You Gotta Try This: Why Chando’s mulita isn’t quite like its cousin, the quesadilla
This is “You Gotta Try This,” The Bee’s series featuring one particular must-have dish at a local restaurant. Each featured dish is nominated by a reader and chronicled at sacbee.com. Got a menu item you want to shine some light on? Email reporter Benjy Egel at begel@sacbee.com.
Lisandro “Chando” Madrigal didn’t invent the mulita. He just brought it to Sacramento.
Mulitas of any kind, much less ones made with adobada, were hard to find in local Mexican restaurants before the former Apple employee opened his first Chando’s Tacos stand on Arden Way in June 2010. Similar to a loaded quesadilla, it’s made with two small tortillas stacked on either side of meat, vegetables and enough cheese to form a skirt around the tortillas’ fringes.
The adobada’s deep red color and spicy, fruity flavor comes from marinating fresh pork butt for a couple days in a proprietary blend of citrus juice and several chilis known only to Madrigal and his nephew Joey Heredia. It’s then slow-cooked on a rotating spit called a trompo throughout the day while hunks of pineapple at either end of the trompo drip juice onto the meat.
Differences between adobada and al pastor are scant but essentially come down to regional dialect and the fact that adobada doesn’t necessarily have to be cooked on a trompo. But that’s how Madrigal saw it done in Tijuana, where he moved alongside his father after growing up with seven siblings in Yuba City, and that’s how Chando’s Tacos does it.
“I like to keep the integrity of traditional Mexican street food,” Madrigal said. “It’s important to stay true to who we are ... using simple ingredients. I’m not a big dude into fusion and all that stuff.”
Upon order of an adobada mulita, a cook slices meat off the trompo and grills it for a couple minutes along with pineapple chunks, if requested. He or she then loads two corn tortillas full of feather-shredded Monterey Jack cheese and grills them until the cheese starts to form a skirt, then flips them.
Once the cheese melts all the way through, the mulita is opened up and filled with adobada, cilantro, diced white onion, guacamole and a house salsa made from roasted tomatoes and japones chiles. The top tortilla is then flipped back on, and the whole thing is ready to serve after a few more seconds on the grill.
Madrigal was working for Apple’s corporate sales team when he noticed “vultures” from other departments would always flock to his Mexican food at staff potlucks, he said. He began catering backyard parties after his father’s death in 2007, and opened his first restaurant three years later.
“I was just sick and tired of my house smelling like a restaurant,” Madrigal said. “And then Karla, my wife, was sick and tired of staying at home with the kids and needed to socialize with big humans.”
Chando’s Tacos now has four Sacramento-area locations and a fifth scheduled to open in Citrus Heights next month, while full-service Chando’s Cantinas can be found in downtown Sacramento and the El Dorado Hills Town Center. A la carte adobada mulitas are $3.99 apiece at Chando’s Tacos and $12 for two at Chando’s Cantina. Catering also remains a “significant” part of Chando’s business, Madrigal said.
Next up is wholesale. Chando’s mothership in West Sacramento has a huge warehouse in the back where employees have started nixtamalazing corn to make tortillas from scratch for use across all restaurants. The warehouse is also being turned into a centralized prep station, which should save Chando’s time (and inherently, money) and allow for greater quality control across the various locations, Madrigal said.
Chando’s plans to sell marinated meat by the pound, housemade tortillas and more out of a small window connected to the warehouse by the second quarter of 2020, Madrigal said. The tortillas will be used before then on tacos, tostadas and, yes, mulitas.
CHANDO’S TACOS
863 Arden Way, Sacramento, (916) 641-8226; 5665 Power Inn Rd., Sacramento, (916) 387-8226; 2530 Boatman Ave., West Sacramento, (916) 375-0075; 943 Pleasant Grove Blvd., Roseville, (916) 782-8226
Info: https://chandostacos.com/
Hours: Vary by location, but roughly 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week.
Pro Tip: Trying to escape the weather outside? Avoid the table near the West Sacramento Chando’s automatic sliding doors, which burst open every time customers enter, exit or throw trash away in the adjacent bin.
This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 4:00 AM.