Socorro Herrera, founder of tiny Los Feliz taco stand Yuca’s Hut, dies
When Socorro Herrera saw the former shoeshine booth in a Los Feliz liquor store parking lot back in 1976, she said she thought to herself, “This is enough for me.”
And it was. For 48 years, Herrera helmed Yuca’s Hut on Hillhurst Avenue with the help of her family and a few longtime employees. The menu and its beloved “Mama” or “Mama Yuca’s,” as longtime customers called her, remained mostly the same, even after a 2005 James Beard award in the America’s classics category and the inevitable changes to the neighborhood around it.
For most of the restaurant’s existence, Herrera sat on a chair at the counter, with immaculate red nails, taking orders and writing the names of customers on paper bags.
“She was funny as hell,” her eldest daughter, Margarita, said over Porto’s pastries at their home in Glendale on Friday.
Since the pandemic, her youngest daughter, Dora, said, she had been there less, to protect her energy and health, but she still visited “the Hut” a few times a week and kept an eye on Yuca’s second location in the parking lot of another liquor store on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena.
After a brief illness, Socorro “Mama Yuca’s” Herrera died on Dec. 23 at age 89.
On Friday morning, Yuca’s posted its first announcement of Socorro’s passing on Instagram. Late Saturday afternoon at the Hut the credit card machine was down, so orders were cash-only, but if you didn’t have enough, the woman behind the counter said it was OK to pay next time.
For some, the origin story of Los Feliz begins on Hillhurst Avenue, under the canopy of “Mama” Socorro Herrera’s Yuca’s Hut.
Dora Herrera, who has been involved with the family business since she graduated from Brown in 1980, sat at a table with a group of friends. Kara Duffus, a New Jersey–born artist who lives in the neighborhood, stood in the parking lot, a drawing board balanced on a bollard, sketching the Hut in the waning light.
A couple and their teenage son had stopped by to pay the rest of a tab in cash from yesterday. The father, Owen Moogan, moved from New York 18 years ago and has been a Yuca’s customer for just as long. “As a New Yorker, Yuca’s helped open my eyes to a different sort of Mexican food,” he said. “And this James Beard-winning taco stand in the parking lot of a liquor store is such a classic L.A. thing. Set up business where you can.”
Socorro’s menu of basic tacos, burritos and tortas sprang from her Yucatecan roots. Her soft tacos educated transplants who knew only hardshell Taco Bell, and sometimes disappointed others seeking more complexity, yet she was among the first to introduce many Angelenos to Yucatecan-style cochinita pibil steamed in banana leaves. And in 2009 she became L.A. Taco’s first Taco Madness champion. Her bean-and-cheese burritos are rectangular purses of American cheese and whole pinto beans; her burgers echo the taco meats with which they share the small grill; and her kitchen doesn’t serve quesadillas (although you can order the bean and cheese without beans).
Hillhurst Avenue is a broad but sleepy street that runs a straight line between Sunset and Los Feliz boulevards.
According to Dora, it was important to Socorro that all customers be treated equally — no preference was given to the many Hollywood celebrities and famous chefs who’d tuck in for her cochinita pibil, carne asada and carnitas tacos, and gang members were welcome as long as they treated her with respect.
Novelist and food writer Ruth Reichl recalled fondly that Mama never knew her by face, although she lived a few blocks away for years while working as restaurant critic for the L.A. Times and had eaten there repeatedly for decades.
“I fell in love with their bean-and-cheese burritos,” said Reichl, who named Yuca’s “best taco” in this paper in 1990. “It’s a flavor that is in my head. I literally don’t go to L.A. without going there. It’s great, I go there and they don’t know who I am. We rented a house in the winter in L.A. two years ago and I went almost every day.”
While Mama called the shots and preferred to keep the menu basic, she was still willing to innovate when necessary, said her daughter Margarita. “We recognized right off the bat that it was her baby, so we helped her with her baby, but we also said, ‘I think you should change this.’ And once in a while she would say, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”
She insisted on making food fresh all day long, which meant that they were constantly cooking and chopping throughout the day; over time she made small changes to improve efficiency and happiness.
