It is with a heavy heart that I write this homage to Su Casa, a beloved grocery and Mexican restaurant in Fennville, Michigan that will close its doors after 27 years this month. Su Casa has supplied Ox-Bow with nearly all of its Thursday Mexican Night fixins,  since at  least as far back as 2000 when I came to work in the kitchen. Cue the blaring cumbia soundtrack– anyone who has eaten at Ox-Bow has probably gathered that Mexican night is very dear to me– its my favorite cuisine and I just love doing up a huge spread of slow cooked taco meats, diverse salsas, and of course, the famed 60 avocado batch of guacamolé. Su Casa is where those avocados come from, lovingly cared for and selected carefully for us by owner Edgar Suarez. Second to the avocados in importance is their fresh made chips, which have an irresistible crunch and a pleasant greasiness, that I started buying when I took reigns as chef in 2004. The rest of my typical Thursday purchase might look like this: locally produced flour tortillas, Chicago-made corn tortillas, Mexican cheeses also imported from Chicago, canned jalapeños en escabeche and chipotle peppers in adobo, homegrown tomatillos and when not seasonally available at the Holland farmer’s market– fresh cilantro and jalapeños. For special dishes like molé and salsas, Su Casa would reliably provide specialty dry ingredients like a full range of dried chillies, epazoté, tamarind, etc. Sometimes a really special ingredient would pop up like the herb papaló, grown in the garden of one of the Suarez’ friends. And you could always count on Mamá to be scraping spines off of nopal petals, a favorite ingredient of mine for vegetarian taco filling. Oh and a Mexican Coke in the bottle or a Jarritos for the road (and maybe a six pack or two of Bohemia after they got their liquor license).

Su Casa and I go further back than my time at Ox-Bow, in fact. My dad’s best friend Skip Rettker owned a little shack off the Blue Star Highway in Glenn and every once in awhile we’d make the trek up from our place in Grand Beach to hang out at his cabin or check out  the shopping in Saugatuck. Skip first brought me to Su Casa as an adolescent sometime in the early 90’s. And I can distinctly remember my order- a torta de milanesa, which has become a staple order of mine at taquerias ever since. I grew up eating Americanized Mexican food, though occasionally I’d get a taste of something closer to what is eaten in Mexico. This torta experience was formative– I had no idea that they even ate bread in Mexico back then. I’d eat there often in my early years at Ox-Bow, enjoying dishes like bistec ranchero, camarones a lá diabla, and carne en chilé. Su Casa expanded their facilities in 2006 and perhaps because my palette had grown more sophisticated by then or it was simply a change of kitchen staff, the food just did not have the same vibrancy after the move. More on that shortly. A few things remained consistent on their menu, however, most notably their excellent salsa verde, which is made creamy by fortification with avocados. I have successfully reverse engineered the stuff and it retains a firm position in my salsa wheelhouse. Their guac was always pretty great and distinctively served in a split dish with smooth and rich refried beans for dipping. I’d still order their enchiladas poblanas in molé, which remained pretty consistent. But my go-to order that always hit the spot was the torta de milanesa.

The original Su Casa was crowded– astonishingly so. Every nook and cranny of the place held a unique discovery whether that be medicinal teas for ailments like gas or migraines, giant reflective dragon stickers, or creepy votive candles with powers to silence your enemies. The ceiling was low and for a tall guy like me that meant being slapped in the face by hanging lucha libre masks or futból jerseys. Shopping there was like foraging in a claustrophobic, psychedelic labyrinth, not unlike markets I’ve since been to in Mexico. The old restaurant was a little more breathable than the grocery, with cozy booths and crazy hand painted fluorescent light ceiling tiles depicting scenes of ancient Aztec times. It saddened me when I learned news of the demise of the original space in exchange for an expanded new building in 2005, which coincidentally aligned with Ox-Bow’s plans to similarly bulldoze our own kitchen to rebuild a big new shiny one.

Enter Edgar Jr. I love this guy and I am sad I had’t see him around in recent years. We are about the same age and he and I became fast friends at the old place. The ever ambitious Edgar Jr. was instrumental in the design of the vision for the new Su Casa. When I returned in the spring of ’06, I was stunned to find a probably about 10,000 square foot Mexican mega-plex towering over the empty lot where little old Su Casa once stood. Edgar was stoked to take me on the tour, the grocery was bigger though still populated by a lot of the same junk from the old spot like racks of norteño CDs and handmade leather keychains. The restaurant was considerably bigger with pretty nice mosaics inlaid in the center of the floor and outdoor breezy patios. They now had a liquor license which was great. But the expansion did not stop there. There was a separate café attached in the front that would serve fancy coffee drinks and gelato and there was a huge honking night club upstairs called Club Casa. This made our expansion back at camp seem modest in comparison. And this is where things got complicated. Edgar Jr. left just after a year or two in to launch his own, highly successful Su Casa brand restaurant in South Haven. Su Casa Fennville chugged along doing what it did best, serving decent Mexican grub on the restaurant side and providing an amazingly stocked grocery for the local Mexican population, curious tourists, and a gangly Mexi-phile weirdo in a Maria Sabina t-shirt buying avocados by the caseload. The café quickly became a storage zone for Mama’s prolific piñata making enterprise. As an aside, her piñatas are truly a work of art, she can do anything with her medium– from Sponge Bobs to freaky anthropomorphic monkey dudes in rainbow shorts to custom made orders like a pigeon she did for me (which if you scroll back enough you can check out on this blog). I was never quite sure what became of Club Casa, though occasionally I’d see an overly Photoshopped flyer for an all ages dance night on their windows. It was clear to me over the years though, that beyond their core business, all the extra bells and whistles were not optimally managed without the vision of Edgar Jr. And the rent on this hulking space was the downfall of  Su Casa. Mamá told me they would be closing a few weeks ago with heavy eyes.

I made one final ride to Su Casa last week and received some promising news from Mamá– they are talking about scaling back and renting a storefront in Holland. I sure hope this happens. I will dearly miss my tranquil Thursday afternoon drive out to Fennville after lunch. Breaks like these from the grind of an otherwise always-on-your-feet job make it all worthwhile. Especially when on the other end you get to explore the very definition of a mom and pop joint with an organically odd selection and are warmly greeted by old friends like the Suarez family.