Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Jorge Guzman
Jorge Guzmán and partners restored their Petite León space in Kingfield by hand.
Chutes and Ladders—ever play? When I was a kid, I loathed it. I refused to play; everything about it was so unfair—you work so hard to get to the top, and then you’re slid to despair by chute, and where’s the justice? I think now my instinct was correct: Chutes and Ladders is too real. Kids want life to be fair; adults are people who have gone through the terrible loss of innocence that leaves you forever knowing it is not.
For example, consider the profound unfairness surrounding the best chicken pozole I’ve ever had in my life. It’s at the new Petite León, in south Minneapolis—takeout-only when I tried it and utterly stupendous. Broth as red as blood from the blistered and ground rendering of chilies multiplicitous and growling with presence, flavor, and a little heat. Broth as thick as hot gelatin from the roasted bones of its youth. Broth so complex and fascinating you want to hold it up to the light like a fancy watch to try to fathom how the cogs work.
Pozole (pronounced po-so-LAY, a little like guacamole in Mexico) is a precontact stew of a soup popular all over the area we now call Mexico. It might be made with red chilies or green, pork or chicken or whatever, but it must have at its core nixtamalized corn, known as hominy. In Petite León’s red chicken pozole, the hominy lurks in the depths, ready to reveal a distinct and appealing mineral chew. And we haven’t even made it to the chicken yet! Rich because the leg quarter is confited in chicken fat, smoky because it’s lightly smoked, flavorful as duck, tender as a chicken any French chef would recognize, it’s here verily punching out for attention from its crimson bath.
Take your pozole, pile on the add-ins—the chiffonade of green cabbage, the translucently thin fresh onion and radish, the lush avocado and bright cilantro, a squeeze of lime—and you have created a galaxy of wonder in a single bowl. So rich from the chicken and stock, so earthy from the charred chilies and hominy, so bright from the lime and fresh additions— is there more you can get into a single bowl? I’d be surprised.
Unfair! Why unfair?
Only because of this: This pozole is the masterpiece of a man who used to be on top and who’s now, through life’s unfair chutes, starting over. Chef Jorge Guzmán can be seen at night through the smoky glass windows scraping grease from the walls by hand, operating two concepts from one old stove, with little in his corner other than Instagram accounts, know-how, and a partnership with chefs likewise willing to start at the bottom. Again.
Chicken, coal-roasted and charred
Chicken, coal-roasted and charred, making every bite primal.
Born in Mexico City to a dad from Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán, and a mom from Erie, Pennsylvania, Guzmán had a wonderful early childhood, running around the hotels his dad managed and his extended family’s various Gulf Coast beach houses. Arm in arm with cousins, eating tacos made by the families’ cooks, he was carefree. Tragically, however, his dad’s alcoholism got the better of the family, and Guzmán found himself without a father in St. Louis with his brother and mom, who brought her boys up to be hard because life was hard.
“She raised us really brutal, to be tough men—no emotion, work harder,” remembers Guzmán. “She was in pain. I understand that. But it was bad. Not having a father was really hard.” In classic American tradition, his football coach stood in for the role. “I don’t think I’d have made it without the coaches that took an interest in me.” Guzmán, who’s got the height and strength of a linebacker, became a high school football standout and went to Drake on a football scholarship, line cooking for spending money. He loved it.
After college he went to The Culinary Institute of America because he knew he needed to take the next step into the food world. “I loved it. They show you one cut, you do it, you get graded, next up.” He ended up in Minneapolis for love and took a job at Redstone, the big woodfired grill restaurants, where he started mastering diverse styles of cooking. He learned Tex-Mex at Tejas and Spanish cooking running Solera. Farm-to-table at Corner Table and French-influenced food at The Inn. In 2014, he found success! Head chef of the biggest, buzziest restaurant of the year, the Surly Beer Hall, he was feeding a thousand people a day, gloriously. I particularly remember a Veracruz-inspired bone marrow with grilled bread and a burger that was the talk of the town.
Things kept getting better! In 2015, Guzmán opened Surly’s Brewer’s Table, with the aim of creating the country’s best beer-pairing restaurant. It took a year, but when he started coaxing food memories from his Mexican childhood and combining them with his artistic vision, technical know-how, and internal restaurant systems control, he got there. In 2016, I wrote in the pages of this magazine: “If there’s a better beer-tasting menu to be had in the United States, I’d be very much surprised.” I will never forget the taste of one tiny masterpiece of a vegetarian tamale with guajillo chili–marinated mushrooms and a squash mole, all subtle earth and smoky fire. The world took notice: Brewer’s Table was named one of the 10 best new restaurants by Food & Wine Magazine in 2016, and Guzmán was named a finalist in 2017 for a James Beard Award as Best Chef: Midwest.
