A new iteration of Taco María opens, in an unlikely place

Carlos Salgado wowed the world of Mexican food the moment he opened Taco María in 2013.

His marriage of high-end with homestyle — sturgeon tacos, Flamin’ Hot chicharrones, handmade blue corn tortillas from kernels he imported from Mexico and milled himself — seemed better suited to Los Angeles or Mexico City than a hipster food hall in Costa Mesa.

The accolades came quickly: L.A Times restaurant of the year in 2018. Four straight Michelin stars. One of Esquire’s most important U.S. restaurants of the 2010s. Salgado was a Best Chef in California finalist for the James Beard Awards — the Oscars of the restaurant industry — in June 2023.

A month later, Salgado shocked his fans by closing Taco María.

As his good friend, I have the exclusive on what’s next. It’s … Wisconsin?

A few months after the restaurant closed, Salgada relocated to Door County — the childhood home of his wife, Emilie Coulson Salgado — in a move that left Southern California’s food scene befuddled, if people knew at all.

If anyone deserved to go all “Walden,” it was the thoughtful Salgado. He had worked nonstop for a decade, weathering the pandemic and an Orange County audience that usually got mad when he explained why his space didn’t serve chips and salsa or had “Black Lives Matter” stenciled on the patio window. Taco María’s lease was up, the location was never the best fit and Carlos and Emilie wanted to spend more time with their two young children and her parents while they recharged and decided what was next.

Now, after some time off, they’re in the restaurant business again, opening La Sirena this month in Ephraim, population 345, about an hour and a half away from the nearest big city, Green Bay.

Expect everything that made Taco María so incredible — a prix fixe menu, a focus on local produce and meat, those fabulous blue corn tortillas that taste like a time portal to Tenochtitlan — except on the shores of Lake Michigan instead of off the 405 freeway.

Nothing against the Badger State, but the idea of a Mexican chef of Salgado’s caliber setting up on a peninsula jutting into a Great Lake is like Shohei Ohtani announcing he’s leaving the Dodgers to join a Sunday beer league. Gustavo Dudamel deciding his next gig isn’t the New York Philharmonic but the Whittier Regional Symphony. Gov. Gavin Newsom forsaking his office to run the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library.

About 8% of Wisconsin’s population is Latino, and Door County is 96% white. The Mexican food scene outside Milwaukee and maybe Racine is still mostly combo plates washed down with massive margaritas, or cartoonishly big burritos in the Chipotle model. Wisconsin is … Wisconsin, land of cheese curds and brats and brandy Old Fashioneds.

“I would push back that [Mexican food] is out of place anywhere in the United States,” Salgado told me by phone last week. “We are the foundation of the restaurant and hospitality industry, farming and construction — I don’t need to say all the ways we’re embedded.”

He sure shut me up there! Besides, I’m proud that his and Emilie’s next step is in an isolated spot in a state that went for Donald Trump in two of the past three elections. California needs all the ambassadors we can get, especially in places that don’t look like us — and we can’t get better ambassadors than them.

Carlos Salgado, former chef and co-owner of Taco Maria, on an outdoor adventure in Door County, Wisconsin, with his two children in an undated photo. Salgado and his wife, Emilie Coulson Salgado, are opening La Sirena, a high-end Mexican restaurant, in Ephraim, Wisconsin.

(Courtesy of the Salgado family)

“In parts of the Midwest, you mention you’re from California, there’s inevitably haters who want to believe that we left California because it’s a failed state, and they try to commiserate with us about how California is uninhabitable,” the 45-year-old Salgado said. “Of course, I don’t believe that. I have pangs of longing for my home state every day, especially fruits!”

“I actually thought we’d live in California forever, and I still consider us California people,” Coulson Salgado, 41, said in a separate interview. “But this experiment to be here [Wisconsin] turned out to be really good for us and our children.”

The two met in San Francisco in 2008, when Coulson Salgado was working for a literacy nonprofit and Salgado was a pastry chef at a high-end restaurant. He moved back to his native Orange County in 2011 aiming to help with his immigrant family’s Cal-Mex restaurant in Orange.

Instead, he capitalized on the era’s food truck craze and opened Taco María. Coulson moved down in 2013 to help transition the luxe lonchera to a brick-and-mortar, eventually becoming the restaurant’s general manager and beverage director, roles she will also assume at La Sirena.

Taco María was a daily miracle, especially given its Orange County location. Salgado got nationwide media coverage and forced Angelenos to do the unimaginable: travel to O.C. for Mexican food. His exhortations for people to value Mexican cuisine and the people who make it was essential in an era where too many Americans love the former and loathe the latter.

But the grind of running a restaurant — which I know too well, through my wife — wore on the couple. They didn’t want to be rushed into opening a new Taco María, so they decided a sojourn to Door County would be fun and also right.

“Emilie put in 15 years with me in California,” Salgado said, and moving to Wisconsin “was something we felt we deserved as a family.”

He unwound from the restaurant rush by hiking through Door County’s forests and fishing in its waterways while continuing Taco María’s successful salsa macha mail-order business; Emilie moonlighted as a grant writer. The plan was to return to California sometime in 2024 and hop back on the restaurant hamster wheel.

But the more they experienced Door County’s slower pace of life, the more they realized it would be nearly impossible to replicate that in Southern California.

“We started Taco María without kids,” Salgado said. “This trial gave us the opportunity to imagine the kind of balance that we wanted, and we realized that we stood a very good chance of creating it here.”

I asked if he meant the cost of living or the sclerotic traffic or the lack of affordable housing or any of the other reasons California quitters give when they leave and whine about their move.

“We’re certainly not California quitters,” Salgado deadpanned. “People talk all the time about making career changes to spend more time with their families, and this is really it for now.”

Coulson Salgado said it’s been “wonderful” to return to where she grew up “with the eyes of an adult.” Door County has seen newcomers from California in recent years, mostly young families drawn by its immaculate landscapes. She does miss the multiculturalism of Southern California — “My son will say, ‘Let’s get pho!’ and I have to remind him we’re not in Orange County anymore,” she said with a laugh.

Chef Carlos Salgado scoops cooked organic blue maze corn into a wet mill to grind for tortillas at Taco Maria in Costa Mesa on Tuesday, February 16, 2016.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

She doesn’t frame the opening of La Sirena in the rural Midwest in the age of Trump as a political act. But she brought up the “terrible” deportation deluge that has hit Southern California this summer (Wisconsin has so far been spared, “but we’re on high alert for it”) as a reason why their presence matters.

“It’s not like we’re in some alternate universe out here,” she said, “but you could be if you weren’t paying attention, and that’s what’s scary … But that’s why it’s more important than ever to create more pockets of joy.”

Her husband vowed that California “hasn’t seen the last of us yet,” while giving no timeline for a return.

In an ideal world, he and Emilie would run both La Sirena and a restaurant back in O.C.

“I’m proudly Mexican American,” Salgado said. “And I’m not going to shy away from taking up space and perform brown excellence in anywhere that I am.”