Cooking, like dance or music, is a form of expression that truly shines when infused with creativity and love. And like so many artistic pursuits, it is also best when shared.
Lisa and Martin Metz, founding owners of Tita’s Mexican Restaurant, have been sharing their passion for food with local residents since their business opened in the spring of 2000. They didn’t know what to expect when they first hatched the idea of bringing a taste of Mexico to the Comox Valley, but they should have had some inkling when they decided to name the place after the main character from the Mexican novel and movie Like Water for Chocolate.
Lisa Metz takes a break on Tita’s vine-covered patio to sample some restaurant favorites, including the popular Molé con Pollo.
Photo by Photo by Boomer Jerritt
“Tita is the youngest daughter, so she has to do all the cooking for her family. She falls in love with a man but isn’t allowed to be with him, so he ends up marrying her sister just to be near her,” says Lisa Metz. “So Tita uses her cooking as an outlet, and that is how she conveys her love for him and the whole range of her emotions in this horrible situation.”
In a classic example of Mexican literature’s magic realism, Tita’s quail in rose petal sauce fills her sister with such passion that she has to leave the dinner table to have a cold shower and the shower ends up bursting into flames.
You might not find rose petal sauce on the menu at Tita’s Restaurant, but you may just feel a little bit of magic when you spend an evening sampling their authentic Mexican fare. Then again, maybe it was the tequila… but I digress.
So, just how did a small, stucco Sixth Street house transform into a brilliant yellow Latin jewel surrounded by fruit trees and a lush patio garden, busy every night of the week with an ever-growing and constantly contented clientele? What’s the story behind this Tita?
Lisa Metz spent her teenage years in Courtenay and had family here when she returned to the Valley in 1999. “I came back because my mother had cancer and was dying, and this was my last chance to spend some time with her,” Metz says. “Then she started to get better and, of course, we wanted to believe she would continue to get better, so I had to get busy—I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. So we decided to open the restaurant, which was a rather large thing to take on. She did eventually pass on, but here I am still doing this.”
“Rather large thing” is a bit of an understatement. It took eight months to turn the house into a fully functioning restaurant, nevertheless when they opened the doors people were literally standing in line to get in and have a meal.
“It was a little overwhelming at first. Right from the beginning we were outrageously, painfully busy—we had line-ups out on the sidewalk. And we were serving people very slowly because we didn’t know how to do things that fast,” Metz remembers with a laugh. “So that was the first thing that changed. We had to come up with very efficient systems to feed people more quickly.”
With Lisa working in the kitchen and Martin handling the bar and dining area, it was all hands on deck as they worked to catch their breath. After being open for just two years, they decided to add an addition to the east side of the house and expand the dining area—two very busy and successful years, obviously.