“I had never lived in a country where I couldn’t get Mexican food.”
When Lily Ramírez-Foran first moved to Ireland in 1999, there was no Mexican food anywhere. In Dublin, the capital city where she landed, there were no tortillas, beans, chiles, mangoes, or avocadoes in any grocery stores or specialty food shops. The Monterrey, Mexico native comes from a third-generation family of tortilla makers. She didn’t realize how much her identity was tied to the food she was missing in her adopted country until the day she received spoiled tortillas from home.
“The box got stuck in customs, and by the time they were delivered, all of the tortillas were moldy,” said Ramírez-Foran. “And I cried.”
Twenty-one years after that fateful day, Ramírez-Foran finds herself the award-winning cook behind Dublin’s Picado Mexican store and the bestselling author of Tacos, the first Mexican cookbook published in Ireland. She now makes her own tortillas and teaches people around Ireland how to make and fill them with delicious Mexican-style meats, veggies, and salsas.