The Secrets of Success

…or what I learned from the Man of La Manchamanteles

If you can make one Elvis, surely you can make a thousand Elvi.

But, you can’t. No one has.

Which is to say it’s truly unclear why some people become eternally famous and others languish in obscurity, or at least don’t find the same level of success, for doing the same thing.

People will always have theories and say they know, but the reality is most people are justifying the outcome, but they don’t really know the reason (if a definitive one even exists).

One might argue that Elvis’s success came from him being a truly singular voice.

But that’s not true. Otis Blackwell and Big Mama Thornton performed their songs in almost exactly the same ways before Elvis covered them.

You might say, as some would say of Eminem, it’s because Elvis was white.

But, so were Pat Boone and Bill Monroe. Successful, sure, but not Elvis successful.

You might say Elvis was a singular unparalleled dynamic performer.  Me, and Prince, would counter with Little Richard.

If there’s one argument that could hold, maybe it’s that Elvis is one of, and still is, at least until Lenny Kravitz came our way, the most beautiful things ever born on this earth.

I might argue that the common thing about most of these observations, that probably defined Elvis’s success, is the King’s unbridled willingness to borrow from a dynamic group of sources at will and make them his own. 

Taylor Swift does the same. Chameleonic, her career trajectory is defined by many things, but a prime driver is her hyper-selective imitation of Peaches, Lana Del Rey, Tim McGraw, Hillary Duff, Carly Rae Jepson, Ryan Adams, Emile Sande, Samuel Beam, Cry-Baby-era Traci Lords, and Beyonce.

Even recognizing this, how could an A&R rep predict a budding talent’s capacity for future well-curated appropriation? Even when you think you know, Swift’s and Elvis’s outsized success isn’t as simple to understand as one might believe.

Luck, tenacity, timing, etc. all play a role too. Paul McCartney failed his O-Level (British standardized testing) Latin exam which forced him to study the subject with a younger group of boys which included George Harrison. The Beatles don’t happen if Paul had been walking around muttering cogito ergo sum.

Or maybe more germane, if Oscar Davis doesn’t drop in at the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis on February 6, 1955, he doesn’t make a call to Tom Parker, aka “The Colonel” to tell him about this kid named Presley. Without Colonel Parker, an incredible hype-man, maybe Elvis only ends up a high-rent Ricky Nelson.

If there’s a Chicago equivalent of Elvis for chefs, it’s probably Rick Bayless. We all know Bayless, but for 12 years, eventually earning a spot as the managing chef of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, the guy by Rick’s side, was Geno Bahena from Tepatulco, Mexico.

In the early 2000s Bahena left to forge out on his own. Coincidentally when I first moved to Chicago in 2002, my friend Aamir and I would trade emails about going to Bahena’s hot spots Ixcapuzalco and Chilpancingo. I was so obsessed with his food, I taught myself to make mole and cook with fresh masa just so I could replicate Bahena’s sope trio at home. If you came to a dinner at my house between 2005 and 2010, you probably had sopes.

This began a run whereby Bahena would open and close a new restaurant every few years before shuttering in a relatively short time. I went to almost every spot, including Mis Moles, his last place which ultimately fell prey to the pandemic. Bahena himself contracted long-haul Covid which limited his work for a few years.  No matter how many spots opened, I left almost every single one of my meals happy and satisfied but also mystified at their lack of staying power. 

Bahena felt like a Don Quixote-chef-figure tilting at success only to find himself churned and spit out by the windmill of the failing restaurant life-cycle.

A person like this, pursuing their ideals no matter the challenge should be supported, but admittedly, even I got exasperated. When Bahena opened Manchamanteles last year in October, I decided to see if it would last before I stepped inside.

Honestly, I may have hesitated to enter that space for other reasons. If you’ve lived in Chicago for more than ten years, you’ll recognize that Bahena’s new restaurant is located in the former Lazo’s Tacos space. For anyone whoever closed out the 4 a.m. liquor-licensed Marie’s Riptide Lounge (R.I.P.) nearby knows that once you ambled out on to the blackened streets, soaked and swaying like the Hancock in the distance, there was, only a few blocks away, a 24-hour Mexican restaurant calling your name.

Having lived in the sleepy Detroit Suburbs and Cleveland previously, tacos at any time is precisely why I moved to Chicago. This may seem ridiculous. Why would anyone need tacos at 5 a.m.? They don’t.

But, they do.

Doped up for 30 years on Amazon Prime, we now know, the human soul craves “on demand” even with tacos. You might not even get those tacos, but that the option exists somehow staves off an existential crisis.

Ultimately Lazo’s was hallowed ground. I wasn’t sure I wanted to return that space in a different form, like that would somehow negate the past.

But also I’m sober with age now. Restaurants die and if we don’t move on, we die too. So, when my friend Rich Shih, writer of the best book on koji, aka Koji Alchemy came to town craving Oaxacan cuisine, I knew we had to go to see about the man of La Manchamanteles, Geno Bahena.

I’ve been talking to Rich digitally for almost 20 years but we’ve never met in person. Those who grew up on the internet probably have lots of friends like this. Our exchanges are meaningful, life-enriching even, but we never experience each other in the flesh. I don’t know if this undeniable fact of modern life is good or bad? 

