- Cantina de la Granja
- Ceviche from a Cantina de la Granja preview
Mark Robertson co-owns the GLBT sports bar Crew Bar & Grill in Uptown, and SoFo Tap in Andersonville. But he grew up on a farm, and dreamed of having a place in the city that better reflected where food really comes from in the midwest. Chef Diana Davida was part of a restaurant group in D.C. that included a hipster taqueria, but despite her Mexican-American heritage, she mainly made American and continental food. But when she saw Robertson’s ad for a chef for a modern, farm-to-table Mexican restaurant, she thought, “I love Mexican food, I should totally cook it. This is what I was meant to do.”
I ask Robertson why he thought the area—Clark south of Foster—needed a Mexican restaurant specifically. “That area kind of needs any kind of restaurant,” he says. “But that area specifically needed Mexican cuisine because a lot of the Mexican on the north side is not very good. It’s kind of old-school Chicago Mexican. It has Lindo Guadalajara, that you go to at three in the morning, but it didn’t have fine-dining Mexican. I love Mexican food, it’s my go-to, and the neighborhood talked to us a lot about wanting Mexican. I like a challenge, and farm-to-table Mexican in the midwest seemed like a challenge.”
