Vecino, for bringing a taste of Mexico City to Detroit, is 2025 Restaurant of the Year - Detroit Free Press
Vecino, for bringing a taste of Mexico City to Detroit, is 2025 Restaurant of the Year Detroit Free Press
For its commitment to delivering a taste of Mexico City to Detroit, Vecino is our 2025 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year.
More than anywhere in the city, southwest Detroit has its own culinary identity — one that has largely been shaped by Mexican culture, namely by way of an immigrant population hailing from Jalisco along Mexico’s western coast.
Southwest’s working class lines up in front of small taco trucks parked on dirt lots for bites of street tacos after work, turning Detroit sidewalks into visions of Jalisco’s street food culture.
At restaurants in what was dubbed Mexicantown more than 50 years ago, the flavors are robust. Beef is marinated in piquant spices before being charred on a grill. Shredded goat is tenderized in a heady blend of chiles. Whole fish are deep fried head first, and tomatoes stain everything from crimson stews to yellow rice.
So how does a new Mexican restaurant add value to Detroit’s dining scene where the demand for Mexican food has already been fulfilled by the classics?
It delivers something entirely new.
Foundations of a dream
Vecino, Detroit’s latest Mexican restaurant, has distinguished itself from the stalwart institutions that have staked their claim for generations, first, by positioning itself in Midtown, 3 miles outside of southwest Detroit, and by drawing inspiration from Mexico City, Mexico’s south-central capital nearly 350 miles outside of Jalisco. Whereas the majority of Detroit’s Mexican restaurants are casual, Vecino is uniquely upscale, modeled after the contemporary fine dining restaurants that have typified Mexico City’s food scene in recent years.
Once a Spanish colonial center, modern Mexico City’s culinary fingerprint is reflective of its history. Flavors from both its European and indigenous pasts linger in corn tortillas and hand-held street foods.
A Mexico City native who spent her formative years in southwest Detroit and raised in a family of restaurateurs behind some of the neighborhood’s most adored Mexican eateries, Adriana Jimenez was poised to bring a new model to the city.
Jimenez’s mother, Eva Lopez, sought work in restaurants when she and her family arrived in Detroit from Mexico City in the mid-1990s. Lopez's uncle, then owner of Arandas restaurant, put her to work as a cook and soon, it became a family operation. Her teenage children ran the cash register while a young Jimenez at age 8 would help her mom peel shrimp.
When she was 13, Jimenez’s parents picked up and relocated to Waterford. Seeing an untapped market for a restaurant to serve the large population of Mexican immigrants in neighboring Pontiac, the Jimenez family opened another Arandas restaurant on Dixie Highway in Waterford, selling giant shrimp cocktails in a marinade of ketchup, orange soda, cilantro and cucumber; and tacos al pastor from her grandfather's recipe. They operated the business for two years before opening a second restaurant called Tapatio in Highland Township.
Her restaurant experience never went beyond those days in the Arandas and Tapatio kitchens elbows deep in raw shrimp, but Jimenez romanticized the hospitality industry. From her career in sales for an automation engineering company and later the law firm she and her husband Lukasz Wietrzynski operated, she daydreamed about working in restaurants again.
“I like the thrill of hospitality and I'm so passionate about food,” she said from a two-top in the dining room at Vecino, a beam of sunlight cascading across her olive skin. “I'm also so passionate about showcasing Mexico in unique ways that maybe other people haven't seen.”
Refreshing mom-and-pop authenticity
Jimenez is objectively beautiful. She’s petite, just shy of 5 feet tall, fit and not a strand of her long, glossy, dark hair is ever out of place. When she stops to greet a guest at the restaurant, you almost miss that she’s deftly eased into speaking Spanish. Her tone is a gentle singsong, warm in the way you might speak to a child.
Jimenez and her family immigrated to the United States when she was just 5 years old. Growing up, her memories of Mexico City were fleeting, but she’d always held a fondness for her hometown. From American soil, she was proud of her Mexican blood and embraced her heritage. She grew up speaking Spanish fluently, listened to Latin music and ate traditional foods. When she returned to Mexico City for the first time in over 20 years in 2018, Jimenez was enchanted.
“It was a dream for me. I always imagined Mexico through my parents’ stories and pictures, but finally going there was amazing,” she said.