I know I was happy to meet Rich for real, and happier he suggested we order the octopus, aka pulpo al mojo de ajo. Glistening in olive oil, sweet flesh bursting with chili and garlic, this was the tenderest octo I’ve had in Chicago since Warlord’s black garlic-glazed beauty. 

Over bites of the excellent pulpo I told Rich that meeting him rekindled a dream I have one day of hosting a party for everyone in my digital life so I can finally see everyone in person.

If that does happen, I’d try to cater the affair with a cauldron of Bahena’s borrego en mole negro, or juicy New Zealand lamb chop pops dripping in glossy black chilhuacle chili-infused gravy capped with sesame sees. Rife with notes of coffee and peanut butter, I could drink a cup of this sauce for dessert.

For nostalgia reasons, we also split the sopes surtidos “Xilonen”, shattery golden masa rafts stuffed to the gills with toppings including plantain spiked with crema, velvety black bean mingling with luscious chorizo, and shreds of chicken in red mole.

They say you can’t go back, but if I closed my eyes and took a bite, I was absolutely transported to my first Bahena meal at Ixcapuzalco in 2003. The only way I could tell anything was different is that because my metabolism is now slower than a terrapin on quaaludes, I knew if I didn’t work out in the morning I would probably gain ten pounds by tomorrow afternoon.

So enamored with the cinnamon and chocolate notes of the red mole, we doubled down on a full entrée portion of grill-smoked chicken breast ruddy with mole Teloloapense.

Mid-bite I fanboyed like I’d actually seen Elvis. But, no, it was Bahena himself traipsing through the Manchamanteles dining room in his trademark vintage French Firefighter-style cap.

I’ve always wondered why Bahena chose that hat over a traditional toque, or as most glossy centerfold-seeking exec chefs choose now, no cap at all. But, in retrospect, it kind of makes him look like either a conductor or a hardcore military general, both apt for how masterful he is at his craft. 

I was like, “Oh dude, Rich, there he is!” The exclamation was as much about being excited that Rich could see the guy I’d been pimping, but also almost a relief that Bahena was committed to this restaurant and it wasn’t just some consulting deal. 

Bahena looked happy. He granted a photo opp to Rich which I’ve dubbed Koji Master Meets Mole Master. Watching Bahena warmly work the room, I was reminded that his first name is actually “Generoso”, as in generous.

Rich and I split a volteado de piña, a tiny round of gooey cake smothered with creamy vanilla ice cream and caramelized pineapple spears for dessert.  Whereas mole is nuanced, has many ingredients, and is labor intensive to make correctly, this was pretty much a pineapple upside down cake riff. But even in its simplicity, each element, the crackling crusted soft-centered pastry and the al dente, but brown-sugar glazed fruit was executed perfectly.

And that’s the thing, this isn’t Michelin-starred Enrique Olvera keeping a “living” 1,000 day-old mole going or making preternaturally perfect tortillas as he does at his Worlds 50 Best spot Pujol in Mexico city. 

No coastal food writer will deign to touch down at O’Hare just for Manchamanteles. It’s not gonna generate views for the ‘gram.  But, in Chicago where we indulge in Latin-inspired extremes, Taco Bell and Tex Mex or endless mom and pop “authentic” taquerias, Manchamanteles is kind of a rarity worth paying attention to. 

Manchamanteles is affordable and elegant. Rife with a vintage-Miami Vice color palate of hot pinks, aqua blues, strands of vibrant papel picado, and a giant rock-encrusted wall, a holdover from Lazo’s, that looks like it was cribbed from the Playboy mansion’s infamous grotto swimming pool, the dining room is festive without being cheesy.

I also noticed something that I hadn’t seen in a Bahena spot since the early 2000s. Though it’s a Thursday night, there’s a lot of people here. And it’s not just food-obsessed people like me and Rich. It’s ladies throwing down over bucket-sized margaritas and dad-bros pre-gaming on their way to smoke cigars at a nearby lounge. There were old folk and young people. 

In other words, something is happening at Manchamanteles. It’s not overrun yet, but you can feel an organic enthusiastic embrace of Bahena’s work. Maybe all Bahena needed to really break through was a restaurant location smack on the edge of Bucktown.

Whatever it is, it’s good. Earlier I suggested that Bahena was a little like Don Quixote.  Many people think Quixote is a tragedy, and honestly it kind of is because the story ends with Quixote eventually renouncing his ideals and then dying.

But, despite that ending, I’ve always read Quixote a little differently. I’ve always thought it remarkable that despite the setbacks, despite the naysayers, that Quixote stuck to his guns and persisted for so long in trying to lead the life of his mind, the ideals in which he believed, was kind of extraordinary.

Yeah, he died, but we all do.  Yeah, he renounced his faith at the very end, but our darkest days should not define us. What really speaks about who we are is what has been most persistent in our character. For Quixote and Bahena that’s the constancy of getting back up again to do what you believe is your calling even if the world hasn’t sent all the right signs. It might not work out, but also, and this is what I hope I’m seeing at Manchamanteles, it just might.

Manchamanteles is located at 2009 N. Western Ave. in Chicago