It’s a grainy image of a fourteen-year-old Silva, slim as he is now, with dark brown hair and bright eyes, standing in a rustic pigsty with thick, rough-hewn stone walls, holding his toddler cousin in his left arm while a half-dozen pale pink hogs linger in the corner under an open window.
By the time the photo was taken, the teenage Silva was already well versed in the workings of pig farming, slaughtering and the ultimate culmination of his family’s traditional craft: cooking carnitas.
Silva and his business partners all grew up in the Mexican state of Michoacán, which is located along the country’s central west coast. The region’s slow-cooked pork technique is a proud, ages-old culinary tradition, and essentially a birthright for any cook from his hometown of Zinapécuaro. No one does carnitas better, or has such sentimental connections to it, than Michoacanos.
Even in Oaxaca, the undisputed gastronomical epicenter of old-world Mexican cuisine, those serving carnitas adamantly advertise it as “Estilo Michoacán” (Michoacán style), knowing it's all the endorsement needed to grab the attention of a hungry passerby.
Pig farming was a big part of Ayax Silva's experience growing up in Michoacán.
Courtesy of Ayax Silva
Big carnitas luncheons are a Sunday standard across Michoacán, bringing families together for an end-of-the-week feast. Silva says that cooking with his family was an influential, and mandatory, introduction to his love for cooking.
“My mom had something to do with it, because she always had us cooking,” he recalls. “It didn’t matter if you were a man — you needed to learn how to cook. I’m the only son, and I have two sisters. My mom would treat us the same. You know in Mexíco, you need to do everything. You can’t say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ No, you are going to do that!”
Silva moved to California a couple of years after he stopped posing for family photos in the pigsty and began working at a restaurant in Bakersfield at the age of sixteen. By the time he was twenty, he had moved to Denver for a kitchen position at the Buffalo Rose. Over the next two decades, he cooked at Mead Street Station and El Camino, among other places. He would occasionally work construction jobs during the day and man a station on the kitchen line at night.
These were long, hard days, and Silva yearned for the social connections that cooking and sharing food brought him. “That’s what I like, man. That’s my passion,” he says. “I like to talk to people. I like to be around people. In construction, you don’t talk to anybody.”
About five years ago, he began bringing the Sunday carnitas tradition to others by running an underground pop-up out of Sandra’s garage. The venture was so popular, it drew customers from as far as Fort Lupton and Avon to their Ruby Hill front yard food cart.
These sold-out successes ultimately inspired the team to open a restaurant. As the hospitality industry began to emerge from the punishing depths of COVID, Silva saw a moment of opportunity when he noticed a “For Lease” sign in the weed-lined parking lot of the former Luna’s Tex-Mex restaurant property in Arvada, a business that had been open for three decades. “I called Sandra and I told her, ‘There's an open space by my house. Do you want to do it?’ And they said, ‘Well, let’s do it!’” he recalls.
At the time, Silva was exhausted with manual labor, and Sandra was grinding away at another service-industry job, while Fernanda was doing much the same in a tedious role at Amazon. “So we got together and put our savings together, every last penny, and we did it,” Silva says.
The location’s interior needed a full renovation after being vacant for six months, and the trio decided to gut and refurbish the entire kitchen with all new equipment. “It took us forever to build this thing. It’s small, but it’s a start,” Silva says.
As the projected May 5 opening date approached, Mi Tierra Caliente had not yet secured a liquor license in order to be able to sell alcohol, and the prospect of having a grand opening with a potentially dry bar on a wildly popular drinking holiday for Mexican restaurants was more than a bad idea. It just felt wrong.
Ultimately, though, the delayed opening worked in the team’s favor. “That was a really good thing that the first two weeks were slow, so we had time to figure out issues we were having,” Silva notes. “But Cinco de Mayo without tequila? Fuck that.”
Ayax Silva with his longtime friends and business partners, sisters Sandra (middle) and Fernanda Calderon.
Tony White
Early on, many guests at Mi Tierra Caliente, who were used to the Tex-Mex offerings from Luna’s, just wanted their crunchy tacos. Silva admits that he felt pressure from these demands paired with dismal first month sales, and feared that hard times called for hard-shell tacos. He considered putting his beloved Michoacán cuisine on the literal back burner and going Tex-Mex, but Sandra and Fernanda reminded him of their shared passion for the food and the joy they have always found in serving it to others.
“They said, ‘No, it’s going to take longer, but we are going to show them our roots, our traditional recipes, and they're going to like it,'” Silva recalls.
And they were right.
The carnitas have quickly proven to be Mi Tierra Caliente’s most popular item, and sales surge on Sunday mornings when the masterfully prepared meat is available by the pound to go (served with pickled carrots, jicama and jalapeños).
At the restaurant, as was the case at Sandra’s home, Silva starts the long, loving carnitas process on Saturday night by cleaning and preparing the meat, which he buys from a certified Colorado wholesaler whom he has known for years.
He takes large whole cuts of the pig — entire rib cages, hindquarters, whole shoulders and flanks — and submerges them in massive copper or stainless-steel pots filled with lard that becomes a hot tub of boiling grease, letting the meat slowly cook overnight, about eight hours. He’ll then pull it out, break it down and have it ready to sell by the time doors open at 8 a.m. “I’m following 100 percent the original [Michoacán] recipe,” Silva notes, and these days, it’s guaranteed to sell out by the 3 p.m. closing time.
Recently, Silva shares, something profound happened to him when a customer — a big fella with a long beard — came in for lunch with his family and ordered a few carnitas tacos. Later that day, he answered the phone at the restaurant. Silva’s eyes are wide with excitement as he recalls the conversation: “The guy told me, ‘Man, when I took that first bite, I knew these were the real ones. I love carnitas, and these are the real ones. I have been trying every single carnitas place in Denver, and none of them taste like these Michoacán ones.’”
Along with the renowned carnitas, Mi Tierra Caliente’s menu focuses on the vast culinary wealth from Michoacán, with an emphasis on homestyle recipes such as warm corn tortilla tacos filled with delectable cuts of carne asada, marinated al pastor with grilled pineapples, and pasilla chile-braised birria. The housemade salsas include a roasted tomatillo, chile de arbol salsa roja and a salsa verde of roasted Hatch green chiles. The menu also has excellent renditions of other Michoacán staples, like enchiladas la Huacana stuffed with queso fresco, simmered in chile rojo and topped with sautéed potatoes, carrots and grilled chicken.
Agave spirit distillation is another tradition that runs deep in Michoacán. Silva is planning to stock the bar shelves with a collection of wild-grown Michoacán mezcals, which will share space on the menu with mezcal margaritas, fruit-flavored tequila cocktails, cold bottled beers and aguas frescas made with ancestral flavors like hibiscus.
“We stuck with our traditional food that we grew up with, and people love it,” Silva concludes, adding that the business has been met with great support from neighborhood regulars, first-time customers and fellow Mexicanos visiting from across the area. “I want them to be happy with the service and the food. That’s what gives me a lot of satisfaction.”
Mi Tierra Caliente is located at 5350 West 64th Avenue in Arvada and is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. For more information, follow it on Instagram @mi_tierra_caliente.
