Three beloved establishments help define the Harrisonburg food scene
WORDS | Sarah Golibart Gorman PHOTOS | Lisa Archer
It’s Taco Tuesday at El Sol Mexican Restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The kitchen simmers in anticipation of the evening rush. Order tickets stream down the line while servers negotiate space with cooks, stepping and spinning with plates in hand, performing a well practiced kitchen salsa.
Tortilla making is Soledad’s sole shift task. Pivoting between a mound of pale masa and a hot flat top, the tortilla press is her axis. Plucking the perfect amount, she rolls the masa briefly before pressing it into a jagged moon on the cast iron press. Her hands fly, deftly flipping tortillas as they begin to speckle and brown on the griddle. She’ll make about 7,500 today. At least that’s owner Luis Castillo’s conservative estimate for a typical Tuesday where tacos flow nonstop out of the kitchen.
El Sol stands as one of the many establishments in Harrisonburg where you can savor a plate of tacos. The Friendly City boasts a diverse culinary landscape with over 20 Mexican restaurants and an array of Central and South American cuisines such as Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, and more. The dominance of Mexican flavors in the local food scene has its origins in the 1970s when harvest crews migrated to Central Shenandoah Valley apple and peach orchards. However, it was the period between 1990 and 2000 that witnessed an extraordinary surge, with the Latino population in Harrisonburg growing by nearly 400%, as documented by cultural anthropologist Laura Zarrugh.[1]
In 2016, a specially commissioned study, conducted in collaboration with Church World Service, the city’s refugee resettlement office, and James Madison University, revealed Mexico as the leading country of origin for newcomers to Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, comprising 18.8% of the immigrant population. This demographic pattern was shaped by jobs available in the agricultural industry and a welcoming Mennonite community steeped in service and conflict resolution.[2]
Recent statistics from Harrisonburg City Public Schools affirm that the immigrant population continues to grow and diversify. In city schools, a remarkable 76 different birth countries and 63 languages are represented. Spanish stands out as the predominant home language, spoken by 49.5% of the community.[1] The cultures represented in city classrooms are mirrored in the entrepreneurial landscape of the city, notably in local restaurants.
Tacos El Primo, El Paisano Bakery, and El Sol Mexican Restaurant are key players in the realm of Mexican American culinary entrepreneurship in Harrisonburg. Using family recipes and dishes from their cities of birth, these families bring a taste of home not only to fellow Mexican Americans, but to anyone who walks through the doors, or up to the food truck window, of their restaurants.
Tacos El Primo
El Primo, which means cousin, wants patrons to feel like they’re part of one big street taco family. Hailing from Jalisco, owner Veronica Avila made the move from Riverside, California, to Harrisonburg in 2005. Longing for the lively food truck scene she left behind, she pioneered the trend in Harrisonburg in 2006, establishing Tacos El Primo as the city’s first registered food truck. El Primo paved the way for Harrisonburg’s over 20 food trucks, filling the niche for good, simple, international comfort food.
Over the years, many hungry patrons have joined the El Primo family. On a typical day, there may be college students, painters, doctors, landscapers, rescue squad staff, or roofers lined up outside the food truck window. On graduation weekend, parents of college students express their gratitude between bites of the tacos that sustained their children, saying, “Thank you for feeding my kid for three years, four years.” Avila attributes her success to “food and flavor, it’s how I show love.”
Crafting the perfect taco is a labor of love at El Primo. Upon receiving your order, you’ll immediately notice that the yellow corn tortillas are doubled. This isn’t just a presentation choice; it’s a practical one. The tacos are generously filled with veggies, campechanos (steak and chorizo), or carnitas (fried pork) to name a few options. That extra tortilla becomes a necessity to catch every delicious morsel that might escape. Avila worked with a tortilleria in Richmond to develop the perfect El Primo tortilla: “I knew that the size, the color, the flavor had to be original and something that represents us.”
