Press

In 1998, Don Hugo Prado opened a small carnitas shop on Av. Paseo de los Leones, in the Cumbres district of Monterrey. He met his first customer, Don Raimundo, a neighbor from Vistahermosa, because Don Hugo flagged him down in the street with a sample in his hand. He bought a quarter kilo and, for decades, came every Sunday to pick up carnitas for his whole family. That first sale set the model: carnitas by the kilo, takeout, made for gathering at home.

Twenty-eight years later, the shop is still open and Don Hugo is still by the cazo. The kitchen is the same. The recipe is the same. The cuts, traditional (leg, crispy skin, shank) and special (shoulder, ribs, maw, flank), are prepared the way they always were: in a cazo, slowly, in full view of the customer. The flank, the most anticipated cut, is only served on the last Sunday of each month; customers who disappear for months come back on that specific Sunday just for it.

Behind every kilo there is a family table. Some customers started coming as children with their parents, then with their partners, and today bring their own kids. Others, doctors, professionals, fellow michoacanos, neighbors, made the shop part of their Sunday routine for decades. Don Hugo remembers them all. "Families don't get together on Sundays like they used to," he says. That's why we keep going. So the ones who do gather have carnitas worth the trouble.

Don Hugo Prado is the founder and master carnitero of Los Prado Carnitas. Since 1998 he has been by the cazo every Thursday through Sunday. He is the face, the voice and the living memory of the business: he remembers the names of customers who have been coming for decades, the cuts each one prefers, and the families he watched grow up.

Beyond cooking, Don Hugo is a musician: he has a recorded album, physical copies of which the family still keeps, and they plan a digital re-release on streaming platforms during 2026. At the shop there are customers, among them the granddaughters of a lifelong regular, who learn the songs from that album before discovering that the singer is the same man serving them carnitas.