When Socorro Herrera saw the former shoeshine stand in the parking lot of a Los Feliz liquor store in 1976, she said she thought to herself, “This is enough for me.”
And so it was. For 48 years, Herrera ran Yuca's Hut on Hillhurst Avenue with the help of his family and some longtime employees. The menu and its beloved “Mama” or “Mama Yuca's,” as longtime customers called it, remained largely the same, even after a 2005 James Beard Award in the American Classics category and the inevitable changes in the neighborhood. that surrounds it.
For most of the restaurant's existence, Herrera sat in a chair at the counter, with immaculate red nails, taking orders and writing customers' names on paper bags.
“She was a lot of fun,” her oldest daughter, Margarita, said over Porto pastries at her Glendale home on Friday.
Since the pandemic, her youngest daughter, Dora, said, she had been there less to protect her energy and health, but she still visited “the Cabin” several times a week and kept an eye on Yuca's second location in the parking lot. from another liquor store on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena.
After a brief illness, Socorro “Mama Yuca” Herrera died on December 23 at the age of 89.
Socorro Herrera and her daughter Dora Herrera in 2016 at the small Yuca's Hut taco stand in Los Feliz.
(Brian van der Brug /.Los Angeles Times)
On Friday morning, Yuca's posted its first announcement about Socorro's passing on Instagram. On Saturday afternoon at the Hut, the credit card machine wasn't working, so orders were cash only, but if you didn't have enough, the woman behind the counter said it was okay to pay next time.
Dora Herrera, who has been involved in the family business since graduating from Brown in 1980, was sitting at a table with a group of friends. Kara Duffus, a New Jersey-born artist who lives in the neighborhood, stood in the parking lot, a drawing table balanced on a bollard, sketching the cabin in the waning light.
A couple and their teenage son had stopped by to pay the rest of a bill in cash from the day before. The father, Owen Moogan, moved from New York 18 years ago and has been a Yuca customer for just as long. “As a New Yorker, Yuca helped open my eyes to a different type of Mexican food,” he said. “And this James Beard-winning taco stand in a liquor store parking lot is such a classic Los Angeles thing. Establish a business wherever you can.”
Socorro's menu of basic tacos, burritos and cakes grew out of its Yucatecan roots. Their soft tacos educated immigrants who only knew hard-shell Taco Bell and sometimes disappointed others looking for more complexity; However, she was one of the first to introduce many Angelenos to Yucatecan-style cochinita pibil steamed in banana leaves. And in 2009 she became LA Taco's first Taco Madness Champion. Their bean and cheese burritos are rectangular pockets of American cheese and whole pinto beans; their burgers echo the taco meats with which they share the small grill; and their kitchen doesn't serve quesadillas (although you can order the bean and cheese ones without beans).
According to Dora, it was important to Socorro that all customers receive equal treatment: no preference was given to the many Hollywood celebrities and famous chefs who ate her cochinita pibil, carne asada, and carnitas tacos, and gang members were welcome as guests. as long as they treated her with respect.
Novelist and food writer Ruth Reichl fondly recalled that Mom never knew her in person, although she lived a few blocks away for years while working as a restaurant critic for the LA Times and had eaten there repeatedly over the decades.
“I fell in love with their bean and cheese burritos,” said Reichl, who named Yuca’s “best taco” in this article in 1990. “It’s a flavor I have in my head. I literally don't go to Los Angeles without going there. It's cool, I go there and they don't know who I am. “We rented a house for the winter in Los Angeles two years ago and I went almost every day.”
While Mom made the decisions and preferred to keep the menu basic, she was still willing to innovate when necessary, her daughter Margarita said. “We recognized right away that it was her baby, so we helped her with her baby, but we also said, 'I think you should change this.' And every now and then she would say, 'Yes, you're right.'”
Socorro Herrera and her daughter Dora, right, chat with customers at Yuca's Hut in Los Feliz.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
She insisted on preparing fresh food all day long, which meant they were constantly cooking and snacking all day long; Over time he made small changes to improve efficiency and happiness.
