FEATURES | CHARLOTTE
Héctor González-Mora Cooks the Story of Two Homes
The Charlotte chef won Michelin’s Young Chef Award, the latest stop on a path that started with seasonal fruit, lime, and chile powder in Los Angeles.
By Eric Barton | Nov. 6, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Héctor González-Mora grew up on seasonal fruit. He came home from school in Los Angeles to fruit cut up and dusted with lime and chile powder. The meal he remembers best, though, was simpler still: a pork chop, plain and unadorned, the first thing he ever ate that made him stop and think.
“I think that was the first time I can remember eating something and thinking, wow, this is delicious,” he recalls.
It’s a moment that helped propel him into cooking, into the industry, and into a long road that took him finally to running the kitchen at The Story of Mi Cariño, a gastro-cantina and mezcalería in Charlotte’s South End. The cooking draws on his family’s Jalisco roots and a Los Angeles childhood. And on Oct. 21, Michelin awarded Mi Cariño a Bib Gourmand, its mark for good food at a good value. It also gave González-Mora its Young Chef Award. The honors came less than nine months after the restaurant opened, the reward for a decade spent building a following one taco at a time.
González-Mora
González-Mora spent his first years in Los Angeles, but his family’s roots are from a small town outside Guadalajara. After his last day of sixth grade, the family moved across the country to the Carolinas, which might as well have been a different country. “Until then, all I had really known was my little Latino neighborhood in southeast L.A. Suddenly, I was exposed to a completely different part of the country, different people, and different cultures. It made me understand just how vast and diverse the United States really is, and it changed the way I saw the world.”
After Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, his first kitchens were Comida, a modern Mexican spot in Plaza Midwood that many in town thought was ahead of its time, and The Asbury. “I really started to establish my culinary identity. I was learning techniques, developing confidence and giving myself room to explore my curiosities.”
In 2019, the founders of HEX Coffee hosted his first Chilito pop-up, a breakfast-taco stand. At one pop-up, he sold more than 500 breakfast tacos in under an hour. “That was when I realized people would actually connect with something I created.”
Camarones Kora
Chilito became El Toro Bruto, a counter inside Resident Culture’s taproom that opened in 2022 and was built on house-made corn and flour tortillas. In March 2024 he opened Noche Bruta, a Mexican fonda dinner inside HEX Coffee at Camp North End. The menu ran from guac and ribeye tacos to miso caramel churros. “Later, with Noche Bruta at Hex, I saw how well my cooking could work in a more relaxed environment while still offering something exciting and unexpected.”
Akaushi wagyu ribeye
González-Mora on the line
In 2025 he left to build something bigger. The Story of Mi Cariño came together with B-Side Group. He was hired in July 2025, and the restaurant opened in January. He saw it as “the chance to bring all of those experiences together and build something on a different scale.”
He calls the approach Left Coast Latino, Mexican flavors and traditions filtered through the multicultural West Coast, especially Los Angeles. “I want to challenge guests to think beyond what they might expect from a typical Mexican restaurant.” The menu runs from ceviche tropicoso and aguachile prieto to the Hatori Hanzo, a foot-long corn tortilla filled with beef birria and truffle gouda. The mezcalería holds more than 200 agave selections. For the tortillas, the team spent months cultivating a sourdough starter and now makes several varieties every day.
Mi Cariño
The Michelin recognition came in October at Michelin’s American South ceremony in Nashville. Ask him about the future and the talk turns to maintenance, not expansion. “What comes next is really about continuing to improve what we do at Mi Cariño and creating an even better experience for our guests. It’s one thing to receive this kind of recognition, but it’s another to maintain it.”
He is still cooking toward the same moment he had as a kid, when a plain pork chop made him stop and think. The awards are a sign it is landing. The rest is doing it again the next night.
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