Sal's Site
Maize was named by Karina Sandoval as a tribute to the upbringing of her husband, Armando, who was born in and lived in Mexico City—the Taco Capital of the World—but also grew up on a small farm for three or four years where his grandparents lived. Years later, when the Sandovals made Champaign-Urbana their home, Karina noticed how the twin cities are citified towns with cornfields all around. The Mexican word for corn, maiz, seemed like the perfect choice to name their restaurant, she thought.
Karina’s clever thinking didn’t stop there. She recommended putting the letter “e” on maiz because that’s the “scientific term,” Armando tells me, and Champaign-Urbana, a college town, is loaded with intelligent people who will get the addition.
“She’s smarter than me,” Armando says with a laugh.
Armando likes to talk, and he breaks the ice when we first sit down by telling me about a well-known C-U writer who drunkenly approached him and his wife only two weeks after Maize opened in 2011, seemingly coming at them with a complaint near closing time on a Friday night. But the this person wasn’t complaining. Rather, the individual was gushing about how great Maize’s tacos were and not long after wrote an article about the restaurant. Two days later Armando’s restaurant was swamped with customers.
Armando and I sit at a two-person copper table with the place to ourselves in downtown Champaign. Large colonial windows let in the waning sunlight of the early evening. The flooring hasn’t changed since the days this place was a train station, he says. There is also a Maize at the Illini Union on campus, a location Armando says is similar to the first small building where Maize was housed, a memorable location in town that has been torn down.
Maize Mexican Grill serves authentic in-house food with fresh ingredients. The menu stands out, according to Armando, because of the tortillas.
“If you ask for a quesadilla, there’s a lady in the back pressing the tortilla at the moment, so I think that’s a big part of it,” he says.
Armando tells me about “corn smut,” the slang term for huitlacoche, an item on the menu he doesn’t care for but vegetarians order at Maize frequently. When corn is young and gets damaged by wind or hail and water gets into it, Armando explains, a mushroom grows out of it, leading to a product that has a “peculiar taste” but is a “delicacy,” he says. When the growing season starts, area farmers call Armando to let him know they’ve got corn smut. Armando once cooked up some huitlacoche for a farmer in his sixties who told him he loved it and felt bad he had thrown away corn smut for years instead of giving it to Maize.
“I think that’s the magic in food,” Armando says.
Armando, who studied sociology at the University of Illinois and had plans to be a teacher, tells me Mexican dishes should be fun. He mentions the huevos divorciados (divorced eggs) that are served during brunch. In the dish the eggs are split up, one side covered in a white tortilla, the other in a blue tortilla; one egg is covered in green sauce, the other in red sauce, with beans down the center.
“Those beans are really, really divorced and they’re not getting back together,” he jokes.
Armando splits his time at Maize working at the Illini Union in the earlier hours of the day and at the downtown location in the evening. Seeing some of his former student workers and customers blossom into men and women with full lives and worthy accomplishments is a point of pride for Armando, perhaps his favorite thing about being a business owner.
“The restaurant business is a really hard business,” he says. “A really, really hard business. But I think the human part of it, whether employees or customers, I think that’s what makes it worth it. For me, at least.”
Photos by Sal Nudo.
This piece and 50 more on restaurants in Champaign-Urbana are available to read about in Eat Like a Local – Champaign-Urbana, published by CZYK Publishing.