A Mexican taqueria opens, serving mom’s recipes and award-winning salsa in Clovis
In the Segura family, true wealth is having food on the table.
“Who cares how much money you have? If you have crappy food, you’re broke,” Miguel Segura said his father, Felix, used to say.
By that measure, this family is rich. They just opened Miguel’s Taqueria, a little Mexican food spot inside the Peacock Market in Clovis. It serves Miguel’s mom’s recipes and an award-winning salsa.
And this family is rich in other ways. They are rich in love — Miguel and his parents have sweet stories to tell — and rich in awards for their growing business.
They lost Miguel’s mom to cancer just a month before opening the taqueria. But her recipes there live on and you can try them daily inside the market at Tollhouse Road and Sunnyside Avenue.
The food
Married couple Lisa and Miguel Seguera started this adventure making salsa. They worked out of the Clovis Culinary Center kitchens and followed its guidance on starting a business, then graduated to a food truck and catering.
On Dec. 3 they opened the taqueria. It’s inside the market, just past the Hot Cheetos, with plenty of seating.
The menu at Miguel’s is simple: tacos, burritos, tamales, quesadillas and tortas.
The salsa it serves (named Taco Truck salsa) won Fresno’s Taco Truck Throwdown’s first salsa competition in October. (It won the Judges’ Choice award. Javier’s Mexican Restaurant took home the People’s Choice Award.)
And Miguel’s food truck and catering food also landed on top of the Yelp.com Top 100 eateries list in November.
Almost all the recipes are from Miguel’s mom, Josefina Segura, who came to the U.S. from Jalisco, Mexico decades ago.
When the couple told her they were opening a restaurant, she told them they must serve tacos dorados. Those are tacos filled with chicken, folded in half and fried til they’re crispy and crunchy.
There’s also Jalisco-style pork gorditas, with the tortilla fried in a bright red enchilada sauce.
Another highlight: loaded tamales. They’re regular tamales, unwrapped and smothered in pork, beef or chicken and all the taco toppings.
Even the refried beans are Josefina’s recipe, made with pork fat that makes their flavor pop. (The menu has vegan and vegetarian options available, too.)
“Exactly how she told me is exactly how I make it,” Lisa said. “I want to be really true to the authenticity of the flavors.”
Turning a family recipe into something that can be served on a large scale at a restaurant isn’t easy, said Kris Marshall, operations manager of the Clovis Culinary Center, a kitchen that doubles as a business incubator to help launch new businesses.
But Lisa finessed it, she said.
“Family recipes should be shared, and I love the fact that they’re sharing them with everyone,” Marshall said.
Salsa
The salsa is its own product line. Nine kinds of it are for sale at the Peacock Market for $7.50 a bottle, and the couple is working on plans to get it in more stores.
The original mild is what the couple calls “happy mistake salsa.” Miguel accidentally put the wrong seasoning into a batch, but when he tasted it, he said it was fantastic.
The salsas include a blending of flavors from Jalisco (where Miguel’s mom is from) with its tomatoes and tomatillos, and from Michoacán (where Miguel’s dad is from) with spicy red and green peppers.
The family
Josefina was working as a waitress at a restaurant in Mexicali when she met Miguel’s dad. He walked in, saw her and bet another man, “that güerita is going to be my wife,” referring to Josefina’s fair skin.
He crashed and burned at first. She was a beautiful woman who got hit on a lot and was used to saying no, Miguel said. But when Josefina’s mom needed medicine she couldn’t afford and Miguel’s dad got it, Josefina fell for him.
They came to the U.S. together, and their son also met his spouse when she walked into his workplace. Lisa was looking for a job when she showed up at CompUSA, where Miguel was a sales manager.
“When Lisa walked into my life, it was like color just walked into my life,” he said.
Lisa was a single mom at the time. With the lesson from Miguel’s father that food is love infused into him, he stocked her freezer with chicken nuggets and taquitos.
They’ve been together for 20 years now, married for 12, with four kids between them.
“Miguel’s mom is an amazing cook and her house was always open for people to come eat,” Lisa said.
Convincing Miguel’s mom that Lisa could cook was a bit of a challenge. Lisa is a white woman with red hair, who didn’t grow up cooking Mexican food.
Josefina was reluctant to pass on recipes, much less let Lisa cook for an entire family get-together.
When Lisa was scheduled to cook, a relative bought 40 pounds of carnitas, just in case her cooking wasn’t good enough. But her barbecue chicken — using Miguel’s salsa in the marinade — bowled them over.
“I earned my family’s respect that day,” Lisa said. “We really started cooking together.”
Josefina died Nov. 2 at age 78 of pancreatic cancer, two years after her husband passed. It was the same day Miguel and Lisa were handing out samples of their salsa and trying to grow their business at the MADE Central California food expo.
They almost named the restaurant Josefina’s. They decided to save that name for another dream: opening a high-end Mexican restaurant.
They’ve got other big dreams, including mass producing the salsa, writing a cookbook and creating a YouTube channel.
“It was really amazing to be able to watch them grow, to see them go through the struggles that every entrepreneur goes through,” said Marshall from the culinary center. “I think it’s a great path. They have so many dreams they want to accomplish.”
Details: Miguel’s Taqueria is inside the Peacock Market, 1427 Tollhouse Road, Clovis. Hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays. 559-797-1870.
