Local Chef Celebrated for his ‘Hidden’ Cuisine
When the Carry Outee takeout food stand on Castro Valley Boulevard closed down nearly 20 years ago, Mikey Ochoa had envisioned opening up his own restaurant there to make the foods he liked to eat and serve the community he lived in.
“It was near and dear to me growing up,” Ochoa said. “When I went to school in Castro Valley, I was always thinking that I had to go outside the town to get anything good. So, I wanted to turn that shack into something where I could cook and open up a restaurant there.”
Now, Ochoa, 31, has a celebrated restaurant a couple of doors down the street at the Castro Valley Marketplace where he is getting noticed by the local and national press. However, he is more excited about the response from the community.
“The feedback from people in Castro Valley has been great,” he said. “I have a lot of wonderful interactions. I have seen people I grew up with or I meet people who say ‘this is so cool. We have been waiting for something like this for some time.’”
Ochoa opened his restaurant, named Oculto—which means “hidden” in Spanish—back in December as a spot opened up with the Night Owl restaurant space upstairs in the Marketplace. Within three weeks and $300 to start up his vision, Ochoa is serving dozens of customers each night.
Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle named Ochoa's Chile Verde tacos on its list of Best Bay Area Dishes for 2021. Ochoa was also recently interviewed by The New York Times where its food critics are expected to give him rave reviews.
Local Roots
Born in Hayward, Ochoa attended Castro Valley Schools including Chabot Elementary, Canyon Middle School, and Castro Valley High School for two years before finishing his education at Redwood High School where he loved its curriculum.
At 19, Ochoa started working in restaurants in the kitchen except for the one year he tried his hand as a tow truck driver. As a youngster, he had marveled at the Corden Bleu chefs with their tall white hats. His mother told him if he worked hard that one day, he would wear one as well. Ochoa’s long list of kitchen experiences includes working in Michelin star restaurants, at social media site LinkedIn’s kitchens in Sunnyvale, and executive experience in places like Homage in San Francisco. He credits his time at Lazy Bear in the Mission District as the greatest influence on his technique and says he can still call up the head chef for inspiration and advice to this day.
“That place shaped me,” Ochoa said. I thought I knew how to cook but working there taught me so much more. It was like re-learning how to walk. One of the things I learned there was to ask, ‘why?’ In other kitchens, I was told how to chop vegetables and prepare things because that was the way that restaurant had done it forever. But when I started asking why we prepare with one technique over another, that’s when my managers said I would go far because I was thinking about food in a different way.”
His philosophy for Oculto is to make everything from scratch including the tortillas, escabeche, and the pickled spices that sit atop his Chile Verde Ribs. He says he tries to use as much of each ingredient as possible and not throw anything away. Ochoa says he works his menu in a more technical way than finding some regional recipe or adhering to a specific style.
“We have a small menu with about 12 items and everything is well-planned out,” he says. “What you learn by working in Michelin star restaurant is that the food becomes more intellectual the more you become invested in it. I think more about the alchemy of food instead of just doing something because I think it’s good.”
Ochoa sees ingredients in an “optic way,” which means he visualizes all of the ingredients and how they should be prepared or how he would like to craft them. Building a recipe means breaking down all the components.
“I see something as simple as peas—which most people think you get in the frozen food aisle—I see peas from all of the parts that are edible -the leaves are edible, the vines are edible, the outer shell is edible. I build up a recipe by breaking everything down.”
Oculto is open Mondays and Thursdays through Sundays between 5 pm and 10 pm upstairs at the Castro Valley Marketplace in the Night Owl restaurant space. Reservations are available, but not always necessary.