Raul Medina loves meat. He loves the taste, the smell. He loves the different gristly flavors and the different textures. He loves carnitas and carne asada. He loves Philly cheesesteaks.
He loves meat but has been a vegan most of his life, and has not eaten it in a long time.
The “meats” he eats these days are all vegan. He makes them himself with things like dehydrated soy chips, tofu skin (also known as yuba) and mushrooms.
“I can make things like beef cheek. I can make things like tongue out of lion’s mane mushroom, which is pressed and then rehydrated, fried a little bit, and then cut up in a certain way, mixed with certain sauces so that it really, really, really tastes like tongue,” he said. “Our king trumpet mushroom carnitas outsells our soy carnitas at this point.”
Recently, Medina created what he sees as the holy grail of vegan meat from mushrooms—skirt steak. You can marinate it, put it on your grill, flip it around and it doesn’t fall apart. It has the mouthfeel of steak.
“No one has tried that yet,” said Medina. “Except for me, my close friends, and every single response has been like: ‘This is insane. This is crazy. This is next level.’ It’s the backyard Mexican barbecue meat.”
La Venganza: Soft opening Dec. 8 and 9, 4 to 9 p.m.; official opening Dec. 15, 4 to 9 p.m.; 6419 Telegraph Ave. venganzafoods.com
The mushroom skirt steak is what he used for his first taste of Korean barbecue in years. It is also what he will use to make carne asada tacos and burritos at La Venganza, his highly anticipated vegan taqueria soft opening Dec. 8 on Telegraph Avenue near Alcatraz in Oakland.
The taqueria is Medina’s first brick-and-mortar restaurant after years of doing pop-ups.
“I started on 15th and Harrison in downtown Oakland, with a Blackstone griddle that cost me $100, and just no care in the world,” he said.
Medina’s cares started piling up the moment he decided to open a “real” restaurant in Oakland.
Eight months of remodeling, eight months of wrangling with various city and county departments and eight months where he couldn’t serve food, which is all he really wants to do. He loves feeding people.
From ranch hand to vegan
Medina grew up in Santa Ana, Calif., but he learned to cook at a ranch in Durango, Mexico, where he lived and worked as a young teen.
“Durango, that’s basically where my entire family’s from,” said Medina, “All the recipes that we have are from there. It’s a lot of marinade. It’s a lot of making things taste better using plants.”
The ranch is also where he stopped eating meat.
“Everybody has to do things they don’t like to do in a ranch,” explained Medina, who hated slaughtering chickens and witnessing calves get skinned.
“It was a very visceral reaction. Every time I see chicken being prepared now, I’m like, ‘Ugh, I can’t,’” he said.
So he became a vegetarian.
“I got made fun of a lot in Mexico, a lot of: ‘You don’t eat meat? Why? Why don’t you eat meat? Go on, just eat a little bit. Here, eat this. Here, I snuck this in for you. I know you eat a little on the side.’”
“Vengeance drives me because I can go to L.A., and see all these people who put salt and pepper on their meat and think they’re hot shit, and have my vegan taco beat them, laugh in their face and come back to Oakland.”
Raul Medina
When he returned to the states he learned about factory farming, slaughterhouses and how hard and dangerous farm work can be — work done mostly by immigrants. It turned him off animal products entirely. His turn to veganism also had a punk rock edge to it.
“I’m going to do this because screw the world,” Medina said.
For a young vegan living in Southern California drawn to counterculture, the Bay Area loomed large and he moved to Oakland in 2012.
In the East Bay he ate at Souley Vegan, Timeless Coffee & Bakery and frequented Chinatown restaurants where he devoured vegetable-based foods that were beefy, porky, fishy—that tasted just like meat. It was a revelation. At the time, he worked as a law clerk, a job he loathed.
“Being a law clerk is depressing work when you’re doing it for immigration,” said Medina. “Every day I had to tell people that they weren’t allowed to be in this country, and that gets to you.”
One day in 2015 he woke up and decided to buy a griddle. “I’m gonna do what my grandparents would have done,” he said. “I’ll sell f—ing tacos.”
