Table Talk: Chocolate lava cake + Beltline bagels
Feb. 10 — Happy Tuesday, friends! Welcome to the table.
In today’s “Family Meal,” I’m bringing you a story from Rough Draft Atlanta media partner 285 South on how the owners of La Mixteca Tamale House will honor their late mother with heart-shaped masa creations for Valentine’s Day.
For “The Move,” I tell you why you need to hop on over to Chamblee to order Oaxaca’s ceviche negro. And Alpharetta Mediterranean restaurant Siena offers a recipe for its baked salmon with sumac-citrus vinaigrette.
Plus, I share what’s currently on my radar, including chocolate lava cake trending on Olympic Tok and Beltline bagel lines.
Cheers!
🍸 Beth
🎉 Team Hidi 2026 is the culinary event you don’t want to miss. Celebrate food service workers on Sun., March 15, at Truist Park, with nearly 100 food and beverage partners supporting Giving Kitchen’s mission. Get details and tickets here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
La Mixteca Tamale House Owners Honor Their Mother’s Memory Through Masa
This story was first published in 285 South, a news publication dedicated to Metro Atlanta’s immigrant and refugee communities, and is part of a partnership with Rough Draft Atlanta.
Born in Oaxaca, Rosa Lucia Hernandez launched a tamale business in 2018 to fulfill a longtime dream. After her death, Rosa’s children are keeping that dream alive.
🫔 It’s not unusual to find Stacey Hernandez in the kitchen of her family’s restaurant, La Mixteca Tamale House. On a Thursday afternoon, her hands were deep in a big bowl of masa. That dough will get turned into tortillas, sopes – a traditional Mexican dish consisting of a thick, fried corn dough with pinched edges to hold toppings, and picaditas, a kind of corn cake common to Oaxaca, where her family comes from. Stacey’s mother, Rosa, used to make picaditas for breakfast, topping them with a bit of lard, salt, and queso fresco for her nine children.
What was unusual, though, was the color of the dough that Stacey was shaping: It was bright pink; and rather than circles, she was shaping them into hearts. After taking balls of the pink masa and flattening them underneath a pan, Stacey pressed a heart-shaped cookie cutter into the dough, revealing the reason for the pink coloring: This is a Valentine’s Day special that La Mixteca serves every year.
La Mixteca was founded by Stacey’s mother, Rosa Lucia Hernandez, who was born in Oaxaca and moved to the U.S. in the 1990s. The family resettled first in East Tennessee, where they had a supermarket, before moving to the Atlanta area. The business that became La Mixteca began in Rosa’s home kitchen, when she started selling tamales to make some extra income while she took care of her grandkids. In 2018, she and three daughters—Stacey, Patricia, and Antonina—opened La Mixteca Tamale House in Suwanee. For the first two years of the restaurant’s existence, the family members worked together closely, making between 1,500 and 2,000 tamales a day, Stacey said, in an industrial kitchen to serve fresh in the Suwanee outlet.
🕊️ The restaurant became so successful that the family opened a second location last year in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhood. Rosa, though, wasn’t there for it: She passed away in 2020.
The new location is being managed by yet another Hernandez sibling, Valentin, who’d decorated the dining room with roses ahead of Valentine’s Day—a tribute to their mother, he said, whom the children try to honor in both small and big ways at the restaurant.
As Valentin moved around the dining room, arranging Valentine’s Day balloons and centerpieces, Stacey reflected on the privilege of being able to work alongside her mother for two years—and to continue working with her siblings now. “In memory of her, we kept going, so that’s where we are now,” Stacey said, tearing up. “Going through the loss of a parent, you just want to freeze time. You don’t want to go to work anymore. You want to be at home. But when you own a business, you can’t do that. You have to keep going every day, no matter what.”
La Mixteca’s regular tamale recipe is the same one that the siblings’ mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother used, though that’s all Stacey will say about it: “It’s a different way from your typical Mexican tamale,” she said. “It is a secret recipe, so I’m not allowed to go into detail.” Today, Stacey and her sister Patricia make the tamales that are served at La Mixteca in 11 different flavors—pork or chicken in spicy green or mild red sauce, mole, rajas, quesabirria—in addition to tacos, burritos, and other Oaxacan specialties like tlayudas.
💗 Although sopes are usually on the year-round menu, the pink heart-shaped ones will only be available for the first half of February, to walk-in customers only—along with cheese-topped, heart-shaped pink picaditas, pink tacos, and other colorful seasonal offerings: pink tamales filled with strawberry jam and topped with vanilla ice cream for dessert; scarlet-colored agua de jamaica; and strawberry atole, a warm masa-based drink. It was Stacey who came up with the idea of doing pink heart-shaped sopes a couple years ago; she gets the color naturally, with beet puree.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone do it, and it became a very big hit,” she said as she shaped the masa. People come from all over Georgia to try them, and the success of the Valentine’s Day tamales has led to other seasonal variations—sweet calabaza tamales, for instance, during fall, and purple and yellow tamales for Halloween. Each innovation reflects hours of work by the siblings and La Mixteca’s staff, trying out ingredients and playing around with recipes.
