When Veronica Martinez was a child growing up in Guanajuato, Mexico, making tortillas was her favorite chore.
She would wake up at 5 a.m. to prepare the fire she and her mother used to make the day’s tortillas. None of her eight siblings liked to make them, so they would always ask her to switch chores, which Martinez happily obliged.
Earlier this month, Martinez opened her first restaurant just outside of Marietta Square. Nestled in the back of the new kitchen is a 24-year-old “prensa,” or a tortilla press in Spanish. She got it soon after moving to Marietta from Mexico in 1996, and while people have bought her new ones, nothing is quite like the original.
Credit: Olivia Wakim
Credit: Olivia Wakim
She still loves making tortillas, but now she makes them for the stream of customers who come eat at Cocina de la Tia.
The restaurant at 301 Lemon Street NE is colorful and bright, with a mural stretching along one wall that depicts a scene of two women making tortillas. The menu is made up of recipes Martinez grew up cooking alongside her mother.
For as long as Martinez can remember, she has loved to cook, even if it meant helping her mother feed her siblings. When she first moved to Marietta, she said she asked her mother how to make the dishes she grew up with, making sure to write each recipe down.
Customers can find those same recipes on Cocina de la Tia’s menu. The food is made from scratch with offerings like enchiladas, tortas, birria tacos, sopes, quesadillas, flautas, pambazo, or a torta sautéed in a red sauce and filled with protein, lettuce, tomato, avocado, sour cream and queso fresco, and Martinez’s favorite item, the gorditas de queso, which are thick, round corn tortillas stuffed with a three cheese blend and served with a choice of braised meat, or guisado.
Credit: Olivia Wakim
Credit: Olivia Wakim
All-day breakfast is also available with items like huevos al gusto and chilaquiles, and guests can wash it down with rotating aguas fresca flavors, Mexican Coke or Jarritos.
Of course, the tortillas are all prepared to order on Martinez’s prensa.
For years, Martinez has been the family’s chef. When her husband started working in construction, she would wake up at 5 a.m. to prepare food for him and his co-workers to deliver it to his work by 9 a.m. Sometimes it would add up to 20 plates of food.
Credit: Olivia Wakim
Credit: Olivia Wakim
The restaurant name Cocina de la Tia comes from Martinez’s status as tia, or “auntie,” and her desire to feed everyone around her. Every weekend, Martinez invites family and friends over to eat her food, whether it’s pozole with tortillas, pambazos or carne asada.
“I love it,” she said.
She’s been wanting to open a restaurant for a long time, she said, so she and her daughter, Brenda Martinez, began searching for the right location. It came in the form of the modest sized building on Lemon Street, which is just a few blocks from her house.
She told her husband she would be opening a restaurant, then proceeded to recruit her family to work alongside her. On a late Monday morning in March, she had her cousins and son-in-law, who had the day off from his normal job, whipping up enchiladas in the restaurant’s kitchen, and Brenda Martinez was running the front-of-house operations.
“I wake up early in the morning motivated,” Martinez said. “I don’t feel like this is my work.”
Brenda Martinez knew her mother wouldn’t be able to open a restaurant alone, and after everything she has done for the family it was no question whether they’d support her.
Credit: Olivia Wakim
Credit: Olivia Wakim
“We do everything as a family,” Brenda Martinez said. “My mom, she has literally been like the glue, our foundation who has kept us all together. How can I not help my momma?”
After calling Marietta home for more than two decades, Brenda Martinez said they’re happy they can plant their own “mustard seed” in the city, plus it gives her mother a whole new group of people to feed.
“She’s always trying to feed everyone,” she said.
Cocina de la Tia is open 10:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays and 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays-Sundays.
301 Lemon St. NE, Marietta. 770-693-5973, cocinadelatia.com
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