The Bodega That Remembered Me: Casa Moneo and the Hidden History of Latino Cooking in New York

Before bodegas became icons of New York life, there was Casa Moneo—a Spanish grocery that fed my family, stocked Diana Kennedy’s cooking classes, and quietly bridged the shift from empire to diaspora.

Casa Moneo’s original storefront at 218 West 14th Street, Manhattan. Photograph from the 1940s Tax Department Collection. Courtesy of the Municipal Archives, City of New York.

People think Mexicans are a recent addition to New York. We’re not. We’ve been here all along, living, feeding, raising, and loving in this city for decades, long before mezcal was poured in bars in Brooklyn.

Still, growing up Mexican in New York often felt lonely. On the Upper West Side, the only other Mexicans I knew were my cousins, while encounters with the children of the Mexican woman in charge of the laundromat on Amsterdam Avenue were rare. Sure, family friends had kids, but they lived faraway in Queens. And New Yorkers are nothing if not provincial in our own campanalismo.

A Mexican Is Born in New York City

“There are people from New York, and then there are New Yorkers,” a former colleague recently told me. “You, my friend, are a New Yorker.”

Real New Yorkers are born not made, as we love to say. Show me your Regents—or RCT—diploma, and I’ll tell you if you’re legit. If not? Sorry. Perhaps in your next life.

I was born in New York—blessed from birth, if you ask me. At school, I was enrolled in a dual-language program that flipped languages daily: English one day, Spanish the next. The entire year was a constant back-and-forth between tongues, a life lived in alternating currents, switching polarity with each sunrise. By junior high, once I was away from family, my life shifted entirely to English. Spanish became the language of home—and of those familiar summers with my abuelita in Mexico.

Until fifth grade, my cousins and I were the only Mexicans at P.S. 84, part of a mosaic of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Black, and Jewish classmates. Each year, our school’s Thanksgiving meal was laid out on desks lining the hallways, one long communal table that reflected a New York rarely found anywhere else.

At home, we lived in Spanish—breathing it, laughing in it, arguing in it—while telenovelas, newscasts on Canal 41 or 47, and headlines from Noticias SIN, Univision’s earlier iteration, blared in the background. Saturdays were for family gatherings—birthdays, baptisms, or card games like poker or conquián, a Mexican version of rummy played with a Spanish deck. The Sunday scaries were warded off with Mexican fútbol, carne Apache—a kind of ground beef ceviche served with saltines and legendary in my family—and long afternoons spent watching Siempre en Domingo.

Pilgrimage to Casa Moneo

As an adult, once I started cooking and sourcing ingredients on my own, I began remembering Casa Moneo, a grocery store located on 14th street between 7th and 8thAvenues. Shopping there became a pilgrimage, requiring a nearly hourlong bus ride on the M7 to the last stop, just to buy chorizo, black beans, tomatillos, hominy, masa harina, and various Mexican staples. “It was the only place in Manhattan that stocked Mexican products back then,” as my mom told me recently. Casa Moneo was more than a simple bodega; it was an unofficial embassy for a community that felt too small to be visible.

Inside, the small space was lined with shelves packed with gleaming, shellacked cazuelas, shallow clay pots, glossy and wide, built for slow-simmered moles and stews. Wooden spoons and hot chocolate molinillos hung above boxes of chocolate en tabla by Ibarra and La Abuelita. The aisle lined with jars of pungent chiles en vinagre and pickled nopales led to the breads I loved—pink, vanilla, and chocolate conchas, soft and sweet, like Sunday mornings.

Nearby, the scent of dried oregano mingled with cumin and nutty achiote, leading the way to a refrigerator packed with chorizos—fresh Mexican, dried Spanish—a spectrum of reds, each redolent of heat and smoke. But Casa Moneo didn’t sell chorizos sealed in vacuum packages. When the salesperson—usually a Moneo family member—opened the fridge, the smoky pimentón and vinegary heat of chiles encased in pork rushed out with the ferocity of a raging bull entering the ring. Heaven.

Memory, Food, and a Gentle Ambush

It wasn’t until I began cooking for myself, hunting down ingredients for meals from childhood memories—like cecina con frijoles y chorizo—that I realized how easy it had become to find what once felt scarce. Tomatillos, masa harina, dried chiles are all now readily available within a few blocks of my home in Upper Manhattan, or a click away, straight from Mexico. That access now feels smooth and imperceptible, as though it had always been there—here, now, with us. Though of course, it wasn’t.

I moved through bodegas and grocery aisles with quiet confidence until, like a note in a Juan Gabriel song I hadn’t heard in years, the memory of Casa Moneo returned. Not loud. Not urgent. But persistent—like a memory with soft claws, a siren call to something older, once essential, gathering itself around me like a gentle ambush. The more I remembered, the more I tried to conjure it, the more elusive it became—like peering into amber gone cloudy with time, its edges dulled by dust and distance. But now, I distinctly remember tasting my first churro at Casa Moneo: a warm tube of fried dough, dusted in more sugar than cinnamon, tucked into the kind of brown paper bag bodegas wrap around a cold beer on a hot day. Damn, I can still taste it.

My only response to that clarion call was, naturally, a question: What was this place?How did Casa Moneo become the one shop in all of Manhattan that served as ourbodega—my family's go-to for chorizo, chocolate en tabla, churros, and conchas? Why was it called Casa Moneo? And who exactly were the Moneos who made the shop a home for the community?

Who Were the Moneos?

Like any researcher worth their salt in stacks and archives knows, questions like these are paths that lead to the unexpected. In short, I discovered that Casa Moneo was once part of a thriving Spanish-American community that took root in New York in the late 19th century as Spain lost its former colonies, one by one. This was the same world that included the Unanue family, who would go on to found Goya Foods, and the Cuban revolutionary-poet José Martí, who launched one of the earliest Spanish-language newspapers in the United States, Patria. Diana Kennedy, newly returned from Mexico and eager to teach Americans how to cook our food, found the key ingredients at Casa Moneo.

The early Spanish immigrants in New York formed civic societies based on shared provincial origins—networks that stretched through Puerto Rico and Cuba before anchoring in the city. The Moneos, it turns out, belonged to that same lineage. Casa Moneo, then, wasn’t just a store—it was a living remnant of Spanish-speaking New York. A link between bodegas, brands, and the broader story of Latinos taking root in the city, just as the sun was setting on the Spanish empire. But how did that store go from serving Spanish immigrants to supplying Mexican ingredients for a tiny, almost invisible community in Manhattan?

So yes, it was culinary curiosity that led me here. But what I found was history, migration, and memory—preserved in the scent of chorizo and sugar-dusted churros.

Care to join me?