She was pleasantly surprised by the diversity in Mexico City and credits the multitude of cultures that have passed through the city for contributing to its rich food scene. Her first real venture into the restaurant industry would bring a taste of Mexico City's multitudes to Detroit.
In 2022, she and Wietrzynski transferred ownership of their law firm, and used the funds to lease the Midtown space that would become Vecino. Then they moved to Mexico City, where they spent a year working on research and development for the restaurant.
Vecino shines a spotlight on Mexico City staples — sopes, enchiladas and lamb barbacoa — and its flavors — smoke with bursts of juicy fruits like pineapple, passionfruit and mango. Its mom-and-pop approach to upscale dining has quickly become a refreshing addition to Detroit’s restaurant scene, where the latest openings are at the ground level of hotels and backed by large-scale hospitality groups.
In the kitchen, Executive Chef Edgar Torres, an alum of Chicago's Michelin-star-earning hospitality group The Alinea Group, is the performer, with Lopez, Jimenez’s mother, as the choreographer. Signature salsas are Lopez's own recipes, and dishes like the half chicken with a tomatillo chimichurri are homey and extravagant as a lovechild of the two skilled cooks.
Carlos Parisi, a Mexico City-born food entrepreneur, described Vecino as a warm, elevated space for community dining. Parisi, who hosts an annual tour of Mexico City’s restaurant scene, said, "it's necessary for more people to recognize the intricacies and differences in Mexican dining outside of just taco trucks and Tex-Mex standards."
Vecino does just that.
Anxious asylum
Kitchens in restaurants across the Detroit area are powered by immigrants like Jimenez and her family. In 2023, 7.2% of the hospitality industry in metro Detroit employed foreign-born workers who crossed borders seeking refuge and opportunity in the U.S. according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Of her own journey to this country, Jimenez’s memory is hazy. All she recalls is the sweltering heat of the truck she, her parents and her two older siblings packed into for the trek from Mexico City to Austin, Texas. The family’s stint in the South was brief. Soon, they boarded a Greyhound bus that drove from Austin to Detroit, shoveling Oreos into their mouths as their only food source during the journey.
“To this day, my mother won't allow us to eat Oreos," she said, alluding to the trauma associated with the confection. Jimenez said the family of five reached the Greyhound station on Fort Street on a hot day in early August, and walked to her uncle’s tire shop in southwest Detroit from there.
Now an legal permanent resident, Jimenez knows too well the experience of the undocumented immigrant. In 2012, when she was 20 years old, she was able to benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), created by executive action under the Obama administration to protect undocumented children. But the concern for her undocumented family, her parents who didn’t have the same protections, loomed.
“That’s the worst thing you can live with — the fear that someone’s going to take your freedom,” she said.
It’s why she is fiercely protective of Vecino’s immigrant staffers.
In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Administration attempted to cease the DACA program, putting thousands of recipients in jeopardy of deportation.
The program was saved by the courts, but today, the Administration’s continued hardline stance on immigration and its pursuit of mass deportation threaten the protections in place even for immigrants with legal resident status.
Among them are many metro Detroit line cooks and dishwashers, grillers and maintenance staff. With changing policies threatening the protections in place that allow them to live and work in this country, these employees could be at risk.
There are the traditional concerns — staffing challenges, tight margins and exorbitant food costs — but the trials of operating a restaurant are compounded for Jimenez. She feels an added pressure to support her employees from a legal, financial and emotional standpoint should they be detained.
“Some of these employees have been here from the beginning,” she said, noting that she's grown to view her staff as family. “Thinking of them being detained — I have that duty to help them, and that requires money.”
There’s only so much she can do, though. In my review of Vecino last year, I wrote about the vigilant tortillera who manned the masa station, the cornerstone of Vecino’s mission to bring nixtamalized tortillas to the city. Then, she was the mysterious woman standing off kilter in the kitchen facing the dining room with the meditative job of pressing hundreds of tortillas, one after another. She was unable to remain legally in the U.S. And just two months after Vecino’s grand opening, the tortillera was deported.
