At Hermanas, East Austin’s New Fine Dining Restaurant, Expect the Unexpected
Chef Silvino Sanchez’s inaugural restaurant blurs the lines between Mexican, Thai and Lao cuisine for an irreplicable dining experience
The first thing you will notice when you visit Hermanas, East Sixth’s two-month-old Mexican and Southeast Asian-inspired restaurant, is how good it smells.
Before even sensing the aroma of the many delicious appetizers and entrees soon to be served, the mingling scents of palo santo and copal set your mind and body at ease, allowing you to melt into the inimitable dining experience ahead. Just like the blending of scents, Hermanas’ Chef Silvino Sanchez blends cultural influences in a way where you don’t quite know where one begins and another ends — and that’s the fun of it.
Cuisine that challenges labels
Describing exactly how the culinary traditions of Southeast Asia and Mexico come together would be appropriate, but it’s much easier to look at Sanchez’s life to understand Hermanas. Sanchez grew up in Austin’s Del Valle, but visited Guadalajara, Mexico, every summer to visit his grandmother, whose techniques still anchor his cooking today. But despite his Mexican heritage, it was Austin’s Thai and Lao communities that primarily shaped Sanchez’s home life. Later, he would train under Chef Thai Changthong of the now-closed Thai Kun and work as sous chef at Michelin-starred Denver restaurant BRUTØ before returning to Austin to open Hermanas. His first solo endeavor, the experience of serving his own food to customers can simply be described as “surreal,” he says.
In the best way possible, Sanchez wants diners who visit Hermanas to be confused. One popular appetizer, Callo de Hacha Tostada, makes the point. Upon first glance, the dish looks like a classic tostada spread with avocado and topped with scallops. But once a bite is taken, the flavors resemble nothing you might find at a Mexican taqueria. “You’re seeing one thing, and you’re tasting another. It sort of trips you up,” Sanchez says. “It challenges your idea of what something is supposed to be.”
More than a meal
Once seated in the restaurant — whose interiors, with dark wood, exposed brick and playful details, somehow feel reminiscent of a summer spent with abuelita — you can start off the night by ordering from the drink menu, which features creative beverages that range from Spanish wine to agave-spirit-based cocktails, and then open with an appetizer like the Callo de Hacha Tostada or Wagyu Larb. For mains, popular choices include a Panang Curry Mole or Pescado Zarandeado, a seafood dish with a carrot butter sauce — a “plate licker,” one server said. But at the end of the day, with an open mind and empty stomach, you really can’t go wrong.
Finally, it’s time for dessert. You can safely go with the decadent chocolate tart, or to truly top off an adventurous experience, order the Helado de Queso, which translated from Spanish literally means “cheese ice cream.” Of course, adorned with roasted poblano chili jam and mango tuile, the dish feels much more sophisticated than the “struggle meal” of grilled chili strips with cheese that Sanchez says inspired the sweetly savory dessert. Just like every dish that preceded it, the Helado de Queso defies labels, solidifying Hermanas as a restaurant as dynamic and undefinable as the chef who started it.
Like the Helado de Queso, every dish, ingredient and seemingly minor detail at Hermanas has a story. Communicating with guests about the significance of the food that they’re eating, Sanchez says, gets them excited about the experience, beyond having a delicious meal. “Opening people’s minds and seeing their faces light up when you share that information is one of the things that I love about cooking,” he says.
Some may call Hermanas a “fusion” restaurant, but Sanchez disagrees. “I personally hate the term ‘fusion,’” Sanchez says. “It doesn’t take into account the natural progression of food. All food is fusion, if you go back far enough. Just because it’s new or unfamiliar, why do we have to put a different label on it?”
Because at the end of the day, Sanchez believes, one thing that people of all cultural backgrounds can bond over is “really good food.” And at Hermanas, there is something for everyone, whether one is a foodie with an insatiable curiosity, an expert in disparate culinary traditions or just really hungry.
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