Oakland's famous tostada is back. Cenaduria Elvira is opening near Jack London Square

After more than five years of selling tostadas, enchiladas, and tacos from her East Oakland backyard, Elvira Varela is officially opening her first brick-and-mortar restaurant on Feb. 21. Her backyard shop, which she started during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been closed since the end of December in order to focus on her new place, and the regulars have noticed.

“They’re eager to come in and have the food, and have been calling nonstop for the past few weeks,” Varela told Nosh in an interview a few weeks prior to soft opening, as she was setting up her new restaurant.

468 3rd St. (at Broadway), Oakland; www.cenaduriaelvira.com

Grand opening: Saturday, Feb. 21; soft open Feb. 11 to Feb. 15, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The restaurant, softly open this week, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., is located in the Jack London Square neighborhood on 3rd Street, the new space has peach-colored walls, straw-colored lamp shades hanging from the high ceilings, and indoor as well as patio seating.

Varela’s family is from Jalisco and her menu focuses on regional specialities from the central Mexican state. Her signature dish is the tostada raspada, which the New York Times hailed as one of the best dishes in the country in 2023. The tostada is an elongated, crispy, thin tortilla shell imported from Mexico, topped with a bean sauce, sliced cabbage, cotija and fresco cheese, a protein such as shredded pork, and a red sauce. She also sells pozole, fried tacos, enchiladas, and other items.

Elvira Varela first launched her food business as a pop-up at her parents’ Jingletown house in 2020. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh

Roots in The Town

Varela was raised in Oakland and wanted to launch her first restaurant in her hometown.

She was 25 years old when, out of a sense of boredom and desire to address the lack of authentic regional Mexican food in the area, she decided to hold a pop-up at her parents’ home in 2020. She printed flyers and put them on windshields around her neighborhood in Jingletown, an area in East Oakland along the estuary that sits across from Alameda.

Varela had thought about opening a food business for a few years, but it wasn’t until COVID hit that she felt the timing made sense. “I remember I was hiking up in the Oakland hills. It just popped in my head, ‘You should start selling tostadas.’” Varela said that even though she was relatively young at the time, she had to grow up fast as a young mom. Her daughter often helps her at the food business. “She was our first waiter. She could take on a full-on table order and read it back to you.”

The menu at Cenaduria Elvira focuses on dishes from Jalisco, Mexico, including tacos dorados. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh

Her home-based shop was initially only open on Saturdays for five hours, and she only sold tostada raspadas. Slowly, as word spread, she expanded her hours and her menu, adding tacos, pozole, enchiladas, and tortas ahogadas. She still worked full-time at her day job in human resources and finance at an engineering controls company as well as a few contract jobs, doing accounting for small companies.

As the only girl among four siblings, she explains that she started cooking and cleaning at a young age. “I always had to help my mom. My love language for my siblings is making them food. Instead of saying, ‘I miss you guys,’ I make them food.”

After a couple of years, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the restaurant, then The New York Times declared the tostada raspada among the best dishes in the nation, launching Varela and the cenaduria to the next level. People from all corners of the world, including Japan and the East Coast, showed up. In 2024, she quit her full-time job to focus solely on her business.

A cenaduria experience in Jack London Square neighborhood

A cenaduria is like a diner, Verala explains. “‘Let’s go have cena, that means, ‘Let’s go have dinner.’ A lot of people in Mexico make their house a cenaduria. They’re incognito. You see a house, you see the tables, you see the smoke and smell the enchiladas, and a sign. You park, and you go in, then you sit down. They serve you like they’re your mom, or you just walked into your grandma or auntie’s house. You feel like you’re treated, you feel welcome, you feel wanted, you feel appreciated.”

Varela carries that spirit into her business. “You start in a driveway, you take what you have, and you make it into something.”

The new restaurant is a part of a historic building known as the Western Pacific Depot, or 3rd Street Station, which was a train station in the 20th century. An Oakland landmark since 1974, the building later housed other food businesses. The cenaduria now occupies the wing used to store baggage.

The restaurant is near Jack London Square in a building known as the Western Pacific Depot. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh

Varela kept the outside the same, but decorated the inside to have a comfortable, warm, and modern feel.

“I was born and raised in Oakland. This is where the first location had to be for me,” she said

The neighborhood also has a personal connection. Her parents used to take Varela and her brothers to the movies in Jack London Square when they were children, followed by a round o of ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s.

Oakland in general, is a misunderstood city, she says. “A lot of people come to Oakland, and I get it: ‘Lock your doors.’ But it’s not always that way. It’s okay if people don’t understand it, but they have to come here to get it,” she says about the food.

Cenaduria Elvira will still have the same menu as before — a concise one with six items, and she plans on adding two more dishes. Ingredients are sourced from Mexico, including the tostadas themselves, made by Varela’s aunt, which are scraped to be very thin, sun dried, and then fried in the restaurant. The vegetables and meat are purchased from the produce warehouses in Jack London Square.

“Everything we don’t get from Mexico, we get from here in Oakland,” Varela said.

She learned not to take shortcuts with her cooking from her father. “We don’t just open a can of hominy. We cook, peel, wash, store, then cook the day of,” she said about the corn kernels used in pozole.

The restaurant will offer the opportunity to expand the menu. At her home, the kitchen space was limited. She is excited about adding more topping options to spoon on top of the tostadas, including patitas de puerco, a stewed pigs’ feet that’s authentic to Jalisco. There will still be chicken, cheese, and vegetarian versions for people who don’t eat pork, she added.

Varela gets her raw tostadas from Jalisco and then fries them in her Oakland restaurant. There are choices for toppings, including shredded pork, then a red sauce is added before it’s delivered to diners. can Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh

For some people, a cenaduria is a new concept, and she’s well aware that she is trying to cater to different populations. “A cenaduria is nostalgic to people who already know it. [There are] people that know it, and people that don’t have any idea what it is.”

She has plans to add fried quesadillas, quesadillas fritas, made with handmade tortillas and tacos de barbacoa, which are made of two corn tortillas and cooked until crispy on a comal, then dipped in a beef stew, similar to quesabirria.

She’s a little bit nervous, she said, but stands by the quality of the food. “I don’t think I had a single complaint that said, ‘I don’t like this.”

She believes she’s the first to have a restaurant like this, and is thrilled to introduce this concept to more people in the U.S. and beyond, and hopes to franchise one day. But for now, the focus is on Oakland. “If you do anything with love and you like it and do it with your heart, it‘s going to show,” Varela said. “That’s kind of what happened with us.”

Oakland’s famous tostada is back. Cenaduria Elvira is opening near Jack London Square

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