Jorge’s Mexican Grill opens in Manchester
The new Mexican restaurant on Manchester’s West Side has history.
“This [building] opened in 1910,” George Sklavounos said. “It was a movie theater. I had customers tell me today that they printed their wedding cards here because it used to be a print shop after the theater. I met an old man — his name is George as well — he’s in his 90s, and he was telling me he used to come here and for 45 cents he would get his popcorn, he would get his pop soda, and he would sit here and watch four hours of movies. This was in 1956. There’s history in the building. We found the building, then realized the depth of its history and took care of it. We have completely gutted the building. fixed its bones and then put skin on it.”
Now it is a Mexican restaurant. Jorge’s Mexican Grill is Sklavounos’s latest project. Sklavounos is the owner of Giorgio’s Cocktails & Eatery in Nashua, Milford and Manchester. Jorge’s is directly across the street from his existing Manchester restaurant and has come after a lot of hard thought and research, Sklavounos said.
“I did a lot of research about San Diego,” he said, “which is kind of the birthplace of the burrito in the United States. I started doing research about what grows in Mexico, what makes it Mexican.” It was important to him, he said not to lump all of Mexico’s many cuisines together.
“It’s like the way that different things grow in different parts of Italy. Different topography, different soil and different earth are going to produce different foods. I went down to Mexico; I met with the cooks in the kitchens because that’s the best place to get a sense of the reality of a cuisine. And I came back here and started purchasing ingredients and playing with them — understanding what all those peppers are, the processes that they put in their peppers, why some are smoky, what different peppers are used for.”
“Then,” he said, “we started building a menu.”
For his new restaurant, Sklavounos said, he wanted to work with a limited number of ingredients to start with.
“We have 15 to 20 items that we prep here,” he said. “When you have a few ingredients you can really, really knock them all out of the park. So our chorizo bacon black beans is one item that you can focus on making the best that you can. We use imported spices and Mexican oregano and epazote and the dried peppers. We make our own chili-lime powder. We do make our own pickles — carrot, onion and jalapeño pickles — which is a staple in burrito shops in San Diego. We’ve developed a couple of nice salsas,”
The tightly focused number of ingredients means the Jorge’s menu is equally tightly focused — concentrating on tacos, burritos and Mexican bowls for its main courses.
“But we also make fresh churros and we stuff them,” Sklavounos said. “We have a Boston cream churro. And my pastry chef makes all of our paletas [a frozen Mexican dessert that looks like but is not a popsicle]. And we’re serving Mexican coffees and drinks.”
Sklavounos said he has taken a cue from the restaurant’s location and focused it on the neighborhood’s community.
“We’re on the West Side [of Manchester],” he said. “As you get to the West Side we’re the very first place you see. I think they built the original theater here for that reason.”
Jorge’s Mexican Grill
Where: 290 Granite St., Manchester, 854-5970, jorges.com
When: Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Featured photo: Jorges. Photo by John Fladd.
