It’s 2 pm on a Saturday, and you just can’t quite get out of bed. Not because you’re lazy, but the pounding headache, weakness in the whole body and the nausea that just won’t quit are more convincing than whatever plans you have today. Whether it’s a debilitating hangover or an extra gnarly cold, it could disappear almost instantly if you could just get your hands on some birria. Lucky for you, Zany’s is open at 11 every day and they happen to serve one of the Valley’s favorites! You could make it yourself, if you happen to possess a LOT of patience, or you can let us do the work for you.
The reason we’re bringing this up is because we’ve run the numbers. The same handful of items are fan favorites every single month, and one of those items is our birria tacos. We completely understand, we love it too, but we thought we should seize this opportunity to talk about it with you. If you didn’t know, birria has quite an interesting history. Have you ever googled it? The name birria quite literally means ‘worthless’. The story goes that back in the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors landed on the shores of the Aztec empire and began to violently suppress their people and culture. They brought technology, social classes, and European livestock. The goats took to Mexico greedily and overpopulated the land in no time. The Spanish, who caused this problem, thought eating goats was below them, so the Aztecs themselves had to come up with a solution.
Birria was born out of necessity, greed, indifference, and neglect but somehow still stands as a testament to the power of innovation and good food. Goat is traditionally a tough meat, but they found that cooking it slow in vinegar softened it up considerably. Combined with spices native to the area, a delicious soup was born. The dish is native to Jalisco and is now most often served in Mexico for family celebrations and as a powerful hangover cure. (File that away for later.) However, in 2020, the dish had a strong love affair with social media and took The United States by storm. Birria became an extremely common, and extremely versatile, menu staple. Today you can enjoy birria more commonly as a stew or quesabirria tacos, but also in ramen, pizza, fries, tortas, and even breakfast hashes. At the time of its rising popularity, it hit the Lewiston area as well and became a celebrated item on Zany’s menu.
Chef Nicolas Garcia uses his own unique birria recipe that relies heavily on guajillo peppers and chuck steak from our butcher shop. Every week, prep cook John Boles prepares over 200 pounds of homemade birria. It takes around 5 hours to cook and the whole time, it produces this enticing smell that weaves throughout the kitchen, teasing everyone’s taste buds. During our conversation, Chef Garcia spoke passionately about birria, its cultural significance, and the importance of honoring its traditions. He explained how there was trial and error to perfect the recipe in the beginning, and it was clear to us that his dedication to quality flavor might actually be the secret ingredient to Zany’s birria.
There are only a handful of local spots to get this infamous dish, and we’re grateful you keep coming back to us! Good food is a universal language, and sharing dishes with stories like birria is one of our favorite parts of what we do. This ‘worthless’ dish has adopted a power over all of us, and we have no doubts that it will maintain its position in the top 10 Zany’s dishes for the foreseeable future. If you’re having a family celebration any time soon, consider celebrating with birria. And if you have a few too many drinks, I think you know what to do. (Don’t worry, we don’t judge.)
