🌽 Homesick for Mexico, she cooked her way back: Aidee Rebollo and Adelitaz Mexican Food

Cover Photo: Aidee Rebollo, the owner of Adelitaz Mexican Food, serving under the papel picado, the strung cut-paper banners, at an outdoor event. Photo supplied by Adelitaz Mexican Food.

There is a kind of hunger that has nothing to do with being hungry.

Aidee Rebollo ran into it after moving from Mexico to Canada. The grocery stores here are full of food. What they did not have was the smell of her family's kitchen, the one that tells you something has been on the stove since morning and people are coming over.

So she cooked it. First for her own family, because that was the whole point. Then for other people, because it turns out a lot of us are homesick for somewhere, and the rest of us can tell straight away when a plate came out of somebody's family instead of a corporate recipe book.

Adelitaz Mexican Food is a family-run Mexican catering business in Kingston, Ontario, built on recipes from Aidee Rebollo's own family in Zacatecas, in north-central Mexico. Alongside the catering runs a seasonal food trailer, parked this year at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, plus pop-ups at markets and events around the region.

Aidee owns it and runs it. The business is Mexican owned and operated, and she says so plainly every chance she gets, right down to the bottom of her emails.

About that name. The Adelitas were the women of the Mexican Revolution, and Aidee told Kingston Spotlight they took their name from Adela Velarde, who fed the soldiers and then fought alongside them. The revolution began on the twentieth of November, 1910. November is also the month Aidee was born.

The Z is hers. She is from Zacatecas, and in Spanish the S and the Z sound the same, so the letter fits. The second reason is less romantic and will be familiar to anyone who has tried to name a business: Adelitas with an S was already registered.

Say it ah-deh-lee-tahs. Her own name is ah-EE-deh, though she says most people in Canada go with AY-dee and she is happy with either.

She is also clear that Adelitaz is about more than lunch. “This project is also a reflection of our journey as a family adapting to a new country while keeping our roots alive,” Aidee told Kingston Spotlight.

The family goes back to Mexico when they can, and filmed some of one trip, family cooking and market stalls both. Writing about it afterward on the Adelitaz Instagram account, she said they came home ready to “share a little piece of home with you, the way we were taught.”

Aidee came to Kingston for a classroom, not for a food scene.

She arrived in 2021 as an international student in the Health Care Administration Program at St Lawrence College, which she picked because Kingston was the only place offering it. The family came with her, and then stayed.

What kept them is the part any Kingstonian will recognise: the lake views, and a city small enough that the population feels close, closer to what they were used to at home. Somewhere their children could grow up feeling safe.

Aidee is straight about the rest of it. She has called the migration itself a huge challenge, and lists two things that have made running a business here harder than the cooking ever was: dealing with technology, and working in a second language.

Tacos are the obvious starting point, and Adelitaz Mexican Food sells plenty of them. The menu also runs to sopes (a thick round of corn dough with a pinched rim, fried, then piled with refried beans and toppings) and huaraches (the same idea stretched long, named after the sandal it resembles).

Start with what holds it all together, which is corn. Adelitaz makes its own tortillas rather than buying them in, from corn flour supplied by a Mexican business in Toronto. Almost everything on the menu is built on corn in one form or another.

Ask about Mexican street corn, the grilled cob everyone has seen a photo of, and you get an answer that explains the whole operation. Adelitaz does not make it (yet). The corn for it in Mexico is white corn, and Aidee told Kingston Spotlight she has not found a Canadian supplier growing it to the quality she wants. So it stays off the menu for now. If you know somebody in this part of Ontario growing white corn, she would like to hear from you.

Aidee wanted us to understand something before we wrote about her menu.

Corn in Mexico is not simply an ingredient. She told Kingston Spotlight it is part of the country's identity, its history and its culture. For the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Zapotecs, corn sat at the centre of the universe and of religion, and it was corn that let communities stop moving and settle in one place. Corn, beans and squash were the foundation of the diet long before wheat arrived with the Spanish.

Those communities also worked out how to make corn feed people properly. Nixtamalization (soaking and cooking the kernels in lime water before grinding them) unlocks nutrients the body otherwise cannot reach, which is why a diet built on corn did not leave people malnourished. It is also part of why a tortilla made the old way tastes like something a packaged one does not.

In 2010 UNESCO added traditional Mexican cuisine to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and named corn, beans and chili as the foundation the whole system rests on.

Which brings us back to the logo. Between the two Adelitas sits a small golden grain of corn with a heart inside it. Aidee says the grain is there because corn is their gold. Every element in that logo has a reason to be there, and she says the rest is another story.

Corn shows up seasonally too. As the weather turns, Adelitaz makes tamales: corn dough filled with meat, cheese or salsa, wrapped in a corn husk and steamed. In Mexico they belong to Día de Muertos offerings and to Christmas gatherings.

Aidee buys locally where she can. Produce comes from Joe Deodato & Family, the Kingston produce wholesaler on Cataraqui Woods Drive. Meat comes from Pig & Olive, the butcher in the LaSalle Park Plaza. Some ingredients come from Quattrocchi's on Montreal Street, which has been carrying foods from other people's home countries since 1949.

Some things have to travel. Corn flour and Mexican pantry staples come from Rincon Guerrerense in Toronto and from Latin Market and Tortilla Maker in Ottawa. All three are Mexican-owned, and Aidee told Kingston Spotlight she loves getting as many Mexican hands on the project as she can.

Before the food truck, Adelitaz was catering jobs and pop-up tables at markets and events, which is the version of a food business you can run around the edges of a job that pays the bills. Cook on your days off, load the car, and hope the weather holds.

She still works the circuit. AWEC pop-up markets, Fiesta Latina at Lake Ontario Park, Market Saturdays in downtown Napanee, Gananoque Ribfest, and Back to the Farm, the summer beer and music festival at MacKinnon Brothers Brewing in Bath.

The food truck changed the maths. Aidee calls it the business's newest milestone and says it had been in the works a long time. What it buys is a place to be found rather than a scatter of one-off Saturdays.

Then she quit her day job.

Aidee now runs Adelitaz Mexican Food full time, and told Kingston Spotlight that the leap feels “sooo scary.” Anybody who has done it will recognise the extra o's.

The food truck is the visible half and the seasonal half. Catering is the year-round business, and it is what carries Adelitaz through the months when nobody is queueing at a window in the cold.

Asked whether there was anyone in Kingston she wanted to point people toward, Aidee told Kingston Spotlight there were several, “for their support, mentoring, guidance or just because somehow all of them have encouraged me to keep going and have contributed with this project.”

She named KEYS, the Kingston charity that has spent more than forty years helping job seekers and newcomers find their footing, and which runs a set of programmes for people starting their own businesses. Our Lady of Fatima Parish on Division Street, whose hall takes banquet bookings. And two restaurants, Sweet Boys YGK and 1000 Curry.

There is also AWEC. Adelitaz Mexican Food was a member of the All Women Entrepreneurship Circuit, a volunteer-run Kingston non-profit that has been running pop-up markets since 2021 and now carries more than fifty women-owned brands across the region, and has kept working its markets since.