Fresno’s ‘most high end restaurant’ and the childhood in Mexico that inspired it
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Readers in a Fresno Bee poll named Tabachines the city’s most high-end restaurant.
- Alvarado based the menu on her mother’s home cooking in Guadalajara and market finds.
- Tabachines shops the Vineyard Farmers Market and stocks 100 tequilas and 100 wines.
Every time the owner of Tabachines Cocina in north Fresno encounters a challenge, she thinks about her mom.
Her mother went to medical school while raising four daughters as a single mom in Guadalajara, Mexico before bringing the family to Fresno for a better life.
“You have no excuse,” restaurateur Consuelo Alvarado tells herself. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”
That mantra has gotten her and the restaurant through tough times — grinding through two cars commuting to Los Angeles after opening her restaurant there in 2014. Then, not long after she moved the restaurant to Fresno in 2018, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic by serving sweaty customers on a makeshift patio.
Twelve years after it was born, Tabachines is still trucking along. It’s near Palm and Herndon avenues, in the same shopping center as Cracked Pepper Bistro and Parma Ristorante.
Last week, readers chose Tabachines as the most high-end restaurant in town in a Fresno Bee poll. It edged out Trelio in Old Town Clovis at the last moment of voting.
Tabachines Cocina restaurant
The name Tabachines (Taba-cheen-es) is a reference to the flame-red tabachin trees the owner grew up visiting in the main square in downtown Guadalajara.
“When it’s moving with the spring winds, it looks like it’s on fire,” she said — and artistic versions of that are all over the restaurant.
Tabachines is a Mexican restaurant that doesn’t fit neatly into any category.
“It’s very elegant and hip. It’s not like a hole-in-the-wall-type Mexican place,” said Sisomvang Hernandez, a former member of Yelp’s Elite Squad of active members of the review site.
She puts it on par with Sabor Cocina Latina & Bar in Fresno or CHICA inside The Venetian in Las Vegas, or the popular Saizon at the border of Fresno and Clovis.
“But not a lot of people know about it,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s in Fresno.”
Tabachines’ owner, Alvarado, is aiming to share the experience of eating at her mother’s table.
Elena Maravilla, now in her 80s, went to the market daily and cooked with whatever was in season for her daughters.
“My mother always provided very fresh meals with a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruits,” Alvarado said. “Maybe a blessing in disguise, we didn’t have a refrigerator. A refrigerator is a luxury in Mexico.”
After becoming a doctor, her mother brought the family to the United States when Alvarado was 17. Alvarado graduated from Clovis High School back when it was on Fifth Street and has called Fresno home ever since.
She’s never forgotten her Mexican heritage. She was a folklórico dancer for decades and never acquired a taste for American fast food.
After a career in building single-family homes with her husband, she decided to bring her mother’s way of cooking to a restaurant.
Food and drink on the menu
The owner’s mother’s recipes show up on the menu, including her mole recipe, which rotates among proteins. Most recently, it was smothering the grilled Berkshire pork chop, served alongside an apricot salad.
Tabachines chefs go the Vineyard Farmers Market twice a week, and the menu is based on whatever ingredients they find.
So the $48 prime rib-eye, for example, is served with black beans, tomatoes from the market and Mexican onion.
You’ll also find a cucumber-fennel salad on the menu with local vegetables.
There’s also a $38 grilled Mary’s Chicken breast served with Mayacoba beans popular in Mexican cooking, and $30 fish tacos that they tried and failed to take off the menu when customers rebelled. They’re made from beer-battered wild Alaskan halibut, served on blue corn tortillas with chipotle crema, cabbage, pico de gallo, radish and microgreens.
Food and beverage director Sam Aguilar said he likes to think of Tabachines as if it’s a restaurant in a big city in Mexico. Not everything is traditional in Mexican eateries. They play with flavors there, too.
“We’re in California. We have the bounty,” he said. “We want to honor Mexican cuisines and also want to showcase dishes you wouldn’t normally see.”
It’s true in the bar also.
There are more than 100 tequilas available, 100 bottles of mezcal and 150 kinds of wine — and lots of cocktails.
There’s a cocktail that’s not on the menu called the El Dorado. Bartender William Marshall wants customers to try it as part of his efforts to get people to drink mezcal, the smoky cousin of tequila.
The drink is made with mezcal, tequila and a syrup made with Kingsburg Honey.
“It’s a very good introduction for people who have never had mezcal or aren’t sure if they like it,” he said.
Back in the kitchen, there’s only four people who work every shift (and they all share dishwashing duties).
Chef Tyler Williams leads them, a Fresno native who brings his experience working in Napa and Yountville, including at Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc fried chicken restaurant, and local restaurants such as Cracked Pepper.
Another way Tabachines defies pigeonholing?
Williams didn’t have Mexican cuisine experience when he started here seven years ago. He transitioned into taking over the kitchen when the founding chef was still there.
“It’s exciting,” Williams said. “It was something different that I just dove head first into.”
Alvarado — who rarely lets anything on the menu unless she falls in love with it — said she loved his attitude. Any skills he didn’t have could be taught, she said.
“Young people are fearless and I love that,” she said.
Details: Tabachines is at 6755 N. Palm Ave. Happy hour runs from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with dinner starting at 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Reservations can be made online or by calling 559-473-1077.
