Despite its proximity to Mexico, the Rio Grande Valley isn’t known for chiles en nogada. The fabled and emblematic red, white, and green dish is a seasonal delicacy, mostly eaten in restaurants in Mexico during September to celebrate the country’s 1810 independence from Spain. So, when Alfredo and Roxanna Treviño first offered it in 2021 at their Weslaco restaurant, Nana’s Taqueria, few customers or staff members had even heard of chiles in walnut sauce.
“Some of the ingredients I’d never come across before,” says Aneth Salaya, one of the cooks first tasked with making the chile relleno-like dish that originated in Puebla, Mexico, over 200 years ago. “But once you start tasting the plate and seeing the bigger picture, it’s an overwhelming feeling.”
Besides the breadth of novel new ingredients, it was also the tedious process involved in making the dish that surprised Nana’s employees. This includes roasting and peeling poblano chiles, dicing apples and pears, sautéing the beef and pork picadillo filling, seeding pomegranates, and then cracking and grinding walnuts for the house-made cream sauce.
Before sampling it at Nana’s for the first time in 2023, Pharr-based food vlogger Ismael Martinez had only ever seen chiles en nogada in pictures. He recalls that he “couldn’t stop admiring it,” with its painterly presentation and the balance of sweet and savory components that come together in a tableau more akin to a dessert.
Although most of the restaurant menu is influenced by Roxanna’s hometown of Nuevo Progreso, located just 10 miles from Weslaco, the Treviños added the eye-catching dish to augment their restaurant’s celebration of El Mes de la Patria, a monthlong event in September honoring Mexico’s birthday. “We think food is an extraordinary motif to give culture to the Valley,” Alfredo says.
In addition to their observance of El Mes de la Patria, Nana’s ownership celebrates Día de los Muertos, Las Posadas, and the Mexican Revolution with special dishes and events, further linking the community and its visitors to their native traditions. Also, on the day the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have first appeared outside Mexico City in 1531, matachines dancers perform a ritual dance in the restaurant’s colorful courtyard, designed by Alfredo to resemble a small-town Mexican plaza.
For Nana’s, preserving Mexican culture isn’t just a way to get people in the door. In 2004, the Treviños and their four daughters were forced to abandon their home and a successful pottery business in Nuevo Progreso due to threatening phone calls from local cartels. Rather than dwell on the unsavory catalyst that motivated them to move across the border, the family resolved to instead shed a light on all the positive aspects of their former home.
After an initial attempt to continue in the pottery trade, the Treviños abandoned their efforts in a Weslaco flea market in 2010 and started a restaurant from scratch. Originally focusing on street tacos and lonches—ground beef sandwiches that are a speciality of Nuevo Progreso—Nana’s Taqueria evolved into a more expansive eatery over the next five years. In addition to touching upon the many nuances of regional border cuisine, its status as a cultural hub quickly made it a community institution and a must-stop for visitors in the Valley.
Although selling pottery was a casualty of the Treviños’ foray into the culinary world, the art form remains dear to their hearts. In fact, it’s had an unexpected influence on their menu. During Roxanna’s travels to Puebla, Oaxaca, and Michoacán in search of artisan wares, she was exposed to several different versions of chiles en nogada. That dish—lovingly recreated at home for decades—is now something all of Weslaco looks forward to at Nana’s. For the third year in a row, the restaurant will host a Feria del Chile during the month of September with a special menu of chiles rellenos along with the traditional offering believed to have been served to Mexico’s first emperor, Agustín de Iturbide, after he signed the Treaty of Córdoba.
Like years past, Roxanna says she will decorate the courtyard with papel picado, the brightly colored folk art tissue paper. And Alfredo will hoist Mexico’s flag in front of the restaurant’s newly unveiled bell tower, which houses an instrument forged from copper sourced out of Santa Clara del Cobre in Mexico. To celebrate the country’s birthday on Sept. 16, the family will stand in that very courtyard and perform the Grito de Dolores, a rallying speech the crowd is encouraged to join in on with the culminating threefold shouts: ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México!
