I don’t often frequent a particular taqueria or restaurant, as my work as taco editor keeps me on the move. But for the last fifteen years, there has been one place I’ve returned whenever my schedule would allow. Every time I was in Austin and wanted a quick, comfortable dinner, I visited El Naranjo, the contemporary Mexican restaurant owned by Iliana de la Vega, who also serves as executive chef, and her husband, Ernesto Torrealba. The fourteen-year-old restaurant has announced it is closing on July 18, and heartbreak doesn’t begin to describe my feelings over the news. I will lose a beloved space where I felt at home, where de la Vega was as likely to be seen sweeping or busing tables as working the kitchen line. Austinites will lose the restaurant that taught them about Mexican food and inspired other popular local establishments, including Nixta, Suerte, and Comedor.
El Naranjo has been plagued with financial struggles for years, with 2025 being the restaurant’s worst year. De la Vega considered closing the restaurant then, but in late summer, business picked up, and she signed a short-term renewal. Then, talks of closing El Naranjo restarted a couple of months ago. De la Vega describes the questions she would discuss with her team: “ ‘What if we do this? What if we do that? What are all the “ifs” that you can possibly imagine?’ And finally, it’s like, we just can’t do it anymore.” Sales of alcohol had plummeted, and there were fewer and fewer customers. Its location in a mixed-use building on South Lamar Boulevard made things more challenging. “People know us as the restaurant next to the dentist office,” de la Vega says. This befuddles me.
When El Naranjo opened in a permanent building in 2012, it was likely the first restaurant in Austin to nixtamalize corn in-house. The ancient Mesoamerican technique is currently in vogue, but de la Vega was so pioneering that she didn’t even advertise her use of it. Nixtamalization was relatively unknown then among the general dining public, but now the mere mention of it gets a restaurant national attention. After de la Vega won the 2022 James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Texas, El Naranjo should not have been suffering. It should have been flourishing. It should still be flourishing.
Flautas. Photograph by José R. Ralat 
Chilaquiles. Photograph by José R. Ralat
I met de la Vega and Torrealba in 2010, when El Naranjo was a food truck. They were operating the mobile rig, with a pale, green wrap showcasing oranges, from the driveway of a small house that would eventually be El Naranjo’s first permanent location on Rainey Street. It was at one of its covered picnic tables that my two-year-old son had his first flautas and mole. It’s also where I had my first true mole negro made with the elusive chile chilhuacle negro, a pepper that had to be imported from Mexico. The experience was full of laughter from the thrill of the food and watching my son contort his face at the new flavors.
De la Vega told me of her plans for the restaurant, including making corn tortillas from in-house nixtamalized heirloom corn, but tacos weren’t the priority. Rather, the menu would feature masa preparations, such as tetelas, triangular-shaped snacks filled with beans topped with queso fresco, and sopes, fried masa discs filled with meat and beans. They both would be novel to many Austinites more accustomed to the city’s vibrant Tex-Mex scene.
As I previously mentioned, the restaurant didn’t advertise its nixtamal. De la Vega thought it was likely too foreign for diners, the Nahuatl-based word too difficult to pronounce. Now, nixtamalized-corn masa programs are like flames for foodie moths.
Such an approach speaks to de la Vega’s humility and focus on food rather than trends. That mindset is what arguably got her the James Beard Award, though de la Vega was uncomfortable with the attention. “I have mixed feelings sometimes,” she told me over coffee last year. “Before, I didn’t have the pressure of it, not that I mind having it.” But de la Vega wasn’t in it for the awards anyway. “We want real food. We’re informal. We’re not doing all those bending things,” she says, referring to high-end modernist Mexican restaurants chasing Michelin stars. Many people don’t know that de la Vega, Torrealba, and El Naranjo had been lauded long before their arrival in Texas.
El Naranjo’s first iteration opened in 1997 in a colonial home in Oaxaca in the center of which grew an orange tree, the restaurant’s namesake. In 2003, Bon Appétit called El Naranjo “the soul of Mexico.” In 2006, amid economic and social upheaval in Mexico, de la Vega and her family left their home and moved to Austin. In 2007, she found work at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America’s San Antonio campus, where she established its Latin American foods program. One of her first acts at the school was to acquire tanks to nixtamalize corn and a molino to grind that corn into masa. She went on to work as a consultant for restaurants and university food-hall programs before building the Austin version of El Naranjo.
In 2019, in the wake of Rainey Street’s high-rise development and transformation into a nightlife hub, El Naranjo moved to South Austin in the hopes of increasing margins and attracting a restaurant-friendly crowd. It worked, for a while. There was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent economic troubles. De la Vega promoted her daughter Ana Torrealba to chef de cuisine and included monthly specials focusing on foods from Mexican states such as Puebla and Chihuahua. But it hasn’t been sufficient, a reality born out painfully in my conversations with the family. “We’ve cried a lot,” de la Vega told me during a recent phone conversation. The loss of El Naranjo is the loss of part of her identity. Ana echoes that response. “It’s where I’ve grown up. It’s part of who I am,” she says, pausing to stave off tears. “We gave El Naranjo everything,” adds her father, Ernesto. “It gave us the opportunity to not only share Iliana’s cooking but to also make new friends. Now we’re losing a member of the family with the end of this cycle.”
Thankfully, the family has another business to focus on: culinary tours to Mexico overseen by de la Vega’s other daughter, Isabel Torrealba, under the name Culinary Traditions. The tours, which include cooking classes, restaurant meals, and historic sites, will continue, as will de la Vega’s consulting at several universities. I will obviously continue to seek her extensive knowledge of Mexican food and its history, something I’ve done before and during my time at Texas Monthly, especially for my Tex-Mexplainer column.
To be frank, of all the Mexican restaurants I’ve mourned over the years, this one hurts the most. Now go make reservations. I’ve already made mine.
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