The Scion of a Cult Favorite Chicago Restaurant Joins 'America's Test Kitchen' to Explore Regional Mexican Recipes

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In the year after his grandmother died, Jonathan Zaragoza cooked his bereft grandfather lunch nearly everyday. His grandfather’s tax practice had been set up in a backroom of the family’s Archer Heights restaurant Birrieria Zaragoza, which Zaragoza helped open when he was 18, and Zaragoza would ask every morning what he wanted to eat. 

“I was just chasing that memory of [my grandmother’s] food and flavors, but also just trying to connect with my grandfather. I love that man,” Zaragoza says.

That year of conjuring memories through food is “what inspired me to dive deep with Mexican food,” he says. It’s now the basis of his career.

On YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok under the handle goatboyintl, a reference to the whole braised goats that made Birrieria Zaragoza a cult favorite in Chicago, he shares recipes for the endless varieties of salsas, tacos, aguachiles, and other dishes that make Mexican food so vibrant. He was just appointed an editor in residence at America’s Test Kitchen, where he will share his expertise in regional Mexican cuisine through recipes and a cookbook due in fall 2027. The first recipe he published for ATK hearkens back to his roots in the family restaurant: the four-ingredient salsa molcajete served alongside the birria tacos at Birrieria Zaragoza. 

“Salsa is such a foundational genre of Mexican food,” he says, which is why he has shared recipes for nearly 40 different versions under the rubric “Salsa 101.” But the Zaragoza salsa molcajete is “the salsa that started it all.”

Go behind-the-scenes of Birrieria Zaragoza and try its salsa molcajete recipe in an episode of WTTW’s Foodphiles.

Even before Zaragoza started preparing that salsa at the restaurant, he was reveling in food and cooking at home. He remembers making a meal for the family by himself at age 9 after watching a cooking show, learning his dad’s recipe for birria around age 12, and helping serve it at informal gatherings of family and friends until Birrieria Zaragoza opened in 2007. By the time he was 22, he had tried culinary school, left it to work in Michelin-starred kitchens around Chicago, and opened the restaurant Masa Azul as executive chef. 

“I see a 22-year-old now, I’m like, ‘You should still be under your parents’ care,’” he says with a chuckle. “I wasn’t ready, but like most people in this industry, you fake it until you make it.” 

“I just knew I wanted to do this,” he continues. “I just knew I wanted to be good at it.” 

After years of cooking around, reading cookbooks, and eventually traveling through Mexico to learn dishes, he turned to social media to share recipes and found an impressive following. It was in part an “overcorrection” to the loss of the recipes of his grandmother, who never wrote anything down. “I’m meticulous with my recipes, and I think that’s why it works with ATK – they’re just as meticulous as I am,” he says. 

Working with ATK’s large team allows for intensive testing of recipes and experienced editorial eyes on anything he publishes for them. “To get the opportunity to write my own [cookbook], my first one, with such an iconic institution as ATK is really not something that is lost on me,” he says. (He’s not the first Chicagoan to explore family and cultural recipes through an ATK cookbook: the food journalist Kevin Pang published A Very Chinese Cookbook with ATK and his father.) 

Whereas he cannot ever fully recreate his grandmother’s recipes, Zaragoza wants people to find and use his recipes so much that they forget where they first learned them. “Forget me. That’s fine. I just want to inspire people to cook,” he says.

One way he does so is by cooking with people who barely know how, in front of audiences who might have given little thought to recipes. That’s what he does in the video series Bite Club and Let Them Cook, in which he chats with professional athletes while making food alongside them, perhaps pausing to explain what cornmeal is while gabbing away about locker room dynamics. 

“It’s about people, man,” he says. “I am so fortunate to be in an industry that affords me the luxury of meeting new people.” 

He doesn’t care how well someone cooks; it’s the simple act of making something for someone else that he finds important. “With cooking, it’s about the effort,” he says.

That was why he chose to assuage his grandfather’s grief by preparing him food. When his grandfather came to try Zaragoza’s food at Masa Azul before he died, he seemed to approve, even if he couldn’t resist some gentle ribbing. When Zaragoza asked him how the dishes were, he winkingly responded, “All that schooling, and you’re still making tacos.”