Tortillas are so foundational to Mexican cuisine that they’re easy to take for granted: a vessel for the main event. It’s not until you have a good one—like, a really good one—that you understand how they can change the entire composition of a dish.
Jorge Aguilar is making those types of tortillas by hand every night at Border Town on the north side of Greenpoint, topping them with slow-simmered guisados, like carne deshebrada or frijoles y queso, before doling them out to eager customers.
During the pandemic, Aguilar built a name for himself, doughy disk by doughy disk, as something of a flour tortilla savant, selling his pillowy, chewy, so-thin-they’re-translucent fare at bars, cafés, and—weather permitting—even sidewalks around Brooklyn.
“It was more of me wanting to learn how to make tortillas, because we were bored,” Aguilar admits of Border Town’s humble origins. He and Amanda Rosa, his partner in both business and life, are longtime restaurant workers—he in the kitchen, she working in management and logistics; they met at Del Frisco’s Grille in Santa Monica before they moved around LA working at various restaurants (Aguilar’s resume includes the trendy Petit Trois and Connie and Ted’s).
In August 2019, the couple moved to New York as part of a team for a new Cobble Hill restaurant, only to find those plans scrapped due to COVID lockdowns. Aguilar spent those early pandemic days trying to recreate the tortillas of his family roots in the Mexican state of Sonora (Aguilar grew up in Mexicali and later Calexico, along
the border).
He experimented, using memories from his youth (plus some online tutorials), then tapped his years of restaurant experience to adjust the recipe. A key, he said, was sourcing the right flour, which he did from his family, who created an ad hoc pipeline from Mexico into the U.S. The difference, they say, is that Mexican wheat flour is less processed, akin to its European counterpart. (While they don’t advertise them as such, they’ve said gluten-free friends have eaten them and felt fine.) Additionally, Aguilar makes them by hand, instead of using a press, giving them small inconsistencies that add greatly to their artisanal charm.
“The main thing, to me, was actually getting the tortilla to puff while it’s on the skillet,” he said. “They were just flat, or hard. But then one day I did it—I was, like, Shit, I’m there.”
Aguilar, bearded and tattooed (including forearm ink of the Morton’s Salt girl), started testing to see if the tortillas would pass muster with fellow North Mexicans, bringing them in a red cooler to Home Depots in Brooklyn and Queens or local car washes.
“I was just trying to see if I could get people to like these, to get some approval,” he said. Flour tortillas are, if not divisive, less common than corn tortillas, less understood. “People from the south of Mexico and South America would say, ‘These are not tacos. These are burritos.’”
Aguilar and Rosa first sold the tortillas on Instagram and delivered them personally, later graduating to a string of pop-ups. The first was at Bushwick’s Pink Metal, a burlesque watering hole that started selling food to skirt around COVID shutdown rules. “Jorge’s slinging tacos in between a lady on a table with her leg in the air,” Rosa recalled with a chuckle. “It did not make sense. But people were coming to Pink Metal for his tacos.”
They became intrepid, if scrappy, taco-preneurs and itinerant tortilla dealers, setting up residencies at Ore Bar and the café and wine bar Commune. They knew they were onto something when their homemade breakfast burritos—offered in batches of 120 through Google Sheets—started selling out in less than two minutes. Or the day when Aguilar couldn’t keep up with demand, and a regular tied his dog to a nearby pole and stepped in to help.
A turning point, they say, was when the food content creator Rob Martinez came by and filmed a video. Things shifted overnight. “I turned around, and there were already 20 people in line,” Aguilar said of arriving the next day at 8am. “He called me 30 minutes in and said, ‘You need to get over here,’” says Rosa, invoking the popular restaurant worker phrase for getting out of a busy shift: “The only way out is through.”
One customer was Ben Turley, formerly of the popular Brooklyn butcher shop, the Meat Hook. His wife, a San Diego native, turned him on to the tortillas, and he found himself an instant convert. I was just, like, “Oh wow, I didn’t know a tortilla could do that,” he says. Turley first courted Aguilar as a customer, but then asked to hang out. It became apparent that Aguilar was ready for something more permanent; he was tiring of the grueling pop-up life. “I said, ‘Well, your product’s good enough. What the fuck are we doing sitting here having coffee? Let’s go walk around and see what’s available.’”
And so Aguilar, Rosa, and Turley—who live blocks from each other—met to talk about options, and things started to fall into place. The location on Nassau Ave was great, but it was too big. When the landlord reached out to say he was open to subdividing it, they were in.
Border Town seats around 55 and features a cocktail bar overseen by Patrick Bradley, which features zingy, bright libations heavy on mezcal and tequila. Designed by local firm Andre Architecture, the yellow walls, pink tiles, and desert plants hint at tropicality.
For now, they are only serving dinner on a first-come, first-served basis. However, they plan to get back to their roots with a takeaway daytime. A pesky hold-up with the city has left them without a proper gas line, but the years of pop-ups have made them adept at working with limited resources. They’d also like to expand their offerings to include more seafood, a standard in northern Mexican cooking.
As they join a growing movement for flour tortillas, like Fidel Caballero’s Vato in Park Slope and Alan Delgado’s Los Burrito Juarez in Fort Greene, one thing was essential to Aguilar: the open kitchen.
“Having the tortillas upfront—visible, live—is important,” he says. “In Mexico, you’d have someone building tacos in front of you on the street.” The current setup mirrors that, with a glass front station at center. “Customers walk up and watch. Kids press their faces against it. I love that interaction—people asking questions, talking.” And people are, indeed, talking.
BORDER TOWN
Greenpoint | @bordertownbk