At which point the whole starry success story collapsed.
Abruptly, and, from this critic’s perspective, inexplicably, Surly’s owner shuttered Brewer’s Table just as it was achieving what it set out to do. Guzmán slid down a chute to the absolute bottom. No restaurant, despite endless meetings and business plans and site tours. He’d been swindled once putting a restaurant together, so he needed to be careful. Nevertheless, a year ticked by. He took a job in La Crosse, Wisconsin, given the mission to turn a distillery into a destination restaurant, but that enterprise quickly folded. He came back to the Twin Cities to do pop-ups around his charcoal-grilled chicken restaurant idea, Pollo Pollo al Carbon. He couldn’t find a permanent home for it. COVID made the pop-ups nearly impossible.
“Anxiety, depression, anger, feelings of hopelessness and failure were my normal. It almost broke me,” Guzmán says now, shuddering at the memory.
Guzmán has arresting pale blue eyes, like he’s just seen something startling, and the shoulders and physical strength of the middle linebacker he used to be. When he talks about restaurant life in Minneapolis nearly knocking him out, it has that particular force that comes with hearing such a thing from someone who looks too strong to be stopped. While he was down, however, Guzmán cast his mind back to one particular charity event. There, he’d gotten to talking to chef Ben Rients, a Lyn 65 founder, who felt similarly. “We were commiserating—we’ve both been so fucked by the industry, we were both so tired of getting hammered on. We said, ‘Well why don’t we do something together?’”
Here was the plan that began to take shape: Guzmán and Rients joined forces with another chef, Dan Manosack, along with bartender/general manager and Lyn 65 veteran Travis Serbus, and the four banded together to found Duck Soup Hospitality. Yes, it’s named after the Marx Brothers movie about absurd life and efforts to be heroic within it. Their plan is to serially open the dream restaurant(s) each of them wants to own.
Chutes, now ladders?
From everything I tasted, I say, yes, ladders! They are running Pollo Pollo al Carbon out of the same kitchen as Petite León as a ghost kitchen concept, selling one thing: a $55 whole chicken cooked on a charcoal fire, along with all the fixings to make a meal, like artisanal corn tortillas from local Nixta, roasted tomatillo salsa, beans, rice, and more. It is a delicious chicken, coal-roasted and charred, then charcoal-fired till it blisters and crackles, making every bite primal and satisfying.
Petite León’s onion-laden
Petite León’s onion-laden burger is a win.
From the Petite León menu, I tried a fine-restaurant version of elote, the sweet corn cut from the cob, tossed with a Tajin-spiced ranch, herbs, and lettuces. And an astonishing roast beet salad given crunch by the addition of a sort of chopped nut crumb topping made from macadamia nuts, with a sauce derived from the Sephardic kitchen. The beets could have been on the menu at Brewer’s Table, but here they are in a takeout box. The burger, a double Peterson Craftsman Meats smash burger with loads of caramelized onions, American cheese, and tangy pickles is an easy contender in the endless best-burger battles around here. Meaty, sloppy, tangy—I ate mine in my car while the sun set over Lake Harriet, and it made me feel like the best burgers do: like you sipped a bit from the essence of steak but also from the essence of moving fast and having fun.
Are these to-go options indicative of whatever Petite León will be after there are widely adopted vaccines and we’re all drinking cocktails like it’s 2019? Maybe? Petite León will, one day, be a sit-down restaurant with pozole in bowls, not takeout containers. There will be cocktails. There will be a larger menu, mainly with a Mexican influence. “I realized what Dominique Crenn says is true for me—it’s by cooking that I can access my Mexico memories. I have to do this.”
In desperate times such as these we are still enduring, it’s natural to look for signs of hope, signs of progress, signs of fairness. Is it too much to say that Guzmán’s new ladder is anchored in a more stable place than any of his prior ladders, and that the best is yet to come? Perhaps. But it’s a hopeful thing to remember at least that the game is not called “All Chutes” or “All Ladders”—and that the game is long.
Petite León, 3800 Nicollet Ave., Mpls., petiteleonmpls.com
This article originally appeared in the January 2021 issue.
