Growing up in Santa Ana, Mexico City-born chef Marco Arreguín watched his mother prepare three meals a day while working full-time. He watched early Food Network shows and “Iron Chef.” And despite a growing fascination with cooking, he watched from the sidelines as his parents steered him toward a more traditional career.
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“My mom worked full time and still would make breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said Arreguín. “For dinner, everyone sat down at the table.”
On Saturday, Sept 12, Arreguín returns to Costa Mesa, where much of his culinary career started, to lead Maleza, a modern Mexican restaurant in the former Native Foods yurt at The Camp.
The restaurant will serve dinner on Saturday and Sunday before launching lunch service on Wednesday, Sept. 23. Maleza marks the concept’s first standalone location following its 2023 debut inside Drift Palm Springs. Both are operated by Irvine-based TMC Hospitality.
Born in Mexico City, Arreguín came to the States when he was 3. His family settled near downtown Santa Ana before later moving toward the city’s western edge near Fountain Valley. Cooking interested him early on in life, though his parents didn’t initially see it as a profession.
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“When I was first interested in cooking, my parents were like, ‘That’s for women. What are you doing?” he recalled. However, he did learn a lot about cooking through his mother. “I would just watch her all the time.”
Arreguín eventually took an office job in accounting. But at 25, with a daughter on the way, he reconsidered.
“If I didn’t follow my dreams of doing what I wanted to do, it would be really hard for me to say the same thing to this little girl that I’m about to have,” he said.
Friends already working in Santa Ana restaurants pointed him toward Charlie Palmer at South Coast Plaza, which shuttered in 2015, where the kitchen became his education. “I just fell in love with it, and I dedicated my life to it after that,” he added.
He later joined Carlos Salgado’s revered and influential Taco Maria in Costa Mesa as a line cook, later returning as chef de cuisine. Also gracing his resume are stints at King’s Highway at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs and Michael Cimarusti’s Best Girl in Downtown Los Angeles. More recently, Arreguín worked with Wes Avila at Ka’Teen, MXO and Hecho Libre in Los Angeles.
That experience helped shape his approach to Maleza and to a phrase that he believes gets tossed around too freely these days — “modern Mexican.”
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“Modern Mexican is just thrown around so much,” he said. “We’re a from-scratch kitchen, and we’re trying to follow the right techniques.”
At Maleza, that term can mean anything from reworking a familiar mole or shifting its presentation while keeping the cooking rooted in tradition. “Every plate has a little bit of the soul of a Mexican dish,” he added.
Dinner will span seafood, masa-based dishes and more. Opening dishes include hamachi aguachile with salsa negra; yellowtail ceviche with tomatillo, jicama and serrano; branzino Veracruzana; and an eye of ribeye with celery root mole. Desserts will include churros served with dulce de leche and espresso ice cream, as well as horchata arroz con leche made with Oaxacan cornmeal crumble, almonds and horchata ice cream.
Masa appears throughout the menu, including green Oaxacan masa cornbread with smoked butter and salsa macha, and masa dumplings with adobo-braised beef and salsa verde. Speaking of, Arreguín is sourcing the masa from Grano, Fonda Moderna’s tortilleria, in Santa Ana.
“I have so much love for Santa Ana that as soon as he said, ‘I’m in Santa Ana,’ I was like, ‘Perfect, man, we’ve got to work together,’” he said.
Also of note: The bar will reach beyond tequila and mezcal with bacanora (“tequila’s friendlier cousin”), Mexican wines and zero-proof libations.
One dish, however, best ties together Arreguín’s career — roasted scallops served in their shells. The presentation, he said, nods to his Taco María days. While the dish itself, essentially a scallop take on oysters Rockefeller with a Baja bent, reflects the creative freedom he says Avila helped encourage.
“He really tried to push my creativity,” said Arreguín. “And really tried to nurture that part of me.”
Opening hours are for dinner only from Sept. 12 through Sept. 13 and Sept 16 through Sept. 20, with lunch service beginning on Sept. 23.
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Find it: 2937 Bristol St., ste E100, Costa Mesa, malezacostamesa.co