Immigrant from Mexico serves up dishes that honour the woman who taught her the recipes
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Brenda Cortes, owner of Dona Cata, serves one of her taco dishes. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
It sounds like a north wind is howling through the phone. I’m stabbing at the volume control but I’m still mis-hearing things. “Did you say the name of your restaurant means widow in Spanish?” I ask.
“No, no, no!” comes the distant but distinctly horrified reply. Dona Cata is named after Brenda Cortes’s grandmother, who was a widow. That’s the grandmother who taught her everything about cooking, which led to this busy Mexican cafe on Victoria Drive.
I suggest I redial and try again and the line is better.
“My father was seven and she had nothing. No husband. Someone found her crying under a tree and took her and taught her how to make pork; how to kill the pig and process and cook it. She started when she was very young and she ran a meat shop and taqueria for 25 years. It’s an honour to continue cooking what she taught me,” says Cortes, a teacher who immigrated to Canada five years ago with her husband, also a teacher.
Cortes is pregnant with her second child and she’ll be at the stoves until she gives birth — and then she’ll be right back at it afterwards. “Just like my grandmother. In Mexico, most women work with babies on their back. It’s normal,” she says.
When you walk into Dona Cata, you’ll notice there are 10 bowls of different salsas set out, all in a row — green tomato, avocado, chipotle, chili de arbol, and so on. Spoon them onto your tacos (a specialty here) and other dishes. It’s a sign that she and her husband (he cooks, too) aren’t just running a business. They love what they’re doing.
Tacos are made with several meat toppers and come in two sizes — $1.25 and the two for $5 Campesena tacos with onions, beans and meat. She says burritos aren’t a true Mexican dish, but she sells them too, along with quesadillas and some combination plates. The latter, I found, was a big messy dish, made worse by the paper plate.
I didn’t visit on a weekend so I didn’t try any of the weekend specials — including lamb stew, pozole and shrimp soup.
However, the tacos are nice and fresh and the atmosphere is homey and lively with music, lineups out the door and people coming in for takeout orders.
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DONA CATA MEXICAN FOODS
5438 Victoria Dr., 604-236-2232
