Siblings Arturo Pérez and Karina Pérez turn family recipes into small-batch, locally sourced flour tortillas delivered across the region, supporting restaurants and home cooks alike
By Renee Ambroso | Photography by John Michael Simpson
Saturdays rarely offer rest for the Pérez family. That’s when siblings Arturo Pérez and Karina Pérez gather in the kitchen of their parents, Juan Pérez and Juana Pérez, to turn out as many as 800 flour tortillas by hand. They begin by dissolving salt from Wilmington-based Sea Love Sea Salt Co. in water before adding pork fat sourced from Saxapahaw’s Left Bank Butchery and flour from Lindley Mills in Graham, North Carolina.
The dough rests briefly before it’s weighed and shaped into perfectly identical balls that are then pressed, cooked and cooled. Finally, the family packages the tortillas and piles them into Arturo’s car – it’s his task to deliver them to the porches and stoops of customers across the Triangle. Arturo and Karina were born in Tamaulipas, a northeastern Mexican border state where flour tortillas anchor daily meals. Their childhood also included hands-on experience with nixtamalization, the traditional method of preparing maize for use in cooking, often to make corn tortillas.
For the ‘Gram
Arturo has documented his favorite local bites, small businesses and restaurants through his Instagram
account, @cheerwineanddine, for more than a decade. “Like anybody else, [Karina and I] have our favorite chains that we grew up on, but a good 95% of what I post there are local restaurants,” Arturo says.
Northern Exposure
The name Del Norte carries layered meaning – not only does it reference the Spanish name for our state (“Carolina Del Norte”), the moniker also highlights the popularity of flour tortillas in northern regions of Mexico and honors the Pérez family’s heritage.
“Our grandpa had cornfields,” Arturo says. “We would go to harvest the corn from the fields, dry it and [carry out] the whole nixtamalization process.” Despite that early exposure, flour tortillas remained the more prevalent staple in their diets. The preference remained when the family immigrated to South Texas, where flour tortillas hold far greater popularity and prevalence than corn.
When Arturo moved to the Triangle in the early 2000s, he quickly noticed the lack of truly delicious breakfast tacos and quality flour tortillas made with animal fat that were familiar from his upbringing. Juana occasionally froze and shipped stacks of tortillas to his door from Texas, a stopgap that ended when she and Juan moved to Durham about a decade ago, shortly after Karina relocated to the city.
The move planted a seed. Arturo envisioned sharing his mother’s breakfast tacos with the community through a farmers market stand.
Frequent visits to the Durham Farmers Market introduced him to many local entrepreneurs who had launched businesses that way, like the folks behind Monuts and Pie Pushers. Arturo met and befriended the owners of the now-shuttered Sweet Arielle Bakery at the South Durham Farmers Market and later worked their booth at the Cary Downtown Farmers Market for about a year. A conversation with the market manager there sparked what Arturo calls his “lightbulb moment,” when the manager suggested the Triangle could support a dedicated flour tortilla business.
“I had never considered this before, but it was in the back of my mind because I had purchased artisan tortillas from places like Caramelo in Kansas and Benny Blanco Pérez Picks Tortillas in Arizona,” Arturo says. “I even went out to [Benny Blanco] to shadow the owner for a week.”
Pérez Picks
“Durham Green Flea Market is where it’s at for tacos,” Arturo says of the siblings’ fave Durham spots. “[We also love] NanaSteak. Karina loves Pizzeria Toro’s spicy lamb meatball pizza [with kale and garlic]. Also Dashi.”
Arturo approached Karina with the idea and, the pair immediately began planning.
“Before we mentioned it to our mom, we researched [ingredients],” he says. “We’ve always been about supporting local – [we wanted to find out] if there’s a way to do this with local flour. Through Sweet Arielle, I knew about Lindley Mills. We started looking into local lard, then I discovered Sea Love Sea Salt … it’s very minimally processed, so that’s why we like their product.”
Then Juana got on board, and the focus turned to creating a scalable process based on her home cooking – a somewhat challenging endeavor. “Like most mothers, she doesn’t have a recipe,” Arturo says. She relies on instinct rather than measurements, eyeballing the ratio of salt, flour and fat, using the palm of her hand to add ingredients. The siblings spent three months in the kitchen with her to document a recipe and methods they could repeat for consistent results.
“We tweaked it here and there for a year or so,” Arturo says. Early batches required rolling out tortillas by hand the way many home cooks would, a laborious and time-consuming method that quickly became unsustainable. The turning point came with the purchase of a used, restaurant-grade tortilla press. “We took a gamble,” Arturo says. “It cost about $1,500. We thought, ‘Let’s try it and see how it goes.’”
Momentum arrived faster than expected. In early 2024, famed Crooks Corner chef Bill Smith shared Del Norte Tortillas on Instagram, triggering a flood of messages. “We were not ready to sell,” Arturo says. He remembers calling Karina in a panic over how to move forward. Together, they decided they needed to commit to the business and got to work filling all the orders they could manage.
Del Norte didn’t have a website at that time, so Arturo rounded up orders via Instagram and word-of-mouth. “For the first three or four months, as soon as I posted the dates that were available, direct messages would flood in,” he says.
Production still operates within the limits of Juan and Juana’s kitchen, though the family has steadily refined and streamlined their workflow to churn out as many tortillas as possible. “Now, it takes about three to four hours,” Arturo says. “If we’re [on our game], we can get 600 made in three hours.”
Each Saturday’s batch supports home deliveries and bulk orders for a few restaurants – several hundred 5-inch tortillas are made for Raleigh’s G’s Tacos’ street tacos, while Hatch Burritos serves its green Chile stew with a warmed tortilla on the side, and Oxford’s Strong Arm Baking Company periodically includes Del Norte tortillas in taco kits. The Pérezes also happily fulfill large special orders as well as requests for vegetarian versions that substitute olive oil for animal fat.
“If we were going to [start a local business] ourselves, we wanted to support others in the process, if we could, and we got lucky in the ingredients we could find,” Arturo says.
Arturo and Karina are humble by nature, but they harbor audacious dreams for Del Norte. Their customer base continues to grow, and they’ve carefully outlined the next steps, which include investing in additional equipment to expand capacity followed by securing a location for a brick-and-mortar, though timing remains uncertain. “The logical step after machinery is looking for space, but I’ve learned that [currently] it’s pretty pricey,” Arturo says. “We feel there’s a market for [a tortilleria], but we wish things were a little more accessible. … It’s a matter of waiting it out.” In the interim, he envisions supplying more local eateries while continuing to bolster direct-to-customer sales. “Hopefully other restaurants might be interested in a product that’s minimally processed [compared to] store-bought tortillas,” Arturo says.
No matter what the future holds, Karina and Arturo remain committed to Durham. They plan to deepen collaborations with local chefs and restaurants by hosting pop-ups and continue delivering small-batch tortillas that carry family history and flavor to the homes and kitchens of their neighbors throughout the Triangle.
