When Holbox opened in 2017, the response across Los Angeles was, at best, a giant yawn. At times, the restaurant seemed to be living up to its name—“holbox” is a Mayan way of saying “abyss.”
“We were mocked,” remembers Gilberto Cetina, the chef who put a first-rate Mexican seafood counter inside the Mercado La Paloma, a community center and super-casual food court with six restaurants in the heart of the city’s South Central neighborhood. “It was tough. We operated in the red for two and a half years.”
Even in Los Angeles, a city that’s accustomed to culinary gems that happen to be tucked into the corners of strip malls, the location of Holbox seemed initially incongruous to its concept. Marketplace regulars flinched at the prices—$7 for a single octopus taco? $12 for a tuna tostada? It didn’t seem to matter that Cetina was obsessed with tracking down the best ingredients on the West Coast. What the old-timers saw was a güey caught up in a crazy dream. “They would just think, ‘Oh, you’re trying to be fancy,’” Cetina says. “‘You’re trying to gentrify the Mercado.’”
If you’ve visited lately, you know that this ridicule eventually subsided.
The first thing you usually see, as you approach the front doors of the Mercado, is a line that forms a serpentine curve out to the margins of the parking lot. Those are people waiting to eat ceviches of rockfish and kanpachi, dozens of blood clams, wild Mexican shrimp in a goblet, a red and velvety seafood stew, sea urchins split and spiky and glistening, and (yes) an octopus taco that has become the place’s signature dish. The abyss beckons: After securing a sought-after seat at the counter at Holbox, most of these customers will order and eat way too much—and leave with delirious smiles on their faces. Some patrons have flown in from other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia.
Holbox represents a breakthrough of symbolic significance for the city of Los Angeles and the immigrant communities who’ve kept the city operating for decades. Bill Esparza, the Mexican American author and resident expert on Latino foodways, puts it this way: “Holbox brings relevancy on a national level with a greater message, because Cetina did this in a food hall that highlights immigrant and Indigenous businesses in Historic South-Central Los Angeles.”
On a recent June morning, an hour or so before that hungry throng of Holboxians began to amass, Cetina sat down to talk about the restaurant’s ups and downs while the Los Lobos version of “Come On, Let’s Go” played on the sound system. Cetina’s presence at the Mercado La Paloma is so commanding that even if you’d never seen a photograph of him, you’d probably be able to identify him. Burly, bearded, and bald, he strolls around the room like a military leader preparing for combat. “The mockery ended when we started finding our audience,” Cetina says. “Word of mouth started growing quite quickly.” Momentum began with BuzzFeed, which aired one of its “Worth It” videos in 2019. In the video, part of a popular series about mind-blowing meals, the two young hosts drop by Holbox—and leave in a stunned reverie, almost drugged by deliciousness. Cetina happened to be out of town when the video went live—and viral. “The next day, the team called me, ‘Chef! What do we do? There’s a line out the door!’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Heads down, cook until you run out.’” Team Holbox ran out of ingredients in four hours.
But Holboxmania was only beginning to stir. Even though the pandemic put the seafood counter on ice for a while, with a temporary detour into distributing build-your-own-taco kits, the lines had returned by 2022—and in 2023, Cetina says, “it just exploded.” That year, the Los Angeles Times named Holbox its Restaurant of the Year and Cetina became a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s award for the best chef in California. In 2024, when Cetina was invited to the Michelin ceremony, he didn’t understand why. “There’s no precedent for a Michelin star in a food court in the United States,” he says.
At a gathering held at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, he found himself mingling with culinary titans like Dominique Crenn and Thomas Keller. “What the f--- is happening?” he remembers thinking. Then someone announced the news: a Michelin star for Holbox. “I kind of blacked out,” he says. “I can’t remember anything. Somebody almost tackled me. The day after that, the line doubled. It’s the underdog story.”
But there’s another aspect of the story that doesn’t get much attention: During the years that Cetina was patiently dreaming up Holbox, he was an undocumented immigrant.
“I became a U.S. citizen two months ago,” he said in June. “Right in the nick of time.”
Cetina’s family comes from the Yucatán region of Mexico. He grew up going back and forth between the two countries, spending many of his formative years at Chichen Itza, the Yucatecan restaurant his family opened in 2001, in the Mercado La Paloma—now a few steps away from Holbox. The marketplace has always felt like home to him, but he understands the toll of the anxiety when you’re undocumented in the United States. “I remember the fear,” he says. “I empathize. Every time you have an appointment, every time you have to go out.”
The shock of ICE raids across Los Angeles this summer has put Cetina on edge—and has laced his entrepreneurial spirit with despair. “The fires, the political climate, and now the raids—it’s hitting really close to home,” he says. “This administration, I don’t think they’re going to back down—it’s relentless.” Naturally, he’s well aware of the presence of ICE in the restaurant’s neighborhood. “They’ve conducted raids a few blocks from us. We have a pretty robust plan in place here at the Mercado in case it does happen. But plans are plans.” Chefs at almost every restaurant in California worry about raids, of course, because of the centrality of immigrant labor to the ways we grow and eat food. Part of Cetina wants to stay silent; part of him can’t. “The less public we are, the less of a target we become,” he says. “But then it reaches a point where you have to speak up.”
Grateful for a distraction on this June morning, Cetina notices an ice-packed box that has been delivered to Holbox. He gets up from the table to inspect it. “Ooh, what do we have coming in?” he says. “Soft-shell crabs, yay!” The crabs have come from Maryland, although most of the seafood served at Holbox has West Coast origins. As customers begin taking their seats at the Holbox counter, they gaze upon beautiful local bluefin tuna on display in one of the restaurant’s glass cases.
Today, the Mercado La Paloma is exactly where Cetina wants to be. After all, he’s practically the mayor of the place. (Over a decade ago, when his parents retired, he took over operations at Chichen Itza.)
As Cetina returns to his seat, he glances around as the vast room begins to fill up with workers and customers. “My family and I have built something here,” he says. “This is what undocumented immigrants do. We create business. This country is amazing and it has given me a lot of opportunities. Unfortunately right now, it’s making me feel like it doesn’t want me here, and that breaks my heart.”•
Over the years, Jeff Gordinier has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Food & Wine, and the New York Times. He recently won the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.
