At La Reforma, Jeff Jinnett turns Mexico City memories into a daily party

“It’s a party every single day” for Jeff Jinnett and his Mexico City-themed La Reforma brewery and taqueria.

Walk in and you can’t help but notice the neon-colored artwork showing scenes from Mexico’s capital.

In the back room, one entire wall features a mural by local artist Natalie Voelker showing Mexico City’s famous Angel of Independence, but it is stylized and has so many other elements that patrons have guessed that it represents everything from a flying bird to a nuclear bomb on Sandia Peak.

However, it’s the Mexico-style street tacos and the restaurant-brewed beer and spirits that have kept the 7-year-old business near San Mateo and Alameda NE going strong.

Jinnett and his family moved to Mexico City when he was 8, so he was raised there and developed a love for the city and its culture.

His business partners are John Gozigian and Javier Castillo, who is also the chef.

Jinnett and Gozigian made their mark in beer years ago. They both developed and opened Blue Corn Brewery and the Chama River Brewery for parent company Santa Fe Dining. They also founded Marble Brewery, along with Ted Rice.

During that time, Jinnett and Gozigian did what restaurateurs do: “We’d sit around and talk about the type of restaurant we would like to have. And it was always sort of a Mexican-themed restaurant.”

So you won’t find green chile cheeseburgers, chicken fingers or other typical bar food at La Reforma. Instead, Jinnett says, they stick strictly to the Mexican theme. That means street tacos with tortillas that are homemade daily, Mexican lagers and craft-style beers and margaritas and other drinks that feature house-distilled liquor.

Most of the time, you’ll find Jinnett roaming around the dining room talking to customers because that’s one part of his job he loves. Not that it’s easy.

“We basically hold a party every single day, and that’s from early in the morning and making all the food, to making sure everything’s clean, to having supplies that you need to welcome your guests, to having a good old time, to entertaining everybody, to shutting it down at the end of the day,” he says. “And then we get up and do it again and again, 360 plus days a year.”

What’s your best-selling menu item?

We sell more tacos than anything. I mean, we’re basically considered to be a taqueria, but we have a pretty varied mix. One of the things about our menu is it’s a small menu. We don’t have anything that doesn’t sell, or else it wouldn’t be there because we want to make all of our food fresh every day. Our philosophy is have a small menu, have proteins that we can use across many different dishes and make it fresh every day so that we have very little waste. That helps us keep our prices down. We want to have very high-quality food at a very reasonable price. And we sell a ton of elote when it’s in season.

You’re also brewing and distilling.

Our brewery is right next door. We usually have about 10 different beers on tap, and we distill tequila, which we call agave spirit, because Tequila is a place in Mexico where tequila is made, and so we want to be respectful to that tradition. We import 100% organic blue Weber agave nectar that’s been extracted, and then we ferment it and distill it here. Our tequila drinks are by far our most popular spirits, especially margaritas. I mean, who doesn’t love margaritas?

Do you think about expanding?

Right now we don’t. When we first opened, our plan was to build two or three. But the pandemic hit, and we almost went out of business. I think that scarred us a little bit. We realized that we have a good thing here, and we have a great team and we have a really strong culture. All of us have worked for businesses that grew for the sake of growth, and it was never the same.

What about the art?

There’s an artist named Charles Harker, and he did all the artwork in the restaurant. We started looking at his artwork, and we loved it. The (Mexico) cityscapes are a little more abstract, but all the others have names of Mexican towns that (he) was inspired by. We have so many requests for information about the artwork, or people asking us to purchase it, that we actually have a printed sheet about the artist with the way to check out his work and where you can buy it.

Did you always want to be in the restaurant business?

I worked in the restaurant industry when I was in college, but I became a systems analyst after college. I worked in a cubicle in an office … modeling systems to build computer programs. I hated it. I realized that my love was working in chaotic situations with customers, and every day is a new adventure. I have that gene in me that just loves hospitality. Like when people are having a good time and enjoying themselves, it releases endorphins in me.

Has the shakeout in the craft beer industry affected you?

We’re a restaurant first, and so our beer and our spirits are a complement to our food. Very few people come here just to have drinks. We serve food to almost everybody that comes in, and that was our plan. We never wanted to be a drinking bar. We don’t serve doubles here; we don’t do shots. We want to promote safe, responsible, fun times and we want to pair drinks with our food. But I definitely have seen our beer sales drop. Our spirit sales have picked up, but our alcohol sales overall are down.

Any hard-earned advice for aspiring restaurant owners?

I would tell them this is not the food business, it’s the people business. And if you don’t want to get down and dirty with people, don’t get in this business. You know, every single customer could be a customer for life, and you’ve got to go out there and talk to them and make them feel important because they are. And remember that your employees have needs and wants. It’s not an easy business.

Do you ever get burned out?

As owners here, we enjoy a very good quality of life. We work hard and we work long hours sometimes, but we take sabbaticals. Last year, I got married and we went on our honeymoon for a month. Those are things that, as a restaurateur, are very unusual because you can’t be away for that long. So when we get back, we’re fresh, we’ve traveled, we’ve done things, we’re experiencing life. We’re not the stereotypical tired restaurateur with bags under his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth and a greasy apron, you know, drinking scotch behind the bar. We’re just not that. And it’s a lot more fun.

Ellen Marks, a former Journal editor, writes One-on-One profiles and Scam Watch. You can reach her at emarks@abqjournal.com.