El Paisano
While El Primo welcomes you like family, El Paisano greets you with the warmth of an old friend. During Hugo Santiago’s nine-year tenure at another Harrisonburg panaderia (bakery), patrons and friends would warmly greet him with “¡Hola, paisano!” — a phrase meaning “friend from the same country.” Fueled by these connections, Santiago and his wife, Berenice Rodriguez, opened their own bakery in 2018, choosing the name “El Paisano” to embody their mission to extend a warm welcome to every customer, treating them like someone they grew up with.
If you ever pass by El Paisano during the daily morning bake, the sweet and bready smells may stop you in your tracks. Laughing, Rodriguez explained, “When people first move to Harrisonburg and visit the bakery, they’ll say, ‘I found my bakery like home.’ or ‘It smells so good! I just came in for the smell.’”
Baking runs in Santiago’s family, where, in his hometown of Vera Cruz, relatives would use traditional wood-fired ovens to bake pan dulce (sweet bread) destined for the neighboring towns. He carries on these traditions at El Paisano where a wall of ovens churns out trays of colorful conchas, custard- and jelly-filled doughnuts, corn bread, and sugar cookies striped in the colors of the Mexican flag. Sweet empanadas, bursting with strawberry or pineapple, are piled alongside savory offerings like Rodriguez’s crunchy bolillo de piso (Mexican roll) from her hometown of Jalisco and Santiago’s Veracruz bolillos — soft and filled with chorizo and potatoes or cheese and jalapeños.
The bakery, strategically located across from Blessed Sacrament, Harrisonburg’s only Catholic church with Spanish language masses and Latino ministries, is a hub each weekend. Rodriguez’s mother crafts tamales, featuring ingredients like chicken with red or green salsa or cheese and jalapeno. Parishioners eagerly line up to purchase these enticing envelopes of masa alongside fresh, hot churros coated in cinnamon sugar.
El Sol Mexican Restaurant
When it came time to decide what to do after graduating from Turner Ashby High School in Rockingham County, there was no question in Luis Castillo’s mind. It was either open El Sol Mexican Restaurant or “go work in the poultry plant.” Rockingham County, once the self-described “Turkey Capital of the East,”[1] is now home to several large scale poultry plants that have often come under scrutiny over the years for unsavory working conditions.[2]
At 18 years old, Castillo and his wife, Rosa Ramirez, opted to venture into the restaurant world. When they went to register their business with the city, the name they had chosen was already in use. On the spot, Ramirez coined the name “El Sol,” meaning the sun, explaining, “the sun comes out for everybody,” a nod to the inclusive atmosphere they wanted to create in the Friendly City food scene.
Castillo learned to cook from his parents, who came to the Valley from Michoacan, Mexico in the late 1980s to pick apples and then work at the poultry plants. Tacos were always the family’s side hustle. After school? Castillo would help sell tacos. At the soccer field on Sunday? Castillo would help sell tacos. He describes this routine as “pretty intense,” but his love of home cooking deepened as he developed the skills and passion needed to successfully run a 102-seat restaurant.
Three generations collaborate to bring Mexican flavors to El Sol patrons with Castillo’s mother in the kitchen and his son managing the bar. Among the restaurant’s standout dishes is the classic Mexican soup, menudo. Castillo suggests squeezing all the provided limes into the soup, creating a perfect acidic balance against the rich broth. Other specialties like sopes and quesabirria tacos are crafted with their delicious homemade tortillas. Castillo follows through on his promise of authenticity by sourcing meat locally from Bridgewater, Rockingham County, and T & E Meats in Harrisonburg, run by Joe Cloud and Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.
These tastes of home help nourish the Mexican American community in Harrisonburg and also bring others into the fold. Even if flavors are unfamiliar at first, our bodies know lovingly prepared food. We will return again and again to places where servers know our names and our order before we even sit down. In these Harrisonburg restaurants, we can enter into the embrace of good home cooking. And for a moment, we become a part of that family — a primo, a paisano — warmed by the sun that shines for us all.
This article first appeared in our 2024 Spring Issue.
