Indigenous Eats
At first, the concept of “Texas Mexican food” espoused by Houston-based chef and food writer Adán Medrano is a little hard to wrap your head around. Wait a minute, you might wonder, don’t we already have a name for that? Is this just splitting hairs over the semantics of Tex-Mex versus Texas Mexican? But the deeper Medrano dives, the more he reveals a truth that has been hiding in plain sight. Though there is some overlap, Texas Mexican is not Tex-Mex, nor is it what is sometimes referred to as “Mex-Mex” or “interior Mexican” food.
Born into a migrant farming family in San Antonio, Medrano worked as a film producer and as a chef at restaurants in Koksijde, Belgium, and Houston before focusing his work on the native food
