New Ala eatery mixes Southern and Mexican cooking

Southern food goes south of the border when the ownership group behind the Birmingham-based Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q chain debuts its newest concept Tuesday in Homewood — a Southern-influenced Mexican restaurant with the tongue-in-cheek name of Little Donkey.

The menu features such culture-blending dishes as chile-spiked fried chicken, hickory-smoked barbecue tacos and oven-roasted Gulf shrimp seared in Lodge Cast Iron skillets and served with house-made salsa and guacamole.

“This is authentic Mexican food that has a Southern soul to it,” is the way Jim ‘N Nick’s commissioner of culture Sam Burn describes it.

Located in suburban Birmingham, Little Donkey moved into an old Alabama ABC store, which has undergone a yearlong makeover in its transition from liquor store to 140-seat restaurant.

Only the shell of the old building remains, as designer John Michael Bodnar, a partner in the Fresh Hospitality Group that owns Little Donkey, has reinvented the space using recycled pine, pressed tin, glazed windowpanes and stained concrete floors.

“We didn’t want the restaurant to be 100 percent where you walked in and it felt like a Mexican restaurant,” Little Donkey co-owner and creative director Nick Pihakis says. “We wanted to have touches of that and the actual feeling that you were in the South. We are merging the two cultures.”

Pihakis, who, with the help of his father, Jim, founded Jim ‘N Nick’s in 1985, says his inspiration for Little Donkey goes back about five years, when he visited San Francisco’s La Cocina, a nonprofit incubator kitchen that helps low-income and mostly Hispanic food vendors launch and grow their businesses.

Pihakis spent some time working alongside the vendors in the La Cocina kitchen and getting a crash course in how to prepare authentic Mexican street food.

Joshua Gentry, who has been with Jim ‘N Nick’s for nearly a decade, most recently as supervisor of the Birmingham market, is the new restaurant’s chef and managing partner.

Pihakis and Gentry spent the past couple of years traveling to Mexico to develop and fine-tune the menu, which they were still tweaking as late as last week.

Having been in the restaurant business since he started washing dishes at 14, the 38-year-old Gentry says he has worked alongside Mexicans for most of that time, and he wants the Little Donkey menu to reflect and respect their culture.

“This is kind of personal for me,” Gentry adds. “The techniques that we know are Southern, and that means smoking meats. But we are not going to take those meats and smoke them with Southern flavors. We are going to smoke them with Mexican flavors.”

All but four of the 24 members of the Little Donkey kitchen staff are Hispanic, including kitchen manager Ender Rodriguez, Gentry says.

“I’m not at all afraid — matter of fact, I’m slightly proud of the fact — that I don’t mind looking at them and saying, ‘Could I be doing this a better way?’” Gentry says.

Just like at Jim ‘N Nick’s, every dish at Little Donkey is made from scratch — from the soups and salsas to the tacos and tortas.

It’s the only way to do it, Pihakis says.

“This food is very sensitive, and if it’s not made fresh every day, you can really tell the difference,” he says. “So it’s pretty labor-intensive on the front end.”

All of the breads for the sandwiches are baked in-house, as well, and the tortillas are not only pressed on site, but the corn for the mesa is ground on the premises, too.

“It’s the full cycle,” Burn says. “We grind the corn into meal and then we turn that meal into masa. Then we take that masa and press it into tortillas and cook our tortillas to order.”

As much as possible, Little Donkey gets its produce and meats from family farmers and local and regional food purveyors, including tomatoes from Mt Laurel Farm in Shelby County, eggs from McEwen & Sons in Wilsonville, pork from Drexel Johnson Farms in Elba and beef from White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga.

Pihakis and Gentry came up with the name for their new restaurant when they discovered that burrito, in Spanish, means “little donkey.” It was too perfect.

“Every time I would say it to somebody, they would laugh,” Pihakis says. “I thought that’s got to be the name of it if it makes people feel good right off the bat.”

That feel-good theme is also reflected in Little Donkey’s bar program, which was concocted by mixologist LeNell Camacho Santa Ana, who, before joining the Little Donkey team, grew up in Alabama, lived a couple of years in Mexico and ran a boutique liquor shop in Brooklyn.

Beside local beers from Birmingham’s Avondale Brewing Co. and Good People Brewing Co. and Jim ‘N Nick’s own Reverend Mudbone’s in-house brand, the bar menu features 10 Southern bourbons and an equal number of Mexican tequilas.

Camacho Santa Ana also created a cocktail especially for the restaurant. The Donkey’s Daddy is a bourbon and tequila drink mixed with house-made hibiscus syrup and key lime juice.

“My thought was trying to combine the love of our tequila and then our second love of bourbon and give them both an equal chance to shine,” Camacho Santa Ana says.

Nonalcoholic aguas frescas, which are fruit drinks popular in Mexico, include fresh-squeezed limeade and horchata, a milky drink made of rice, cinnamon, vanilla and crushed almond that goes well with spicy foods.

The Fresh Hospitality Group plans to open a second Little Donkey in downtown Tuscaloosa, next door to where it is opening its newest Jim ‘N Nick’s at the end of this month, Pihakis says.

Information from: The Birmingham News, http://www.al.com/birminghamnews