New York’s hottest love story is cooking inside a tiny 400-square-foot Mexican restaurant in Harlem, where the kitchen is on the bar, a piano sits in front of the house, and romance (as well as the irresistible smell of beef beer) is always there. in the air.
Husband and wife team Karina Garcia, 31, and Eduardo “Lalo” Rodriguez, 36, met while working at the now-closed Morini Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side.
The pair traveled to Puebla, Mexico, together, fell in love, then began catering as a supper club in 2020, tossing tacos from their fifth-floor promenade in Harlem.
It’s been successful enough, they’ve now opened a small 25-seat, walk-up-only restaurant – Cocina Consuelo at West 143rd Street and Hamilton Place, where they created a specific menu to fit their small space.
“We do a lot of preparation in the morning. I try to get slow cookers ready so all I have to do is put them in the oven,” Garcia told The Post about outfitting the space with a convection oven to cook her beer, which which is slowly cooked for 15 hours.
Birria is a traditional beef stew boiled in bone marrow from the state of Jalisco. Garcia — a former employee of the ultra-fine-dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park — serves it on two giant halved bones with salsa roja, pickled onions and cilantro, among other hot items like confit tuna jalapenos.
The restaurant has its roots in Garcia and Rodriguez’s love story in New York. Although, they joked, sparks didn’t fly right away.
“She didn’t like me,” smiled Rodriguez, who was a bus driver in Morini at the time – Karina worked as a captain of the waiting staff. He noted that she warmed to him when they started talking about their love of Mexican food.
“We had a conversation – one of the few conversations – I told him that my grandmother is a very good cook. She said she would come visit me one day in Puebla,” Rodriguez, who was also working as a musician at the time, told The Post.
“He thought I was just a messy New Yorker,” Garcia said of visiting Rodriguez in his hometown in April 2018. “A week later I got the tickets.”
It was then that his grandmother and aunt taught her how to cook dishes like Jalapenos Stuffed with Confit Tuna—an item now on their menu.
“I had never been to Puebla—he [Rodriguez] basically showed me around. We went to this pyramid in Cholula. I slipped and he caught me. We just felt something — it was a movie moment,” Garcia recalls.
They had their first date in September 2018 at Batard, the former Tribeca French restaurant, where they “ordered everything on the menu,” Garcia recalled, ending the meal with a cocktail and Boulevardier cheese.
Rodriguez briefly moved to Mexico, but the pair continued to visit each other.
Back in New York, Garcia took a job working front of house at Eleven Madison Park in 2019, which included 18-hour weekend shifts. Garcia bounced back months later, landing a gig at the contemporary Mexican restaurant Cosme in the Flatiron as a busboy and food runner after walking in without a resume.
They got engaged that year at Eleven Madison — but outside the restaurant.
“As soon as I got there I was told that the table is not ready – I’m thinking something is wrong, we have a reservation. They said, can you go outside and wait here… I come back and he had this ring. I had no idea,” Garcia said.
They married in October 2019, but were laid off months later during the pandemic. To make ends meet, they started dinner at Garcia’s apartment.
They then hosted pop-ups at Bed-Stuy’s Corto Cafe and in the Catskills at Scribner’s Lodge before landing on-site at the Smorgasburg food festival in 2023.
They used the money they saved—and poured in their life savings—to lease Cocina Consuelo, turning it into an all-day restaurant that served dulce de leche donuts at breakfast and their signature beer and aguachiles—a catch of the day similar to chile ceviche. – in the evening, often with live music provided by local musicians.
And New Yorkers have asked for a table.
“One of those places that deserves a Michelin star but hasn’t been discovered yet,” rated one restaurant in a five-star Yelp review.
“We’re hardworking people chasing our dreams,” Garcia said of her full-circle moment, having grown up in the neighborhood where she and Rodriguez are now raising their daughter.
“We are meant to be together.”
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