“If you go to my house, this is pretty much how it looks. So it is our home,” she said. “I call them to my guests. They’re not my customers, they're my guests—it's my home and I want them to feel like [they’re] home.”
Her restaurant, Mexican Mom Cocina Tradicional, offers a menu that changes weekly with some set items that appear every week such as her empanadas, enchiladas verdes and choriqueso. Other items change from week to week.
No matter what dish is being served, it is always cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients, she said.
“Saturday, Sunday, any time I have ... I will go all the way to the market ... and get my boxes of fresh things that I need,” she said.
“Everything is cooked fresh at the moment,” said Jaime Reverte, Antimo’s husband. “If you order enchiladas, she will cook them from scratch. The food is high quality, she goes and buys everything personally to make sure that everything's top quality, and everything is cooked fresh.”
Antimo started cooking 15 years ago, making food for her husband to bring to work. After his coworkers started asking for food, Antimo quickly started in the catering business, creating authentic Mexican dishes.
“I started with [doing something] a little more refined than the regular tacos or the regular Mexican food. We're trying to make it a little more refined but [still] homestyle—the way I ate everyday at home, the way my mom used to cook for us and my grandma used to cook for us,” Antimo said.
When the pandemic started and events halted, Antimo kept cooking for her family.
“We had two kids in college at that time, and they were missing eating mom's food—they couldn't come and visit us,” she said. “So I thought of a way to give them my seasoning, my cooking, so I started the canning—I started making my sauces ... I was sending my love in the jar.”
In September 2022, Antimo opened the restaurant
While eating, diners may notice crickets incorporated into different aspects of the interior design.
“There's a sentimental thing behind this little cricket. My dad passed away a little more than a year ago and he loved the empanadas, he loved my cooking. The last meal that he had was crickets with avocado in a taco and he really enjoyed it,” Antimo said.” So he said to me, when you open a place or if you keep doing your catering, call it ‘the cricket,’ call it ‘the chapuline’.”
Antimo already had the name “Mexican Mom” trademarked, so instead of changing the name, she added a cricket to the logo and included its image throughout the restaurant.
Her favorite part about the restaurant is getting to interact with the people that come through its doors.
“That's the best part of my job—that I get to interact with people and please them,” she said. “That's a very good part of it. I like to make them happy and to see them happy and see empty plates when [the plates] arrive to the kitchen.”
Mexican Mom Cocina Tradicional
1027 Sawdust Rd. Ste. 375, Spring
832-614-1798
www.mexmom.com
Hours: Mon-Tue. 11 a.m.-3 p.m., Wed-Sat. 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 5-8 p.m. Closed Sun.