He once mashed beans for his burritos, but decided it was too much trouble, so he started leaving them intact. He got tired of cutting ham for his ham and egg breakfast burrito, so he took it off the menu.
Sometimes customers asked for crispy carnitas. “That was usually a mistake on our part because we had let it cook too much and then they loved it,” Dora said. So Socorro would remove the aluminum foil, then start the oven, crisp it up, and save the crispy bits for those who wanted them. “She always said, 'Okay, if you really want this, I can make it happen,'” Dora recalled.
Socorro del Carmen Sosa Suárez was the first of four children, born to a housewife and a law enforcement officer in Mérida, Mexico, in 1935. From the beginning her father treated her like the firstborn he had wanted, Dora said. Socorro's social nature, courage, and adaptability likely had their roots in his early childhood experiences accompanying his father to bullfights and bars.
“I took her everywhere. He put her in front of him on horseback when she was 2 months old. They would watch the bullfights and then take her back and give her one of the first cups of bull blood from the slaughter. He banged on the bars on the way home on his horse.
“When he grew up, many bars had little tables prepared for mom and they gave her this mini beer; She couldn't go to the bar, but she sat outside. And then when he was ready, he simply put her on a horse, tied her to the saddle, and told the horse to take her home.
“My grandfather always said, I don't care if you fight, but you have to win,” Dora recalled. “And that's how she always figured it out.”
Socorro married Jaime Herrera in the early 1950s and they had three children: Jaime, Margarita and Dora. When Dora was 5 years old they moved to Belize. While Jaime Sr. looked for work, Socorro used the sewing skills she had learned from her godmother to start a clothing business. As her daughters remember, she improvised but quickly became a tailor-made tailor for the elites.
In the mid-1960s they moved to Los Angeles, where Socorro found success as an Avon salesperson and sample maker in the clothing industry. She realized that her coworkers didn't have time to shop for their kids during the holidays, so she and Jaime filled a U-Haul with toys and went from factory to factory selling toys at wholesale prices to busy parents. .
In 1976 Margarita met someone who was trying to sell an 8×10 space on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz. Socorro and Jaime hadn't planned on opening a restaurant, but they thought it would be helpful to cover Dora's tuition at Brown. They initially continued making menu items from the Middle Eastern joint that had inhabited the space before them, but Socorro soon transitioned to the cuisine of her homeland. Her children say they knew she had found her passion at Yuca's because she never got bored or looked for another job.
The neighborhood has changed a lot over the years: long gone are Pedro's Grill in Vermont, where Jaime and Socorro used to go out dancing after work, and Acapulco at Sunset and Hillhurst, where Mom would settle down on Saturday nights to play animated Pac-Man games. But the remains of Yuca.
“Because everything I touched was like gold, it just worked,” Margarita said. “People asked him, what is the secret? And she goes, I use my hand. “I touch everything.”
The sisters used to joke that the worst thing about Yuca's was that they no longer had home-cooked food: it was all takeaway from the Hut. But the family always gathered around the table at the end of their busy days; They waited to eat until Margarita arrived from work as a supermarket cashier at 10 at night.
“We would all gather in the kitchen and talk, drink and eat for a couple of hours. And that was beautiful. There was a big party almost every night. What happened at work? What happened at school? It was just lovely,” Dora recalled. “People always said, 'Oh, it must be so hard to work with your family.' And it's like you have no idea. It's the best!
In an interview with the LA Times in 2016, Socorro admitted that working with family “isn't easy, but if they love you and you love them, you find a way to make it work, so it's not always what you want or what they want. “You want, it's a balance.” Her success, she said, was probably due to the fact that she decided what she wanted.
“I made rules and insisted on them and now the same rules are in effect. There has to be a leader, because the coherence of a person who decides and sets the tone is needed; This is how quality is maintained in what is offered. “People come back decades later and say it tastes exactly as they remember it.”