She once mashed the beans for her burritos, but decided it was too much trouble, so she started leaving them intact. She got tired of chopping ham to order for her ham-and-egg breakfast burrito, so she took it off the menu.
Sometimes customers requested crispy carnitas. “That was usually a mistake on our part because we had let it overcook and then they loved it,” said Dora. So Socorro would take the foil off, then crank up the oven and crisp it and save the crispy bits for those who wanted it. “She was always like, ‘OK, if you really want this, I can make it happen,’” Dora recalled.
Socorro del Carmen Sosa Suarez was the first of four children, born to a homemaker and a law enforcement officer in Mérida, Mexico, in 1935. From the beginning her father treated her like the firstborn son he’d wanted, said Dora. Socorro’s social nature, her spunk and her adaptability were likely rooted in her early childhood experiences tagging along with her father to bullfights and bars.
“He took her everywhere. He put her in front of him on horseback at 2 months old. They would watch the bullfights, and then she would be taken in the back and given one of the first cups of the bull blood from the kill. He would hit the bars on the way home on his horse.
“When she got older, a bunch of the bars had little tables set up for Mom, and they’d give her this little mini beer — she couldn’t go in the bar, but she would sit outside. And then, when he was ready, he’d just put her on a horse, tie her to the saddle, and tell the horse to take her home.
“My grandfather would always say, I don’t care if you fight, but you have to win,” Dora recalled. “And so she always figured it out.”
Socorro married Jaime Herrera in the early ’50s, and they had three children: Jaime, Margarita and Dora. When Dora was 5 they moved to Belize. While Jaime Sr. looked for work, Socorro used sewing skills she’d picked up from her godmother to start a clothing business. As her daughters remember it, she winged it but quickly became a bespoke tailor to elites.
In the mid-1960s they moved to Los Angeles, where Socorro succeeded as an Avon saleswoman as well as a sample maker in the garment industry. She noticed that her co-workers didn’t have time to shop for their children during the holidays, so she and Jaime filled a U-Haul with toys and went from factory to factory selling toys at wholesale prices to the busy parents.
In 1976 Margarita met someone who was trying to sell an 8x10 space on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz. Socorro and Jaime hadn’t planned to open a restaurant, but they figured it would be helpful to cover Dora’s tuition at Brown. Initially they continued making the menu items from the Middle Eastern joint that had inhabited the space before them, but Socorro soon pivoted to the cuisine of her homeland. Her kids say that they knew she’d found her passion in Yuca’s because she never got bored or looked for another job again.
The neighborhood has changed a lot over the years — long gone are Pedro’s Grill on Vermont, where Jaime and Socorro used to go out dancing after work, and the Acapulco on Sunset and Hillhurst where Mama would post up on Saturday nights to play lively games of Pac-Man. But Yuca’s remains.
“Because everything she touched, it was like gold, it just worked,” said Margarita. “People asked her, what’s the secret? And she goes, I use my hand. I touch everything.”
The sisters used to joke that the worst thing about Yuca’s was that they no longer had food cooked at home — it was all takeout from the Hut. But the family always met around the dinner table at the end of their busy days; they would wait to eat until Margarita got home from work as a grocery store cashier at 10 p.m.
“All of us would meet in the kitchen and talk and drink and eat for a couple hours. And that was beautiful. It was this nice big party almost every night. What happened at work? What happened at school? It was just lovely,” Dora recalled. “People were always like, ‘Oh, it must be so hard to work with your family.’ And it’s like, you have no clue. It’s the best!”
In an interview for the L.A. Times in 2016, Socorro admitted that working with family “isn’t easy, but if they love you and you love them, you find a way to make it work so it’s not always what you want or what they want, it’s a balance.” Her success, she said, was probably due to the fact that she decided what she wanted.
“I set rules and insisted on them and now the same rules are in place. There’s got to be a leader, because you need the consistency of one person deciding and setting the tone — that’s how you maintain quality in what you offer. People come back decades later and say it tastes exactly the way they remember it.”
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