“One thing that I’m very blessed with is that sometimes people say you can’t work with family because it’s hard. But I think it’s the opposite of us. We all work together,” Stacey said. “That’s the beautiful thing about our family, is that my mom raised us to have a very good bond with each other. Even though she’s not here, we’re still here for each other.”
Orthopedic issues? This is how you Get Better.
SPONSORED BY PEACHTREE ORTHOPEDICS
🧑⚕️ Peachtree Orthopedics has 43 leading physicians, with specialists in every body part – providing expert, focused care that is designed for the quickest recovery and the best outcome.
Our UrgentORTHO Clinics offer same-day, evening, or even Saturday hours. So come when it works for you, get seen quicker, incur less cost, and avoid the E.R.!
📲 New patients can use our AskORTHO feature – a free online resource where you can chat with a live Peachtree clinician.
Peachtree Orthopedics has served Atlanta for over 70 years with a commitment to helping you return to the things you love. No matter your orthopedic challenge – they’ll help you Get Better too.
➞ Learn more or book an appointment here.
The Move: Ceviche Negro at Oaxaca
🇲🇽 Just after I arrived for dinner on a recent Friday, a short line began to form at Oaxaca in Chamblee. The dining room and bar were already full by 6:30 p.m. From my seat, I watched the kitchen crank out dish after dish, as tickets continuously hit the point of sales system throughout the night. Expeditious service accompanied courteousness and patience, while people mulled over the menu or asked questions. It was a pleasure to see a restaurant running at full tilt on a Friday night, but without harried staff, a stressed out kitchen, or diners who didn’t understand the painstaking dance routine restaurants do on high-volume nights.
The Mexican restaurant centered on dishes from the state of the Oaxaca gained critical acclaim within weeks of its opening in 2023. But the hype surrounding Oaxaca never really died down, nor should it.
🦐 Ceviches are a must at Oaxaca, which come with large shards of fried tortilla you break off into pieces to pile on with seafood. We kicked off our meal with ceviche negro ($18), a shrimp aguachile that sees the crustaceans marinated in a zingy soy lime juice that punches up the umami. Poached shrimp mixed with pickled white onions sponge up all that good juice. Slivers of habanero peppers bring the heat, cooled by dollops of avocado. Add in crunch from the tortilla, and this ceviche might have you longing for the coast.
Recipe: Baked Salmon With
Sumac-Citrus Vinaigrette from Siena
🐟 This week, we’re sharing a recipe for baked salmon with vegetables and sumac-citrus vinaigrette from Siena in Alpharetta.
“Siena is rooted in Mediterranean and Italian cuisine, but rather than focusing on a single region, we draw inspiration from the entire coastline,” said Siena Chef Baba Estavillo.
Estavillo said this salmon dish was inspired by her love for acidity and spice, rather than heat, as tools for brightness. “Sumac is traditionally associated with Middle Eastern cuisine, but I was equally drawn to its presence in Southern Italian and Sicilian cooking, where citrus-forward profiles, preserved flavors, and spice accents are common,” she said.
🎉 Team Hidi 2026 is the culinary event you don’t want to miss. Celebrate food service workers on Sun., March 15, at Truist Park, with nearly 100 food and beverage partners supporting Giving Kitchen’s mission. Get details and tickets here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
On My Radar
1️⃣ Beltline bagels. ICYMI last week, a certain viral bagel shop opened on the Eastside Beltline just steps from a local bagel shop (with a bagel automat). The hour-plus-long line was captured on social media, which only led to further virality. That line, however, also sparked online conversations around what it truly means to support local businesses. Why were people willing to stand in line for hours on a cold day for a bag of mini bagels and schmear from a Connecticut-based business with multiple locations but not for the local bagel shop down the lane? I plan to watch how this plays out over the coming months, because the hype will eventually die down on the new spot.
2️⃣ Olympic Village food. As in 2024 with the summer Olympics in Paris, I’m loving the TikTok food reviews by the athletes coming out of the Milano Cortina Olympic Village canteens. While chocolate muffins took over Olympic Tok in 2024, chocolate lava cake is currently trending on Olympic Tok in 2026.
3️⃣ Food as art. I follow Eaten magazine on Instagram, which celebrates the history of food. But the account also shares beautiful vintage food photography and still life works of art that force you to stop mindlessly scrolling. Eaten’s Instagram feed is a little oasis in the middle of the internet.
➡️ Get double the Atlanta food and dining coverage with “Family Meal,” edited by Beth McKibben, on Tuesdays at 5 p.m., and “Side Dish,” edited by Sarra Sedghi, on Thursdays at noon. Subscribe to both here. ⬅️
