Las Ramblas Hospitality Group is launching a new venture at Market Square next door to its original business, Las Ramblas Lounge, and lured Chef Eugenio Uribe away from El Divino in McAllen to head it up.
The name of the new place is Boqueron, Spanish for white anchovy. The concept is upscale tapas and wine, “comfort food” as Uribe described it in a recent interview.
“It’s very straightforward food,” he said. “There’s no gimmicks. I’m trying to focus on quality and very simple preparations. Because that’s what a tapas place is. There’s no showmanship. There’s not foams or gels or things like that. There’s no place for it.”
Uribe has plenty of experience with showmanship, however, graduating from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin about 12 years ago before interning at a private golf club in Florida. He dived into cookbooks to find out what was happening in the cutting-edge kitchens of Europe, New York and Chicago, and eventually made his way back the Rio Grande Valley, where he went to work for Peppers at Uptown in McAllen.
“By that time I already knew some people in the industry in McAllen,” Uribe said. “A friend of mine asked me to join a restaurant he was working on, and that was El Divino. He was the bar manager there and they were moving from downtown to the uptown side.”
He was head chef there for 11 years.
“We did a lot of cool stuff,” Uribe said.
As for where his culinary heart lies, he said “everybody goes through phases.”
“You get interested in something and then you get bored so you want to move onto the next,” Uribe said. “You grow. At the beginning you’re young and you want to prove to everybody what you can do. You’re trying to flex your muscles. Now I’m in that phase of I know what I can do and I want to expose people to cool things. I want people to get out of their comfort zone and try new stuff.”
Putting food in front of a customer who’s never seen or tasted anything like it before is a calculated risk, Uribe said, though he enjoys seeing the looks on customers’ faces when encountering such a dish, even if they don’t like it. At any rate, he exposed many people to new things through El Divino and likes to think he made a difference culinarily, Uribe said.
While Boqueron’s menu is more down to earth, it’s all about sourcing the best ingredients possible — New Hampshire oysters, for instance, or hams from Spain or heirloom beans from Napa Valley’s Rancho Gordo, he said.
Even if the food is relatively simple, Uribe’s goal remains expand palates and getting customers to “try new things and don’t be afraid of them.” It’s essentially the same approach Boqueron’s wine expert Vanessa Treviño Boyd, who joined Ramblas as beverage director and resident sommelier last year, takes with customers when introducing them to new wines. A big part of it is dialing down the snob factor so no one feels intimidated.
“That’s something that I really like about Vanessa,” Uribe said. “She has the same way of doing things in the sense of let’s have them try new stuff. There’s other things than just California (cabernet) that is delicious and it’s at a good price point. … We’re trying to have a very relaxed environment where people are having fun and drinking and eating. Every restaurant, that’s how it should be.”
That’s not all. Ramblas owners Michael and Fabian Limas plan to open an upscale eatery of some type, with Uribe at the helm, somewhere downtown in the not-too-distant future. At this point, it’s all a big secret, including what kind of food will be served, though Boqueron serves as an opportunity for the Ramblas team to get its feet wet before going big, Uribe said.
“We’re still deciding which concept, but we already have a location,” he said. “We’re pretty pleased with the response that we’re getting so far (with Boqueron). The actual restaurant is going to come soon. That’s where I’m going to expose people to a lot of cool stuff as well.”
