 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| History
Leona has come a long way. From roadside stand to corporation, Leona Medina-Tiede, the eldest daughter in a Chimayo family of eleven, remembers helping her uncle run a food stand during the summer, and then working with her mother to sell steaming bowls of posole and fresh tortillas to pilgrims who journeyed to the village of Chimayo the week before Easter. Her first solo venture was a roadside stand in 1977 on New Mexico’s Highway 76 in Chimayo. Seven years later, she began mass producing the tortilla, starting at 4:00am taking a break to go to church and then continuing to work in the tortilla shop and restaurant the remainder of the day. Soon it was obvious that the Santuario needed a full-time restaurant. She and her husband, Dennis, converted the storage shed, next to Leona’s childhood home, into a take-out restaurant, staffing it with family members. From its beginning, the restaurant has always been strictly a family affair. It is in their blood. Even son Paul, at age 9, could prepare everything they sold. And to this day, during Holy Week, the entire family assembles to prepare food for 40,000-50,000 pilgrims visiting the Santuario. Years later, Leona’s Restaurante de Chimayo proudly endures just across from the holy Santuario de Nuestro Senor de Esquipulas. For many years, Leona has fed visitors to this village, knowing in her heart that long hours and quality ingredients are the key ingredient to success. Commercially prepared tortillas would not do for this eager entrepreneur, and she flatly refused to serve them. And so it all began. The whole wheat dough was made by hand, patted out into balls and rolled into perfect circles with a bolillo. Then with almost musical precision, Leona cooked them, one at a time, on her cast-iron comal in the small restaurant kitchen. She also handmade her own tamales, folded her own taco and tostada shells and prepared the green and red chile sauces from scratch. But instead of a few dozen tortillas, about 40,000 used to roll off the tortilla machine daily, with round the clock shifts running 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. And true to form, Leona spent two years perfecting the recipe for these tortillas that steadily fly off this industrial tortilla oven. Not unexpectedly, other companies have copied her, but she says “the recipes are just not the same”. Still driven, Leona then originated northern New Mexico’s flavored tortillas. These unique tortillas used to be sold in assorted packages as well as single-flavored packages. They were prepared in the same traditional manner as the whole wheat tortillas, but with the addition of all-natural flavorings and sugar when appropriate. Many people now know them as flavored wrap tortillas. |