An Interview with Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill
Chef Mary Sue Milliken
You might recognize blond, wholesome Mary Sue Milliken from the Food Network. She was one of their early stars in the mid-nineties, and by my lights, hasn’t aged perceptibly since I met her in 1983, at City Café, her first L.A. restaurant.
Today, she and her business partner Susan Feniger, are institutions. They own Border Grills here and all over Los Angeles, as well as their two taco trucks and a few other ventures. On TV, they were known as Too Hot Tamales. I still find Mary Sue hot, but shhh-don’t tell her.
Milliken, from a small town north of Detroit, St. Clair, MI (oddly, also the birthplace of Grant Achatz of Chicago’s Alinea, currently the most celebrated restaurant in America), always wanted to be a chef. So she went to a trade school in Chicago, and then bugged Jovan Trbojevic of Le Perroquet so persistently that he eventually caved and hired her.
That’s where she met Feniger. In the early nineties, they opened City Cafe, where I was often found at the counter. That morphed into the amazingly diverse City Restaurant. “We just wanted to cook what we liked, from anywhere”, Milliken told me, as I nibbled on ceviche made by her Vegas chef, Mike Minot, at Border Grill in Mandalay Bay. I can still taste the giant, mock-up Hostess cupcake they used to make.
The women traveled to countries such as India and Thailand, cooked in restaurants there, and brought their knowledge back to America. But a realization that what they really wanted to cook was Mexican cuisine slowly settled in, and the Border Grill concept took flight. Today, it is one of the 50 Essential Restaurants in my book, “Eating Las Vegas”. I have no plans to remove it from the list.
I recently sat down with Mary Sue and was plied with several of the nouvelle Mexican dishes at Border Grill, which included the oven roast pork dish from Yucatan called cochinita pibil, cooked in a banana leaf, Negro Modelo braised beef short ribs, two types of ceviche, pumpkin seed mole with grilled chicken, and Border Grill’s inimitable tres leches cake. While this was going on, we did an informal Q and A.
UnicaHome: How have local tastes changed since you opened here?
Milliken: Diners have been getting progressively more adventurous by the year. I love the fact that even middle-Americans look for fresh and exotic flavors in food these days?
UnicaHome: Have you altered what you cook to keep pace?
Milliken: When we started, I think we were overly concerned with authenticity. We wanted to do Mexican food just like a grandmother. But now perceptions have changed, and we just do our own thing. This is a cuisine that needed to be modernized somewhat.
UnicaHome: What about Central American flavors? When you opened, they were present on the Border Grill landscape.
Milliken: We opened a restaurant in Los Angeles called Ciudad, so we could have a platform for those, and S. American dishes. We even had moqueca, an Afro-Brazilian seafood stew made with coconut milk. The fact is, though, in the long run, it didn’t take. Today, that location is a Border Grill.
UnicaHome: What are your most popular dishes?
Milliken: People love ceviche, skirt steak, and seafood here.
UnicaHome: Is what you do in Vegas different from Los Angeles?
Milliken: Sure. Everyone there watches calories. We sell lots of salads in L.A. In Vegas, they come to party, and they eat more robust fare and dessert.
UnicaHome: Do you make a bigger profit with the lighter dishes?
Milliken: Not really. The food costs are lower, but all the chopping and cutting takes more time, so the labor costs are higher. With meat, you take a big hunk, and just put it on the grill, or throw it in the oven.
UnicaHome: Are you adopting any of the new trends in cooking?
Milliken: I just got something called an immersion circulator, which I first encountered when I was a contestant on Top Chef Masters. I use it to make tamago onsen, slow cooked eggs, which I love.
UnicaHome: So are you adjusting to trends?
Milliken: Not much. My kids and I eat 80/20 at home, a ratio of 80 percent vegetables and grains, to 20 percent protein. That’s the wave of the future.
UnicaHome: Who are some chefs you admire?
Milliken: Here in Vegas, I love Hubert Keller and his new restaurant, Fleur, just down the hall. (They were both on Top Chef Masters.) I love Fergus Henderson, too. He’s the chef at St. John in London, and does nose to tail cooking, using every part of the animal. I just love offal.
Border Grill is at Mandalay Bay. 632-7403.
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