Cinco to Celebrate: Inside the East Harlem Mexican restaurant that became a TikTok sensation

If there’s anything that’s constant in New York City, it’s change, and most New Yorkers have become hardened to the tragedy of seeing their favorite small businesses shutter. Since COVID, the trend has only gotten worse: Places like China Chalet and Coogan’s, which once defined their respective neighborhoods and the city at large, practically disappeared overnight. 

When I think of small New York businesses that have held out, Ollin, the small, orange Mexican restaurant in East Harlem, instantly comes to mind. Located on the corner of 108th Street between First and Second Avenues, they’ve survived multiple recessions and a pandemic, a testament to the power that their community—as well as their undeniably bomb food—continues to hold in the face of gentrification.

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Ollin’s story began in 1997, when Juan Perez immigrated from a small town in the Mexican state of Puebla and opened a deli called Rosas de Tepeyac. It was a place where other Mexican immigrants could buy ingredients that were hard to find elsewhere at that time, like jalapeños and tortillas. In addition to those ingredients, Juan also sold food he made himself, like tortas, tacos, and most notably, cemitas, a subgenre of torta that’s local to Puebla and that you can’t find in most Mexican restaurants. 

The deli blossomed, and it got so busy that Juan had to recruit his wife, Leticia, to help him out. Soon, their three sons got involved in the business, too. On weekends, Jonathan, the family’s middle child, worked closely with his parents at the register and mopped the floors. In 2008, Juan decided to close the deli and try his luck opening a restaurant just a few blocks away. That’s how Ollin—the Aztec term that means “to act with one’s heart”—was born. 

Shortly after Ollin began its operations, though, there was a rupture in the family: Jonathan realized he was queer and began to distance himself from the family business. He tells me that during this time he barely saw his parents. Instead, he found jobs at restaurants throughout Manhattan and found a chosen family among the Latino queer community in Jackson Heights. 

Then, in 2020, the pandemic hit and restaurants began to close en masse. Even though his relationship with his family was shaky at times, Jonathan worried for his parents. “I thought there’s no way Ollin was going to survive COVID if they already had a hard time when there was no pandemic,” he tells Time Out. He quit his job at the Japanese restaurant where he worked and decided to try and help his family’s restaurant survive.

The first thing he did was get on TikTok. Jonathan began making videos of himself talking about his family’s story, how they’d been in the neighborhood for several decades, and, of course, all their food offerings, including their iconic cemitas and homemade churros. Those videos resonated at a time when we were seeing small businesses close en masse, and Ollin quickly gained a following (today, the restaurant has 83k followers on TikTok). For several months throughout 2021, you could see a line out of Ollin’s door, and people would drive from Long Island and beyond just to see what the hype was about. 

Pretty soon, Ollin became a hub for the local community. They held sip and paint sessions and organized screenings of Coco for children in the neighborhood. They also set up an altar for Dia de los Muertos where neighbors could put pictures of their deceased loved ones and honor them. “Ollin has become a beacon for so many different communities,” Jonathan tells Time Out. “We’re so proud that beyond our food, we built a place of community and care.”

The family’s compelling story is the reason many people go to Ollin. But let’s be real, the food is the reason they keep coming back. For first timers, Jonathan recommends ordering their sope with chorizo, since the dough is made in house. For a main course, he recommends the cemitas, which are made with fresh papalo, an herb popular among Indigenous cuisines throughout Latin America, homemade chipotle, and quesillo, a type of cheese they source from Mexico (it’s also commonly referred to as Oaxaca cheese). 

Another very popular dish from the restaurant is their birria, the quesadilla-like dish that you dip into a beef broth. Ollin uses the dried chilis required in traditional recipes, as opposed to tomatoes, which some restaurants use as a substitute to cut costs. If you’re lucky, you’ll also get a chance to try their mole, which is made and shipped by the family’s grandma back in Mexico—which also means it’s not always in stock.

Another favorite is the Plato Juancho, named after Juan, which is a hearty plate that includes grilled potatoes, a whole cactus, onions, jalapeños, cheese and the meat of your choice. It’s the plate that the patriarch of the family would eat to keep him going after long days of work, and a dish that says a lot about the family’s origins.

Ollin is a restaurant that has survived out of a family’s grit, but has thrived out of the love of the surrounding community. Ultimately, Jonathan sees Ollin as a vessel that will propel his family into a more gentle era, an era where they can rest. He wants Ollin to be successful enough so that his family can build their house in Mexico, where Juan and Leticia eventually want to return and retire. “Once I see my parents’ house fully built, I can think more about my future,” Jonathan says. “I want my parents, who are in their 60s, to have somewhere comfortable to go once they are older.”

You can visit Ollin at 339 E 108th Street Monday through Thursday from 11am until 9:30pm.