After many years working as a chef on luxury yachts around the world, Jon Walter moved back to his hometown of Lubbock in 2019. He was out of work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his bank account was quickly dwindling. He begged his grandmother for her tamales recipe, thinking he could use it to open a small restaurant in Wolf-forth, a town about 15 minutes southwest of Lubbock.
“I rented this little space and started running a restaurant, barely making it day by day, working as hard as I could,” he says.
After the tamales restaurant took off, he returned to his Le Cordon Bleu culinary training.
