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Carlos Raba, chef-owner of the acclaimed Clavel restaurant in Remington, is set to open his newest restaurant, a taqueria called Nana, in Towson this January.
Raba’s personality exudes youthful exuberance. In fact, kids, childhood, and family are front of mind with everything going into his newest venture, which will replace the former Purdum Pharmacy in the historic Stoneleigh Community Building at 6901 York Road.
Inspired by his mother, aunts, and grandmother, Nana pays tribute to the women who raised Raba and who ensured that a tragedy that occurred before he even drew his first breath would not impede the joys he would find throughout his life.
Two month’s before Raba was born, his father was murdered during a home invasion on Raba’s older brother’s birthday.
“I was born in March. It was my brother’s birthday; my brother was born on January 9. They were coming back from buying presents for my brother and the home invasion (happened),” Raba said. “They came into the house. My dad fought them. It was a shooting. He shoved them, he got them out of the house, and then he went after them. That’s when he got murdered.”
After that, Raba’s mother fled with her children from southern Mexico to northern Mexico. They moved to Culiacán, where Raba’s mother had four sisters, with whom they lived from then on.
It was there he was deeply influenced by cooking and the concept of the taqueria. While his mother worked as a journalist and editor, his aunts and grandmother would take care of him and his cousins.
“They used to love to go to taquerias,” Raba recalled. “So, Friday night and Saturday night, they will take all my cousins and myself to this sit-down corner taqueria which was on the street. A metal cart with a taquero making tacos and two people or three people. There was a dishwasher, a taquero, and the lady making tortillas. I was passionate about the beauty of the taco.”
As a journalist, Raba’s mother uncovered corruption by the highest government officials — including Raba’s own grandfather.
“He was a diplomat, and when she didn’t agree to stuff that he was doing she would hit him in the newspaper,” Raba said. “From the early ’80s to the late ’90s she was feared by politicians of corruption, that she will publicize them. She wrote in the national papers. She was one of the founders of Processo, the magazine. She wrote in Noroeste. I have pictures of her with the president of Mexico interviewing and walking around. So, she was very influential to me.”
Eventually, due to his mother’s profession, Raba’s family had to seek asylum in the United States as political refugees.
They arrived in Washington, D.C. and were held by Amnesty International when Raba was 16 or 17 years old. He attended Blair High School in Montgomery County, Maryland.
“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “We were homeless for a little bit and then then we find some people to help us just little by little.”
His mother, who has bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, returned to Mexico. She hasn’t been able to work since she left the U.S., Raba said.
“My brother and I hustled and sent her money, and we were lucky that she purchased a house,” he said. “She had a house, and we sold a house.”
Now, she lives in a retirement home. “Yeah, she’s looked after,” he said. “But she kind of had a really rough life at first. I grew up around strong women. She was a fighter like all my aunts, so this is what I’m going to do here.”
Raba’s other restaurant, Clavel, has been lauded by Food Network, Travel and Leisure, Oprah Magazine, Saveur Magazine, among many others. The restaurant, and Raba have been nominated for James Beard awards; Clavel is a two-time semi-finalist in the bar category.
With Nana, Raba is channeling his childhood, and what he wants for his own child and the children in the neighborhoods around him. He said everything about his cooking and businesses is based on things he loves and feels passionately about.
“In Clavel, probably one of my happiest moments was when my son — he’s now 9 — he said his favorite food is torta de cochinita pibil, which was my favorite food when I was his age and my aunt used to make it for me,” Raba recalled. “So, it makes me really happy that my son had the same experience that I have, and he was like, ‘Dad, I want to go to the jiu jitsu party and then I want to walk to Clavel and have torta de cochinita pibil.’ And there’s the same thing that I want us to hear.”
In describing his vision for Nana, Raba said, “I want the neighborhood kids to say, ‘Dad, I’m gonna go and ride my bike and have adobo.’ ‘Hey, Dad, I’m gonna go and ride and have three tacos.’ ‘Hey, do you want to pick up chicken from Nana and you don’t cook today?’ ‘Hey, don’t worry about dinner. I’m gonna go and get a whole chicken and Nana before dinner and you come here.’”
He describes wanting to feed a family with a chicken and three sides for $35. When people see his proposed menu, they are in disbelief about the low prices.
