Starting a restaurant is never easy, but for Mala Pata, which opened a year ago in Raleigh’s Gateway Plaza, the multi-year journey to opening day was so tough the owners named the Latin American restaurant after a slang term for bad luck. But in just one year of service — Mala Pata celebrated its first birthday in May — they turned that bad luck around, even earning a Bib Gourmand award from the prestigious Michelin Guide along the way.
“There’s a long story of how we got here,” says Marshall Davis, one of the restaurant’s partners. “And I think it’s been even more meaningful and important that our first year has been so strong.”
Created and owned by a consortium of familiar veterans from the Raleigh hospitality industry, Mala Pata is a testament to partnerships forged in difficult times. It all started back in the pre-pandemic days, when Angela Salamanca, the owner of Centro, a Mexican restaurant in downtown Raleigh, and Marshall teamed up to open Gallo Pelón, the first mezcal bar in the Southeast, above Centro.
With the success of the mezcaleria, the two entrepreneurs soon hatched another restaurant idea, one that would celebrate masa, made in-house using a traditional nixtamalization process and heritage corn from Oaxaca.
“For me personally — and I think that for Marshall, too — one of the things that really drives the concepts of the places that we create is we see a thing or experience a thing, and we’re like, oh, my God, can we have this at home? How can we share this with everybody we love?” Angela says, recalling the travels in Mexico that inspired her to develop Mala Pata.
Similarly, Marshall recounts a particular food vendor in Oaxaca called El Lechoncito de Oro, famed for their rolled pork lechon tacos, topped with crispy pork skin and hot sauce. There’s an homage to these tacos on the menu at Mala Pata that he swears will never come off the menu. “The first time we went (to Oaxaca) I might have eaten 36 because they are one- or two-bite tacos — they are so delicious and simple and there’s nothing to hide behind.”
The idea was to open the nixtamal restaurant at the Durham Food Hall, and a series of pop-up taquerias perfected the menu. But the pandemic forced a pivot to fast-casual for the new space and away from the delicacy of tacos on fresh tortillas, which would not have survived the transit of takeaway. So the team created Ex-Voto, with its now famous sturdy “crunchwraps” and burritos.
Meanwhile, Angela and Marshall bonded with their food hall neighbors, Locals Seafood, who were similarly struggling to survive lockdown. When the dust settled, two entities — Angela and Marshall, alongside Locals Eric Montagne and Zack Gragg, who today serves as Mala Pata’s executive chef — decided to partner on the restaurant and name it appropriately, celebrating the bad luck that brought them together.
Creative Alchemy in the Cocina
The nixtamalization process is a good metaphor for Mala Pata — it’s a long, patient process that yields incredible results with a multitude of applications provided you have the skill and craftsmanship. The menu at Mala Pata is a testament to the power of the fresh tortilla in its many expressions — from the soft white corn and pork tallow tortillas that encase rich carnitas in those lechoncito tacos to the fried flautas and crispy tostadas and corn chips, perfect for hoisting the aquachile verde or guacamole to your mouth.
A bright, no-frills guacamole gets dressed up with pickled red onion, cherry tomato, jalapeño, and a dusting of Cotija cheese.
Most items on the menu are meant to be shared — this is a friendly, family-style place, where you’ll want to try as many items as possible, so think small plates and lots of them.
For Marshall, the place to start is with the crispy buñuelos, which he describes as a “Colombian hush puppy kind of thing” and attributes for getting him into the restaurant business in the first place. “It was one of the first things Angela ever served me when we first met almost 15 years ago. It was so good that I ended up working for her as a manager at a restaurant, just so I could be around her cooking.” These pillowy, golf-ball sized starters are savory, salty, and only slightly sweet (the agave butter served on the side adds to that) with an incredible crunch on the outside and a soft, light interior. It’s a marvel made from corn and cassava.
Everything on the “Botanas” part of the menu is easy to share, and I’d order almost all of it if I had a group of four or more. The aguachile verde, with NC shrimp, serrano pepper, and cucumber, is fresh and zippy, as are the salads, one featuring sugarcoated pepitas, the other a combo of grilled pineapple, radicchio, serrano, and queso fresco crema (get it; it’s delicious).
Personally, I think it’s a crime to go it alone into the “plates” section of the menu; why stop sharing now, especially when each item offers multiple pieces? Who isn’t curious about the Cheerwine mole on the rajas enchiladas? And who needs three flautas de papas after all those starters? The flautas are wonderful, as one would imagine: warm whipped potatoes in deep fried tortillas, smothered in queso Oaxaca, salsa macha, and crema, with a bit of crunchy curtido atop to cut through all the cream. The other two offerings in this section of the menu are those popular lechoncito tacos (great with a beer!) and the fish tacos that change with the seasons.
Larger-format dishes, called platters, feature large, impressive proteins meant to serve the table. For me, the pescado frito, a cubed and fried whole flounder, is a standout. It’s perfectly cooked, the delicate and flaky meat a stark contrast to its outside. Served, like all pastor, with an al pastor sauce and pineapple, there’s a depth of flavor and a balance between smoky and sweet, earth and ocean. I felt like this was a dish I should be eating closer to the sea, like I was on vacation.
“I dream about the flounder,” Angela says when I tell her how much I enjoyed the dish. “This is the precious gift that we’ve had with working in partnership with the guys from Locals: their vast knowledge of the North Carolina seafood world. I mean, it’s just like the biggest blessing — we get first dibs on all seafood because these are our partners.”
A Place and a Community to Celebrate
As Mala Pata shows, building up the right partnerships can bring out the best — in ingredients, in service, in ideas and execution, and in learning how to be flexible in increasingly difficult times for the hospitality industry. It also does something else, which isn’t a product of the restaurant as much as its foundation: It builds community. In the year that Mala Pata has been open at Gateway Plaza, the mid-century shopping center that serves as its home has changed too, adding more communal spaces, more landscaping and plants, and more tenants. No doubt, having a Michelin-recognized restaurant in the space helps to activate these new spaces.
Gateway Plaza has changed since Mala Pata moved in: more greenery, more gathering space, more reasons to stay.
To celebrate Mala Pata’s first anniversary, the restaurant threw a patio party at the plaza with a DJ, a piñata, and a special food and drink menu. It was a smashing success, a perfect way to culminate a year — nay, many years — of hard work paying off. But the Mala Pata team — Marshall Davis, Angela Salamanca, Zack Gragg, Eric Montagne, Justin Pasfield, and general manager Alison Houser — are hardly the types to rest on their laurels. When I ask Angela what her hopes are for the restaurant’s second year, she responds with a list: to have a bit more curiosity within the menu, to extend the hours (they are adding dinner service on Sundays), and “to continue to activate the plaza with intentional events.”
“It’s been a full, intense year, but I’m really grateful for the opportunities and everything that I’m learning because it’s been really beautiful,” she says. As she looks to the future, she doesn’t forget to enjoy the present.
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