It’s Friday evening at Vecino. The kitchen has been tinkering with a new taco: a paper-thin slice of New York strip draped over a blue-and-yellow nixtamalized corn tortilla with a delicate skirt of melted cheese and contrasting salsas. It sparkles as it catches the last of the golden-hour light spilling through the dining room windows.
In just over two years, Vecino has become one of the city’s most celebrated restaurants; nationally, the James Beard Awards named it a semifinalist for best new restaurant in 2025. But it is also the newest branch of a family tree whose roots stretch back to Mexico, specifically Arandas in Los Altos de Jalisco. Co-owner Adriana Jimenez comes from a family of restaurateurs.
In fact, name your favorite Detroit taqueria, and chances are good that a member of Jimenez’s extended family has something to do with it: Taqueria Lupita’s and Los Altos Restaurant, Taqueria Mi Pueblo and Jordan’s Family Restaurant, Los Corrales and La Tapatía Neveria, Taqueria El Nacimiento and Camino Real Mexican Grill, La Palapa del Parian, and Tequila’s.
Like many Mexican immigrant entrepreneurs, Jimenez’s relatives followed a model often described as a “social franchise” — an informal network in which family members learn a trade, share knowledge, and eventually branch out into businesses of their own.
That’s exactly how one extended family came to shape Detroit’s Mexican food scene.
“One family member becomes very successful at something,” Jimenez says. “Then the whole family and generations of families follow that success.” Like any good franchise, this one has a flagship.
The Taquero Blueprint
Adán Lopez (first cousin of Jiminez’s mom, Eva Lopez) arrived in Detroit in the early 1980s and spent more than a decade cooking at Mexicantown institution Xochimilco, his daughter, Valeria, tells Hour Detroit. One of 15 siblings, Adán belonged to a family that eventually spread across Detroit’s restaurant industry. In 1995, he opened Taqueria Lupita’s, bringing a style of taquería rooted in his native Arandas in Los Altos de Jalisco, where generations of migrants popularized restaurants centered on tacos de cabeza.
Tacos de cabeza use the slow-cooked meat of a cow’s head, including lengua (tongue), cachete (cheek), sesos (brain), and ojo (eye), served simply with onion, cilantro, salsa, and lime. According to Jalisco-based culinary magazine Jaliscocina, the modern commercial style took shape in Mexico City in 1936, when a pair of migrants from the village Santiaguito de Velázquez near Arandas transformed overlooked cuts of beef head into tacos de cabeza — the foundation of a taquería model that gained popularity in Mexico and, eventually, the United States.
Tacos de lengua remain among Lupita’s defining specialties, their melt-in-your-mouth texture connecting southwest Detroit to a tradition that originated generations earlier in Los Altos de Jalisco. Adán later expanded into Los Altos Restaurant, just as waves of immigrants from the Jalisco highlands made their way to southwest Detroit. Many arrived in the 1990s seeking work in landscaping, construction, and auto-related manufacturing, helping to double Detroit’s Latino population between 1990 and 2007, according to a 2008 Los Angeles Times report.
“His menu is something that he would order, that he likes to eat,” Valeria says of her father’s approach. “He’s like, ‘I would never add something I don’t personally like.’”
Just as importantly, Los Altos served as a training ground for the next generation of restaurateurs. Adán’s niece, Nancy Diaz-Lopez, started working there at age 14 before transforming her father’s modest taco trailer into a Detroit staple.
Reinventing the Taco Truck
Around the time of the Great Recession, Detroit’s taco truck scene was still taking shape. Nancy and her husband, Ramon “Wicho” Diaz, turned her father’s taco trailer into El Parian, placed on an empty lot next to a car wash at Vernor and Dix.
Over the next two decades, the couple expanded the single trailer into a fleet of six taco trucks that have become permanent fixtures in the neighborhood, parked on rented lots as reliable stops for hungry Detroiters. They’ve also dipped into physical restaurant ownership with a growing group of eateries that includes La Palapa del Parian on Lawndale, and Tequila’s in Roseville and Portage.
At La Palapa del Parian, the couple’s signature al pastor remains the centerpiece. A trompo of marinated pork spins nonstop while potatoes and onions cook beneath it on the plancha, catching the rendered drippings. The result is one of Detroit’s finest expressions of tacos al pastor.
Nancy and Wicho’s influence reaches beyond the family. Chef Eddie Vargas spent years working alongside them before opening the award-winning Tacos Wuey, where his crisp birria tacos and birria egg rolls — an idea first introduced at La Palapa — demonstrate the way each generation learns the craft before making it their own.
Not Just Tacos
The family tree continued to grow in every direction. Joel Padilla, son of Herminia Lopez (one of Adán Lopez’s sisters) and Rodrigo Padilla, was just a month old when his family moved from California to Detroit in 1997. In 2001, Rodrigo, opened Taqueria El Nacimiento, named after the village outside Arandas where he grew up. Today, Joel is helping his family bring its biggest venture yet to life: La Alteña, a 20,000-square-foot Mexican supermarket with a bakery, butcher shop, tortilla factory, and prepared foods. Its namesake intentionally references the famous La Alteña tequila distillery in El Nacimiento — where Rodrigo worked in his youth.
Elsewhere, another cousin went from selling tacos on weekends from the living room of his Dix Street bungalow to running Taqueria Mi Pueblo. The next generation reimagined Jordan’s Family Restaurant with a Mexican American lens, pairing hotcakes with café de olla and huevos divorciados. According to Valeria, the family of another of Adán’s sisters went on to operate Los Corrales, where she says the family carried forward Adán’s pollo asado recipe. Today, the dish is a neighborhood institution.
The Next Branch of Culinary Excellence
Jimenez’s parents left Arandas for Mexico City, where she was born, before immigrating to Michigan and opening restaurants in Waterford and Highland. She grew up in the family business, learning every aspect of restaurant life before eventually striking out on her own.
Because she lacked legal status in the U.S., Jimenez couldn’t return to Mexico until she was 25. On her first trip back, a freshly nixtamalized tortilla from a neighborhood molino reshaped her understanding of Mexican food — and, ultimately, the restaurant she would build. Vecino, a modern tribute to the city where she traces her roots, is the youngest branch of one of Detroit’s most consequential restaurant lineages.
This story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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