, as a major mentor. “I was just a very young student at that time who didn’t know much about food and didn’t know much about cooking,” Torres remembers. “He was extremely patient. And I will always have a tremendous amount of love and respect for him for that.” She adds that her experience with Miles Angelo at Arizona 206 changed the way that she approached plating with food and flavors and that Zarela Martinez has always been a great culinary inspiration and teacher to her.

Along with Ortega taco nights, good food was always a part of Torres’s upbringing. “On the Italian side, we had a garden. We fished. We crabbed. We sourced the best possible ingredients, if we weren’t growing them or catching them ourselves. On the Puerto Rican side, it was a little more exotic—with achiote and banana leaves and just more exotic ingredients,” she recalls. “And going to Queens to visit my Puerto Rican grandmother and seeing the different ingredients like yucca and plantains in the markets, and even being taken to a slaughterhouse and picking out chicken and goats. My grandmother always hand-selected what she was going to feed us. These were my big, foundational lessons growing up.”

Next, Torres takes a lifechanging trip to Mexico…

But Torres’s professional turning point was her first trip to Mexico in 1996. “When I went to Mexico and I saw their ingredients, I was amazed. It reminded me of my mother’s family from Italy where everyone takes such pride in the simple ingredient–making sure that that ingredient has the most flavor and is picked at the right time and is local as can be. So, it was just sort of a natural progression for me to be cooking Mexican food because I fell in love with very little effort.”

She cites a meal on Mother’s Day weekend in Oaxaca, while traveling with her cooks, as particularly memorable. “We had a goat barbacoa. There was something about the goat—watching the father putting it in a pit in the ground and then all of us coming back later that day and eating it. I took a video of how he was laying it in the ground with the stones and the blanket and the leaves. It was just such an experience for me, and I will never forget what that goat taco tasted like.” It was also her first time tasting brain. “The brain is a delicacy there. So they had saved it for me. Somehow, I was the guest of honor, even though there were all these mothers there cooking their asses off on Mother’s Day!” she says. “So you had this beautiful, shredded goat meat on a handmade tortilla, cooked over a wood fire and then little pieces of brain. It was unbelievable.”

She went on to specialize in Mexican cooking at the Rocking Horse Café and Hell’s Kitchen restaurants before opening Sueños in 2003 and joining the movement to educate New Yorkers about the pleasures of authentic Mexican food while dispelling misconceptions along the way. “I think the accessibility to cheap Mexican food has made people believe that all Mexican food should be cheap, that it’s not worthy of a price tag. We use organic chicken, which is not a cheap product. We’re making our own tortillas, and we’re making our own moles and everything. To make those things is not cheap, but yet people expect it to be cheap. Nobody complains about paying $20 for a chicken parmigiana and some pasta.”

Torres plans to spread her culinary gospel via two new spots, where she’ll be working for the very first time with her husband, Darren Carbone, who she fittingly met while both were cooking at a Day of the Dead event at the James Beard Foundation. One of the newlyweds’ new restaurants will be in Westport, Connecticut, the other in St. Thomas, complete with ocean view. Their most anticipated collaboration, however, arrives in the new year: the couple is expecting a baby boy in January. “Now I have to again turn to the Zarela Martinezes of the world for inspiration,” Torres says. “And figure out how the hell she did it all—cooking, parenting, and running several businesses.” We suspect that just like constructing that ultimate taco, Torres, no doubt, will find that perfect balance.

For tickets and more information about Tacos & Tequila and the New York City Wine & Food Festival, visit nycwff.org.