PROVIDENCE — There aren’t any measuring spoons or cookbooks in the kitchen at Dolores — a restaurant on the city’s East Side serving up traditional Mexican cuisine from the Mixteca region of Puebla and Oaxaca.
Chef Maria Meza cooks from memory.
“I know what I’m doing,” said Meza, 72, the owner and chef of Dolores, which she runs with her husband and two sons. It’s clear that she does. She was recently recognized by the James Beard Foundation as a finalist for Best Chef: Northeast.
“I feel very excited, because I work so hard,” said Meza, who is from Puebla and grew up in Oaxaca, a region known for cuisine featuring traditionally cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and peppers.
At Dolores, “everything is homemade. Everything comes from the original,” Meza said, adding that they grind the masa every day to make tortillas, and source most of the menu’s ingredients from Oaxaca and Puebla.
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Meza spoke with the Globe on a recent weekday, taking a brief break from hand-making upwards of 700 tortillas for dinner service that night.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Maria, your food is better than it is in Mexico,’” Meza said. “It’s because I do everything with my heart.”
Diego Alcantar, owner of Tuxpan Taqueria, which opened in Central Falls last year, said dining at Dolores reminds him of home.
“The atmosphere inside, it just connected me right away to my Mexican roots,” said Alcantar, who’s from Tuxpan. “For me, it was very difficult to find a little more elevated Mexican food, and the first day I went to Dolores, I knew that there was something special going on in there. I see them as role models.”
People come to Dolores from all over for Meza’s authentic Mexican cuisine, and specifically her famous moles — a traditional sauce that blends dried chile peppers, spices, breads, fruits, and nuts. Meza’s most popular mole is the Mole Poblano, which is cooked with cacao.
“Sometimes people come and if there’s no mole, they don’t even stay,” Meza said.
People also come to Dolores for simple sides done right, like beans.
“We boil and cook the beans, and then you mash them by hand,” Meza said. “People like them because they’re not from [a can].”
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Alcantar called out the menu’s queso fundido — a hot skillet of melted cheese, peppers, and house-made chorizo — and its huarache — a thick oval-shaped tortilla with chile-arbol braised pork belly and jalapeno-onion-radish escabeche.
Meza “utilizes a lot of ingredients that sometimes we don’t even know about,” Alcantar said.
Meza moved to Providence with her family in 1992, and was drawn to the area because it felt familiar.
“Providence looks like Puebla,” Meza said. “It has a lot of universities, schools. It’s in a small town, but it’s beautiful. And that’s why I moved straight here.”
She worked in a jewelry factory in the city for 14 years.
“And I was always thinking, ‘One day I’m going to have a small restaurant,’” Meza said.
She teamed up with her son, Joaquin Meza, to realize the vision — first opening El Rancho Grande on Plainfield Street in 2007, and running the family business for about 14 years. The Mezas closed El Rancho Grande during the pandemic, shortly after opening Dolores in late 2019.
“We couldn’t handle running two places,” Meza said.
Plus, she was already putting in 12-hour workdays, typically arriving in the late morning and staying until after close.
“But I never get tired,” Meza said. “I don’t think in age. I just think in the way I feel.”
She recognizes that the recipes that live in her head should be put to paper.
“I’m not going to live forever. No one does. So we have to write down the recipes,” Meza said.
She’s working with her son, Joaquin, who runs the backend operations at Dolores, to create a recipe book. For now, it’s just for the restaurant, but Meza hasn’t ruled out the possibility of one day publishing a cookbook.
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“We sell cactus salad, and I’m the only person who knows how to peel the cactus,” Meza said. “My kids don’t know everything, but they need to know.”
Chef Meza measures with her hands, for example. “Two fingers” equates about one teaspoon, and “three fingers” makes up about one tablespoon.
“I have everything in my mind,” Meza said. “So that’s what I mean when I say I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m starting to learn and be able to improvise the way she can,” Joaquin Meza said.
Meza was named a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Northeast alongside Conor Dennehy from Cambridge’s Talulla, David Standridge from The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Conn.; Jake Stevens from Leeward in Portland, Maine; and Cara Tobin from Honey Road in Burlington, Vt.
The awards ceremony will take place in Chicago on June 10. Chef Meza and her family plan to be there.
Brittany Bowker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @brittbowker and also on Instagram @brittbowker.