ELEMI Restaurant

As a teenager, Emiliano Marentes worked in the tortillerias of his native El Paso, delivering tortillas to restaurants. But the corn tortillas he ate at home were made in Ciudad Juárez, on the other side of the Rio Grande. “It was just a way better tortilla,” recalls Marentes. Relatives from Mexico—especially his uncle—would regularly bring fresh tortillas to Marentes’s mother, and sometimes he and his mom would cross the border to pick up their own. His early introduction to restaurant kitchens inspired him to pursue a career as a chef, but memories of those tortillas drew Marentes back to El Paso to open Elemi, a modern Mexican restaurant built on ancestral culinary traditions.