Gilberto Cetina's Holbox is a festival of flavor

“I don't think it's fully sunk in,” says Gilberto Cetina, reflecting on his restaurant achieving a Michelin Star. “Our team is super excited about it and very, very motivated.” Opening in 2017, Holbox is a Mexican restaurant in South Los Angeles highlighting the best Californian fish and seafood. In 2023, it was voted LA Times Restaurant of the Year, and when it achieved the star this year, it became the city’s only Mexican restaurant with the accolade.

Located inside the Mercado La Paloma, a modest food hall where his family restaurant, Chichén Itzá, has been operating for many decades, the restaurant is far from your typical fine-dining establishment. Self-taught Cetina’s journey towards the star is also atypical. He spent the first five years of his life in a small fishing village called Telchac Puerto in Yucatán, and moved to South LA, with his journey into cooking starting early, as he assisted his immigrant family selling food to make ends meet. “We had to help shredding chicken for tamales, cleaning banana leaves and hauling things over to our local church to sell food after Sunday service,” Cetina recalls. “And that's kind of why I didn't want to do this professionally.” While spearfishing with his cousins on visits back to the Yucatán, he got a taste for experiencing seafood at its freshest.

Though initially disinterested in pursuing cooking as a career, his passion was reignited when he became the General Manager of the second location of his family’s restaurant in southern LA. This is when he immersed himself in cooking, driven by the desire to preserve his family’s culinary traditions, but also an insatiable curiosity about gastronomy, making his way through cookbook after cookbook, including El Bulli and The Fat Duck Cookbook. “That was not my thing, fortunately,” he says, wryly. “And I stopped dabbling in molecular or modernist cuisine. But I did learn a lot.”

The second location closed and he returned to the first, learning Yucatán cooking side-by-side with his dad. “We made changes to Chichén Itzá. It was thriving. It was doing really well. And then I started to get bored with the static nature of our traditional menu.”

This is what led to Holbox, where customers can order a couple of tacos and spend less than $20 or spend over $100 on the highest-quality seafood in the city. What doesn’t change is the attention to detail and quality across the board, enhanced by a custom-built dry-ageing facility, and championing of the ikejime method. All the hand-pressed tortillas and tostadas are made from heirloom corn masa and are the beating heart of the menu, with highlights including a bluefin tostada, Maine scallop taco, and kampachi taco that’s based on a smoked marlin taco popular in Baja California. Elsewhere, there are aguachiles made with ingredients like raw Kauai shrimp; richer, cooked fish and seafood dishes reflecting Cetina’s heritage in Yucatán; grilled dishes such as Santa Barbara spot prawn, and ceviches that include one of the menu signatures using scallop and Santa Barbara sea urchin.

A meal at Holbox is a festival of lively and powerful flavors, and jolts of heat and tang, but it’s all delivered with impressive precision and balance. Whilst the restaurant’s walk-in policy means constant queues most of the week, they also offer a ceviche-led tasting menu on Thursdays and Fridays, introducing even more luxurious and lesser-known seafood. I spoke with Cetina about Holbox’s journey to becoming LA’s only Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant, and how the restaurant is uniquely positioned in relation to high-end Mexican cuisine across the globe.

It must have been quite the journey. When you opened in 2017, what were some of the earlier challenges you faced?

I knew it was going to be an uphill battle. I knew that people were reluctant to pay $24 or $25 for a ceviche, where, you know, a big plate of ceviche is 12 bucks at the local mariscos shop. And it really was a struggle. It was a struggle to get people to try it. But fortunately, we were able to survive the first two-and-a-half—almost three—years of just nothing happening. And we weren't growing, and it was actually getting a little bit slower. And then finally we started to kind of find our niche and find our market of people who both liked traditional Mexican mariscos and also had an appreciation for high quality, local, sustainable produce.

LA has quite a reputation already as a Mexican food city. But it has its own distinctive vernacular. How would you say Holbox connects to that?

I think it's a style of Mexican food that is definitely rooted in tradition. There's a lot of pride in being Mexican here in Los Angeles. And we really like to show that and not hide it in any way, but we're also in a city that has so much great food from so many other cultures that it's inevitable that those things seep into your cooking. Those influences of the food that you love in the city, they always add to a Mexican food that is very unique to Los Angeles, where you see ingredients that you would associate more with Thai food or with Japanese food or with Middle Eastern food in our Mexican food. We definitely avoid the label and avoid the cooking style that would be considered fusion. With that being said, if I try a fermented chili at some other restaurant that absolutely blows my mind, I'm going to try to make a Mexican version of that with Mexican chilis and incorporate it into my food. And that's something that does happen.

It's this expression of Mexican food seen through the lens of beautiful ingredients that we have here. So, a lot of sea urchin and spot prawns and local rockfish and local white sea bass, yellowtails and halibuts. These are kind of the staple, iconic ingredients of Southern California. And we lean on those to make our version of Mexican food in Los Angeles.

With Mexican cuisine becoming increasingly popular globally, how is Holbox representing the height of Mexican food in LA and contributing to its global image?

We're honoring the tradition of Mexican cooking and we're always checking ourselves when we're doing something. Is this actually Mexican food? Does this disrespect Mexican cuisine in any way, what we're doing? And that's something that I'm always asking myself when I'm creating a dish. But what I can contribute to global Mexican food—and within the context of Holbox and our small little place here in South LA, in Mercado La Paloma—is my experience as a Mexican immigrant in the United States; how to cook in the United States in my father's Yucatán-style restaurant and discover the beauty of Southern California seafood. And to just become obsessed with this idea of ‘let's make Mexican food with these things that people are normally only used to seeing at Japanese restaurants or high-end American restaurants.’

The fact that you see these live sea urchins and these spot prawns and this Yucatán-style-made halibut or, you know, beautiful kampachi—I think that that's the unique thing that we can contribute. We didn't know if it would click and resonate with people. Fortunately, it seems like it did. And we're just going to continue to explore this marriage of Mexican tradition and beautiful ingredients.