Luis Ramirez can still remember the bench, what he was wearing, and the shredded beef torta his grandmother handed him.
He was playing with his cousins in the courtyard of his grandmother Josefina’s home while visiting family in Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico, when she called him toward the kitchen.
“She looked over at me and said, ‘Come here,’” said Luis, the chief operating officer of Littleton-based Ramirez Hospitality Group, which operates Los Dos Potrillos. “I was about to tell everyone, and she said, ‘Shh, come here.’”
Josefina had packed two tortas with her shredded beef. She told the other children Luis was helping her carry something, and the two slipped away for a walk to the town Ჹí. They sat on a bench, ate their sandwiches and talked. On the way home, Josefina bought him ice cream. “I’ll never forget that day,” Luis says. “I can vividly remember every single detail.”
In a family as large as his — his mother was one of eight children and his father one of 15 — a grandmother’s undivided attention was hard to come by. For an afternoon, while the other cousins stayed behind, it was Luis’ turn.
The memory helps explain the thinking behind a major menu redesign at Los Dos Potrillos, which has grown to six Denver-area locations and will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. More than 100 dishes no longer appear in print, from carne adobada pork to Monterey chicken to enchiladas del mar — but customers can still order them.
The family just wants to make it easier to find recipes like Josefina’s.
Her shredded beef recipe – which calls for simmering the protein for six to eight hours with seasonings and dried chiles — came from her mother and was later passed to Luis’ mother, Martha. At Los Dos Potrillos, you can ask for it tucked into a bolillo roll with cheese, avocado and pickled jalapeños, or stuffed in a burrito. “Itap such a special, comforting meal for me,” Luis said.
The beef figures into another Ramirez family story. When Luis’ parents were dating, his father, José, repeatedly requested it during visits to Mexico. Luis joked that the dish may have helped persuade his father to propose.
For the Ramirez family, narrowing the menu means the dishes have left the pages, not the kitchen. “They may not appear on the menu, but if you still have your favorite, and we have all the ingredients, we can absolutely still make it for you,” Ramirez says.
The slimmer lineup is intended to guide diners toward dishes the family believes best tell the Los Dos Potrillos story. Alongside Josefina’s shredded beef are his grandmother Ricarda’s tomatillo sauce, a pozole associated with family celebrations, carnitas tacos first made by José and Martha, and barbacoa quesa tacos developed by Luis and his brother Daniel. The carnitas and barbacoa have also won honors at Colorado’s Top Taco competition.
Reproducing those recipes consistently across six kitchens — in Littleton, Centennial, Highlands Ranch, Parker, Castle Rock and Denver — requires more than writing them down. Los Dos Potrillos employs roughly 600 people, many of whom weren’t even born yet when its oldest dishes were created. The Ramirez brothers rely on training and kitchen checks, but Luis says teaching employees the stories behind the food matters just as much.
“When you really tell the story of where something so traditional comes from, it tends to stick around,” he said.
A cook preparing a 50-year-old recipe, he adds, should feel responsible for making it “the exact same way, just the way that Grandma used to make it.”
Those stories began in two large households in Jerez before José and Martha brought the families’ food traditions to Colorado. They opened the first Los Dos Potrillos in Centennial in 2002, when Luis was in seventh grade. He went to school carrying business cards and menus for his friends. “I’m like, ‘Hey, give this to your mom and dad. Tell them to come check out my restaurant,’” he remembers.
As the restaurant grew from that first Centennial dining room, consistently reproducing the family’s food became more complicated — and more important, particularly for customers who have ordered the same plate for decades.
But for Luis, the purpose of the redesigned menu is to preserve the smells, flavors, and stories he and his brother grew up with and to invite customers to form their own attachments to the food.
“Thatap what we wanted to share with our guests: our family tradition,” he said, “so it can hopefully be part of someone else’s tradition as well.”