He thought back to all the vegan “meats” he had eaten in Chinatown and mixed in what he knew from his mom’s cooking to make vegan carnitas.
His first day selling tacos at 15th and Harrison streets attracted about 30 people. The second one maybe 50. By his third pop-up there were long lines winding down the sidewalk. It wasn’t just “hippie vegans,” said Medina.
“No, it was a bunch of different people. Construction workers who saw the line and then said, ‘F— it, I’m gonna try this taco.’ That was inspirational to me.”
Next, he held pop-ups inside other restaurants, inside bars, even inside a liquor store. And in Southern California he did pop-ups in his hometown of Santa Ana and in Los Angeles.
In L.A. he was invited to participate in various taco festivals, and in 2018 his vegan tacos won Best Los Angeles Taco at L.A. Taco’s “Taco Madness.” Not best vegan taco. Best taco, period.
“We beat every meat out there,” said Medina. “I’ll say it: We beat your meat!”
“The Vengeance”
If it sounds like Medina has a chip on his shoulder, it’s because he does. He proudly admits it. It is what drives him and what prompted him to name his taqueria “La Venganza.” It’s not the Spanish word for vegan, as many assume. It means “vengeance.”
“Vengeance drives me because I can go to L.A., and see all these people who put salt and pepper on their meat and think they’re hot shit, and have my vegan taco beat them, laugh in their face and come back to Oakland,” Medina said.
But accolades and hype don’t always equal success in the highly competitive restaurant industry.
“Something I see every day in this place is Michelin-rated, Michelin Bib Gourmand [restaurants]. Three months later, they’re closed,” he said. “SF Chronicle mentions this best of blah blah blah. Half of them are closed. Half of them are in scandals.”
Many of those restaurants shutting down are vegan ones, like Medina’s beloved Souley Vegan, which, in his mind, is an example of a business spread too thin and overly reliant on outside financing.
“Vegan restaurants have been dying left and right,” Medina wrote in an Instagram post in October. “I blame loans, bad investments and hubris … a restaurant is hard work, but I thrive on challenges.”
Medina has his own plans for growing La Venganza. A taqueria in Santa Ana is in the works, as well as a larger space in Los Angeles.
La Venganza is also slated to be one of the vendors at Saluhall in 2024, the new food hall at the recently opened IKEA in downtown San Francisco.
Other vendors at Saluhall include Bay Area favorites Curry Up Now, Momo Noodle, Casa Borinquena and the Sarap Shop.
“That’s Chinese, that’s Indian, that’s Puerto Rican and that’s Filipino,” said Medina. “That’s so many different foods!”
Diversity of foods and diversity of flavors are important to Medina. And it’s something he thinks industrial plant-based meat companies like Impossible and Beyond don’t quite get.
“Look, just point blank, our meats here taste better than anything that Impossible is daring to make,” he said. “If I taste a taco with Impossible meat, and I taste a taco with my beef cheek or my carnitas, or anything else, I’m going to go nine times out of ten to [mine]. Any Mexican on earth is going to go nine times out of ten to mine. And that’s what those big industry people aren’t really recognizing. They think that the milestone is just we replicated it. The real milestone is we replicated the diversity in it.”
Once fully up and running at the Telegraph Avenue taqueria (the official grand opening is scheduled for Dec. 15) Medina will serve tacos, burritos, nachos and loaded fries, along with lots of special items and “crazy new ideas.” Things like mole and pozole and tamales. He will also have bakery service in the morning—“panaderia hours”—where he will serve conchas, cold brew and drip coffee.
Pricing is something Medina thinks about a lot. Nothing on the menu will be more than $25, and most items cost far less. Tacos run about $5. Burritos will start at $15 and go up to about $20.
“People will comment: ‘$15 for a burrito? That’s insane. I pay $8 over here,’” Medina said. “Yeah, for a tiny little burrito. Cool. We make two-pound burritos with amazing vegan meats. They’re priced accordingly. The calorie content of this is enough, trust me, to get you through two days.”
And while vengeance may drive him, it’s love—love for the food, love for his customers and love for Oakland—that sustains him.
“Honestly, I just want to feed the people,” Medina said. “I want to feed you!”
