- Michael Gebert
- Marcos Carbajal at Carnitas Uruapan
If you order carnitas at a chain burrito place, you will likely get roasted, shredded pork shoulder. For Marcos Carbajal, that’s like using “barbecue” to mean only one kind of meat. “There’s shoulders, there’s ribs, there’s pork belly, there’s pork skin,” he says, pointing to each on a styrofoam plate we’ve just been handed at his family’s restaurant, Carnitas Uruapan in Pilsen. “Usually the shoulders and the ribs are the top two choices for beginning eaters. But at a more advanced level of carnitas eating, a lot of people like more of the skin, even as far as some of the organs like the kidneys, the liver, all of it. We cook the whole hog.” He puts together a taco containing shoulder, some of the belly (more rubbery than pan-fried bacon) and a little of the near-gelatinous skin, then douses it all with some of the house-made salsa. “The specialty cuts are only available first thing in the morning,” he says. “They sell out pretty quick.”
Marcos, 31, grew up living over the restaurant and working in it from a young age—”I’ve been involved with the restaurant pretty much since I was born”—but he was happy to get away from it by the time he went off to the University of Michigan. He worked for a major financial company for about seven years, but having grown up the son of an entrepreneur, he harbored ideas of having his own business someday. While he contemplated that, he had to confront the fact that his family already have one.
