Xalisko Cocina Mexicana

From tortillas to the pass

Tortillas came first: at 7, Beatriz Martines stood on a chair to flip them while her mother made them. Now Beatriz Martines cooks as chef and co-founder at Xalisko Cocina Mexicana in The Woodlands, carrying Guadalajara family practice onto a restaurant pass with Houston training behind it. Her own account of the work begins with her mother and grandmother, and with food as the family’s way of showing care. That is not nostalgia on the wall. It is the working base of the kitchen: memory held through repetition, adjusted by a cook who has spent years feeding many kinds of rooms.

Martines studied at the Art Institute of Houston, then worked from 2005–2013 in cafeteria service at Cy-Fair ISD, at Willbern Elementary and Moore Elementary, while also running Taquizas as a catering business owner. Those years gave her a practical discipline: volume, timing, consistency, and the judgment to make food land well for people who are not waiting for theater. In 2013 she moved into a sous chef role at Aquiles Chavez. She later held Culinary Director and Corporate Chef roles at H Town Restaurant Group, where standards had to travel through teams and menus without losing their shape. Since 2023, Xalisko has been the station where that path narrows back to her own hand.

The trompito as a working center

The restaurant’s most visible gesture is the tableside trompito al pastor, a small vertical spit brought into the room rather than hidden entirely behind the pass. It gives the al pastor a second life at the table: heat, cut, tortilla, garnish, service. Martines lists Trompito among her signature dishes, and Xalisko’s menu language extends that same Jalisco line through tacos al pastor, tamal de elote, pulpo en salsa de chorizo, birria tatemada made with goat, and ceviches including aguachile verde and ceviche tatemado.

The method here is modern without treating inheritance as costume. A tamal de elote can carry the softness of corn and steam; birria tatemada depends on the deeper register of fire and meat; ceviche asks for acid, temperature, and timing. None of those plates works by decoration alone. They ask the kitchen to hold contrast in the hands: char against freshness, masa against sauce, seafood against chile, the old family lesson against the pressure of a dining room. Xalisko’s beverage program stays in the register of cocktails, spirits, and beer, a practical companion to food built around smoke, corn, citrus, and broth.

Warm light, live energy

The room reads polished before it reads formal. Xalisko sits in the Woodlands Mall area, but the dining room works against the blankness that phrase can suggest: modern decor, romantic lighting, a bar with movement, brunch crowds that lift the noise, and occasional live music threading through service. It is an upscale casual room, which means the pass has to carry both precision and ease. Small plates move differently from a heavy procession; a la carte service gives the kitchen a changing rhythm all night.

That rhythm suits Martines’s background. Cafeteria service taught volume without fuss. Catering taught transport, setup, and the discipline of making food hold. Restaurant-group leadership taught standards beyond one pair of hands. At Xalisko, those lessons return to a more intimate scale, where the counter, the pass, and the table meet over a trompito al pastor. The craft stays closest when the cut of pork, the warm tortilla, and Beatriz Martines’s childhood chair remain part of the same line.