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Defying expectations
The menu at Vecino is a love letter to Mexican ingredients. Mild Oaxaca cheese tops duck-filled enchiladas. A rainbow of corn varieties from various regions in Mexico give tortillas their flavor and color. Chocolate ice cream, paired with a crispy, sugar-dusted churro ring, is made rich with chocolate also sourced from Oaxaca. That same chocolate deepens the flavor of a burly mole.
Spicy chiles from throughout Mexico prickle the tongue in a salsa trio and wines from Guanajuato and Queretaro place an emphasis on the bounty of central Mexico.
“Eighty percent of what comes out of here is sourced from Mexico,” Jimenez said, another characteristic of the restaurant at risk under the new Administration. The trade war between the U.S. and Mexico has already impacted the cost of many of the goods that make Vecino’s food and beverage program sing. “My tequila is going to go up 20% and every time I compare an invoice to three months ago, it's 10% more and I don’t think it’s going to stop, unfortunately,” she said. “Especially now.”
But Jimenez has chosen to divert her attention away from the impending threats to Vecino’s livelihood. She keeps a permanent smile on her face, flashing her perfectly straight, white teeth as though her concerns are no concern at all.
“Oh, I’m super nervous,” she said, reassuringly. “I’ll just have to deal with it when I have to deal with it. Right now, I'm just going to embrace that it hasn't happened yet — but it's going to happen.”
Rather than scaling back on the restaurant’s Mexican imports, Jimenez leans in, curating artesanías or crafts to line the red brick walls. She credits the Facebook group, Mexicanas en Michigan as her secret weapon for breathing authentic Mexican life into the space.
Jimenez takes a special interest in Vecino’s bar program, where cocktails are allusions to her favorite pastimes in Mexico City. Her memories sucking down the sweet-spicy juice at the bottom of a bag of sliced ripe mango dusted in chile powder is reimagined as the Mango con Chile, a milk punch of chile-infused tequila, mezcal, mango, lime and agave. Soon, she’ll push the boundaries with a cocktail featuring grasshopper dust pressed into the side of the glass.
It's these subtle interpretations of Mexican culture and the skillful use of traditional ingredients that make Vecino so endearing. A coffee-based cocktail might resemble the trendy espresso martini, but the carajillo is a distinct beverage of Mexico City. A plate of beets is bedazzled in chicatanas — flying ants for a salty crunch.
Vecino exists to defy the expectation that Mexican food is a cheap eat. Its housemade masa program is a celebration of Mexico’s ancestral corn varieties. The investment in a dedicated tortillera showcases a deference to tortilla-making as an artform in the same way a restaurant boasts its breadmaking or from-scratch pastas. Crafting totopos, tlayuda shells and tortilla discs, in some instances, is a days-long process.
With a beloved collection of taquerias and food trucks just down the road, Jimenez recognizes that the spend at Vecino can be difficult to reconcile for some.
“That really motivated me to be very creative and intentional so that people didn’t feel like they're just coming into a place where you’re paying more for Mexican food with dim lighting and fun music,” she said. So she zeroed in on nixtamalization and adding elements like tlayudas and chicatanas, which are hard to come by outside of a family home in Detroit. “It was really about setting ourselves apart and creating a unique experience.”
A large part of the experience at Vecino is the warmth of the staff who walk guests through dinner like an attentive tour guide. “I always tell my servers and my staff, ‘We’re performers,’ ” she said. “People are here to see us — the music, the lighting, the art, the drinks. We’re putting on a show.”
In return, she hopes the restaurant will reward her staff for their stellar performance. She imagines a day when simply listing Vecino on a resume can bump a worker’s job application to the top of the pile.
As a semifinalist for the 2025 James Beard Foundation Awards, up for Best New Restaurant, Vecino is already on its way to becoming a national treasure in hospitality. Taking home the prize in June, Jimenez said, would be a restaurateur's definition of the American Dream.
Her only hope, however, is that the American people would love Mexican immigrants as much as they love Mexican food.
Vecino address
4100 3rd Ave., Detroit. 313-500-1615; vecinodetroit.com
Save the Date: On Tuesday, Aug. 19, Vecino, the Detroit Free Press and Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers will host a Top 10 Takeover dinner. Stay tuned for ticket information at Freep.com.
For a chance to win five $100 gift cards to dine at restaurants on the 2025 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list, visit chevydetroit.com/community/giveaways/roy25.
