This comment from Kevin Fink of Emmer & Rye to now James Beard semifinalist Olivia Lopez made her rethink what she thought was the job of her dreams at the time: making pasta from scratch and mastering the flavors and comforts of Italian cuisine.
"All these pasta shapes have a meaning, but they deserve respect," Lopez told the Observer. "I could create and put dishes together. It was on the plate, but it wasn’t me."
After a hiatus from Dallas' culinary scene, she found the answer to her deeper calling in Molino Oloyo, a concept rooted in her personal journey and Mexican heritage.
Lopez began cooking at around 13 years old, and that's when she first discovered the value of quality. Her grandmother would send her off to the market early in the morning with a list of requirements for the food she was to bring back. If it wasn't the best, she was sent back.
“She’s really the person who taught me a lot about getting to know quality. If she taught me something, it’s quality,” Lopez says.
Even since her grandmother's passing, she has embraced her sage wisdom by sourcing the best ingredients from three key places: Molino Oloyo's own regenerative farm, Pequeno; corn, salt and cacao from Mexico; and Texas.
The yin to Lopez's yang is her partner, Jonathan Percival. He started in the front of the house at age 19 and slowly moved his way back to the kitchen, joining forces with Lopez in 2020. He works and maintains their small-scale, no-till regenerative farm, brings projects from ideas to life, and works alongside Lopez in the kitchen.
"It’s very common to see that we don’t open a lot of cans in our kitchen. It’s just a different thing. Anyone who helps us in the kitchen knows it’s about the process. With all the work we’re putting in, we’re building something that can take days or weeks, depending on what we’re making. Having appreciation from the kitchen to the plate changes you as a cook.” Lopez shared.
They create menus based on what they can get each season, which is interpreted through Lopez's memories.
"Most of the time, when I’m building menus, it’s from memories. They just get reinterpreted with what we have in season. With a modern approach." Lopez told us.
Because she grew up on the coast, seafood was one of the dominating ingredients in her childhood.
“I used to go to the beach to eat seafood once or twice a week. We used to go to this little restaurant that floated on the water to eat clams, and they were so fresh that they would move when we squeezed lime on them," she says.
Lopez's seafood dishes are highlights of the dinners they host at various locations around Dallas, the most recent being at Marcellos Andres Ceramic Studio, where in-season Texas strawberries shone in desserts and raw fish dishes.
But if you can't make it to one of the hosted dinners, your sights should be set on Saturdays at Wayward Coffee, where they serve a breakfast menu featuring an array of tacos and rotating sweets.
"The only thing that will transport me home is a good tortilla with good masa," Lopez reminisced. The memory of buying the corn, grinding it and transforming it into a tortilla during her childhood is the base of her breakfast tacos.
All of the corn is sourced from heirloom farmers through her relationship with Masienda, a company that helps preserve one of the world's most important crops. Red, yellow and blue corn are on rotation. Our order of wagyu suadero yielded an eye-catching warm pink tortilla made with heirloom red corn from Tlaxcala or the Estado de Mexico just outside of Mexico City.
Inside is cooked-to-order scrambled farm eggs, Rosewood Ranch wagyu suadero, queso Oaxaca, cilantro, onion and lime. All tacos are served with two mild salsas, but if you want to turn up the heat, they have two fermented hot sauces, one red and one green, made with salts from Lopez's hometown region of Colima.
"We get it [the salt] from a small beach town in Colima called Cuyutlan. All of the salt is collected and harvested using techniques from ancient times. It's artisanally processed and is similar to fleur de sel. We use it as a finishing salt and in fermentations," Lopez told us.
It goes without saying that these are some of the best breakfast tacos in Dallas. Last year, they made Texas Monthly's list of the 50 Best Tacos in Texas.
Rediscovering Conchas
The conchas are also amazing and mandatory to complete a meal here. I've never had homemade concha before, so I was really surprised when I bit into this for the first time.
In the past, I wasn't particularly fond of conchas because the pastries were always dry and lacked flavor. After some digging, I found that's a very controversial opinion; some say it's because of the baking style or cultural preference, while others swear up and down that you need to have a fresh concha.
No matter the reason, this one turned my palate upside down. Here was dense and spongy bread covered with a soft strawberry icing. It has a chewy bite with subtle sweetness from the Texas strawberries.
What's Next?
The past (almost) four years, Lopez and Percival have been testing and discovering, meeting farmers, visiting their land, growing seasonal produce and recreating Lopez's childhood memories through recipes.The fine-tuning is always underway, but the pair has their eyes set on a restaurant soon, with a location that is still to be determined. They told us they're looking all over Dallas, particularly noting the North Oak Cliff and East Dallas areas, but nothing has stuck quite yet.
In the meantime, dine in casually at their weekend pop-up at Wayard Coffee Co. or refine your palate at one of their pop-up dinners at various locations across Dallas.
Updates for either occasion are posted on the Molino Oloyo Instagram page. Any occasion is an occasion to see what they've built over the last four years.
Molino Oloyo (weekends at Wayward Coffee Co.), 1318 W Davis St., Saturdays from 8 a.m. - 2 p.m. (or sold out)
