For Luis Mendiola, the kitchen is his happy place. It has been since he was a kid. The kitchen is warm and comfortable. The kitchen feeds him and keeps him safe.
“It’s like being in the womb. You are always protected,” Mendiola said in Spanish. And while Mendiola loves cooking in the kitchen, his wife, Veronica Lopez, enjoys serving customers.
Together, they’re running their dream restaurant in West Long Beach, Black Pork. Lopez describes Black Pork as “a multicultural, California-style” restaurant.
Before meeting in California and settling in Long Beach together, Mendiola and Lopez learned to cook in various professional kitchens from Mexico to London, Louisiana to Oregon. Drawing from their experiences around the world, they put together a menu of comfort foods: empanadas, mac and cheese balls, clam chowder, Cubano sandwiches, hamburgers, barbecue ribs, porchetta, Korean barbecue and more.
“We want to give people something different with our style,” Lopez said.
The menu is a culmination of customer feedback over the last three years and what the couple just wants to make. Clam chowder holds a special place in Mendiola’s heart because it was one of the first soups he learned how to make, so when customers asked for a soup, it was easy to decide which one. The clam chowder was only supposed to be on the menu for a couple of months, but customers loved it so much they kept it as a regular menu item. The soup, like almost all of their food, is made from scratch and has a hint of spice from the splash of Tabasco and white pepper that Mendiola adds.
With a name like Black Pork, their pork dishes, of course, take center stage.
“The pork belly skewers are decadent; crispy but tender, the smoky flavor is perfect. Chef Luis makes some mouth-watering Cubano pulled pork, too,” Kate Maule, a long-time customer, said. “I honestly won’t order a Cubano sandwich anywhere else because it will never be made with the care Chef Luis takes.”
Inside Black Pork, a three-foot-tall black pig wearing a scarf and glasses greets customers as they walk through the door. A smaller pig wearing a bow tie stands on the counter next to the register. Illustrations of pigs line the left wall and figurines of pigs with wings sit on a shelf above the tables. Mendiola and Lopez’s nod to John Steinbeck’s Pigasus — a symbol of aspiration.
The pig motif and the restaurant’s name are a reflection of Mendiola’s passion for cooking with pork.
“[Mendiola] loves to cook with the pork because he says that you can work with everything: the head, the tongue, the feet, everything. You can do whatever you want,” Lopez said.
In the three years they’ve been open, Lopez said Black Pork has gained a loyal following from customers in Long Beach and surrounding cities.
“I don’t know why people come here, but I love that they do it,” Lopez said.
Maule said it is the food and the warm hospitality of Lopez and Mendiola that make Black Pork one of her favorite restaurants and keeps her coming back at least once a month since they opened in 2023.
“You don’t just go for a good meal. You visit friends, too,” Maule said. “Chef Luis and Veronica aren’t just chefs; they’re the best kind of people.”
She appreciates how much care they put into every dish.
“You can tell Chef Luis put himself into all of his smoked meats; you can tell Chef Veronica puts her last touches on everything before that plate gets put in front of you. I rarely get that feeling anywhere else,” Maule said.
Christine Cabrera’s customers at PBS Pub in Wrigley, kept raving about the empanadas at Black Pork. When Cabrera and her husband, who help run the pub, finally went to Black Pork a few months after the restaurant opened, they planned on ordering their food to-go. But they dined-in after meeting Lopez and Mendiola.
“We hit it off with [Mendiola and Lopez], ordered appetizers, and left with full bellies and hearts,” Cabrera said. Now, Cabrera and her husband are one of the many frequent customers at Black Pork and sell their empanadas at their pub.
“We are a community of small businesses. Our neighbors aren’t just people who live here, but also people who believed in the neighborhood enough to invest here, which makes it even more important that we lean into helping other small businesses that have that same dedication,” Cabrera said.
Black Pork’s owners said they work 12 hours a day, six days a week and run the restaurant by themselves because, “it’s something that we do with all the love in the world,” Lopez said.
Black Pork, 1916 W Willow St., is open Mondays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Tuesdays through Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.