Chef and restaurateur Michael Tavarez has always sought to bring Dallas into the future. When he first arrived in Texas from New York City, he sold solar panels door-to-door, trying to get Texans to rethink how to power their homes.
COVID-19 meant he and his sales reps were unable to go door-to-door to sell these panels, so Tavarez decided to pivot to the food industry.
His parents came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic. He grew up on Dominican cuisine through recipes from his mother, who, alongside his father, owned a Dominican supermarket in New York.
“Between the years that I moved here, there was no Dominican food, and I was waiting for somebody to do it,” he says.
During the pandemic, Tavarez would reach out to his mom for recipes, then recreate them in his home kitchen. He sometimes found it difficult to replicate his mother’s techniques, so he would add his own twists.
His knack for home cooking expanded into Picadera, a pop-up concept that would frequent popular Dallas haunts like Strangeways and Trinity Cider. He met Jason Ortiz at the cidery, who began picking up weekend shifts cooking for the pop-ups.
“I grew up in a Dominican and Puerto Rican household,” Ortiz says. “And there was no Dominican food, no Dominican culture, nothing like that down here when I moved [to Dallas]. One day, I saw Picadera had started doing their pop-ups, and I started going out, and that was exactly what I was missing from home.”
The Picadera pop-ups proved to be a hit. Its Dominican chimi burger won Dallas Observer’s best burger and fried chicken in 2021. Last month, Tavarez launched The Picadera Group, a ghost kitchen with three separate concepts that shared a mission to make Dominican food as ubiquitous as any other cuisine in Dallas.
Underneath The Picadera Group’s umbrella include its namesake Picadera, which offers Dominican street food like wings, fried chicken, sandwiches, and burgers, similar to what Tavarez liked to order from food trucks and stands on the streets of New York. There is La Bodega, serving up “bodega classics,” like customizable bodega bowls with rice and plantains. Dominimex is a concept that puts a Dominican spin on Mexican food, including tacos with plantain shells.
Tavarez says he’s had to tweak some of the recipes to cater to his customers. Many of them have asked for spicy food, he says, though Dominican food isn’t necessarily spicy.
“We use a lot of spices,” he says. “There’s a lot of flavor in our food, and I think that’s one of the things that sets [Dominican food] apart. But I have created spicy versions of our dishes, for those that do want them.”
But Tavarez doesn’t cut corners when incorporating authenticity into his craft. Many of the spices, herbs, and other flavorings are shipped into the Dallas ghost kitchen from New York.
“Our food is as authentic as it gets,” says Tavarez. “We’re not substituting anything, we’re using straight-up Dominican oregano, Dominican sauces. Even in our baking, and in our desserts, we’re using Dominican vanilla, and all that stuff.”
One of its signature desserts is the tres leches cupcake, which delivers the spongy, creamy goodness of a tres leches cake in a cute, portion-conscious form. This cupcake is the specialty of Tavarez’s wife, Jen, who he says “has been there since day one.”
“I pretty much learned [Michael’s mother’s] recipe by heart,” she says. “And if we need 100 of them, I know how to make 100 at a time.”
Customers can order from The Picadera Group concepts via food delivery apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub, or through the ghost kitchen’s official website. The Picadera Group is based in West Dallas but caters to various parts of Dallas, Grapevine, and Addison. Tavarez and his crew hope to open a Plano kitchen followed by locations in Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and, perhaps, Miami.
“It’s been really important for me and Michael to make sure that we’re doing everything super authentically,” says Ortiz, “and doing right by our community to shine the spotlight on just what kind of culture we have here. And hopefully, bring that to the rest of the country.”
The Picadera Group, 921 W. Commerce St.
Clarification 10:06 a.m.: a previous version of this story misidentified which burger won Dallas Observer’s best burger in 2021.