“It’s kind of silly, because every time that I present the menu to people, they’re like, ‘Wait, you are making all that type of stuff $5?’ I’m like ‘Yeah, I want [people to say] ‘I’m gonna go with $5. I could buy myself a taco, or I can make three tacos with the $7’ or stuff like that. It creates excitement to the kids and into the adult people too…. I want to make it fun!” Raba said.
Nana will be more casual than Clavel, with a louder, more exuberant, out-on-the-street type of feel.
“You’re gonna hear people chopping.… Everything’s going to be cooked on fire. So, you’re going to have carne asada, pastor, rotisserie chickens. And you’re going to have two taqueros, taking the meat and chopping it up and making the tacos, each taco with a little paper and a little tortilla, and a single taco to three tacos per plate,” Raba described excitedly.
He continued, “There’s different cooking also. Everything is on the fire. Everything in Clavel are slow cooks. They do more from the south of Mexico. The north of Mexico is very influenced by the Germans, by fire, by grilling, a really low open fire flame. A lot of tacos that are northern cooked, it’s more challenging because I have to teach my staff the skill of being on the kettle, the skill of chopping the meat, the skill of cooking the meat into the fire, making sure that is the right temperature, the right seasoning and being consistent with that. So it’s a totally different challenge of what I had in the other restaurants.”
Raba is the only staff carryover from Clavel; he’s hiring everyone new and training every cook himself. This is one of the challenges, but he feels confident that organizing and creating systems that work is a strength of his based on his days working at places like Whole Foods and Giant.
“I want to mentor and teach and I’m going to make sure that a Latin restaurant is strong in this community. There is not a lot of Latin restaurants here. There is Chipotle, and that’s what it is,” Raba said. “Towson is highly populated by Hispanics. So, I want to have a proud Mexican taqueria.”
He wants the place to be for kids of all ages, too. It’s not lost on him that his location is near numerous colleges and high schools.
“I want the kids from Towson coming here. I want the kids from Loyola coming here and having tacos. I want to have a place of like, ‘Man, I don’t know what to eat. Let’s go to Nana.’ Or ‘Let’s order from Nana online,’” Raba said.
He wants 60% of Nana’s business to be online and/or to-go orders.
“I want people to be home with like, ‘I want to order some tacos,’ because that’s what I did,” Raba said, harkening back to his childhood again. “In Mexico, there was multiple nights that my aunts didn’t want to cook, that my grandmother didn’t want to cook. They were like, ‘Order tacos. Just order tacos,’ and there were like 10 or 15 tacos from the taquerias and then there was a feast in the house.”
Again, Raba thinks of what it’s like to be a kid.
“When I talk to my business partner, he’s like, ‘Come on, it’s YOU. It should be $7 a taco.’ But the point is I want to be a kid and I want to have $5 and go and have a taco,” Raba said.
He made the point that if his son asked for $5 to buy candy, he’d give it to him. He loves the idea of that same $5 buying him a meal.
“I want to think I’m hard working enough to be able to provide for him. I’m in a neighborhood that he can say, ‘Dad, can you get $10? I’m gonna go and bike down (to Nana),’ and they want to have two tacos and they’re going to go back home. You call your friend and say, ‘Hey, man, I want to go to Nana,’ and we get on our bikes in the summer, and we call them and then we have three tacos and then we ride our bikes back.” Raba said.
The décor also reflects his childhood and his family. Three enlarged photos will be framed and hung: one of his entire family from the early 1970s in Mazatlán; one of his mother, grandmother, and aunts; and one of Mazatlán itself. The tiles decorating the walls were inspired by a quilt one of his employees made during COVID that Raba purchased. The colors of the quilt matched many of the colors of houses and flowers seen in Sinaloa where he grew up.
His grandmother’s favorite flower was the bougainvillea, which customers will see in Nana’s logo and on the menu.
Raba’s handiwork will even be seen in the menu design itself, on which he and his wife collaborated.
“I want to make it fun-looking. The menu looks like you know when you go to a Mexican market and everything is painted on hand,” Raba said.
Of the entire Nana experience, Raba said, “I want to make it like you’re going to market then you see the taquero and then you see the menu and you hear that the taquero screaming to people, ‘We have two tacos! We have three tacos!’ So, the person is screaming to the people here and then you’ll have a kid running around, creating excitement, you know what I’m saying? Excitement of culture, excitement of food, just excited.”
