Flint native Stephen Arellano often gets so enthralled with the process of making food people love that a critical piece of running a business occasionally slips his mind.
“Sometimes I forget to charge people,” Arellano said. “I see the expression on their face, when they’re like, ‘Oh my God!’ because they’re enjoying something I made so much and that feels like payment to me, like I’ve won.”
To be clear, Arellano does still want customers to pay him. But passion for food, for fresh ingredients, and for using his creativity to make things that people in his hometown seek out and crave are all part of the inspiration and craft behind his business, Monarca – Comida Buena (meaning ‘Monarch – Good Food’).
Monarca launched last year, in the midst of a career transition for Arellano. The menu options evolve and rotate, as do Monarca locations. He sometimes operates in front of The Kickback on Saginaw Street downtown, but also does pop-ups at various other bars and locations. Patrons seek him out for gourmet foods that include tacos, ramen, and, most recently, neapolitan pizza.
“It (making pizza) has been a fun learning adventure so far,” Arellano said.
Creativity and a willingness to experiment as he learns, combined with a belief in using fresh and locally sourced ingredients are core components of Monarca.
“I wanted to do a side hustle while I was looking for another job, so I started Monarca last year with tacos,” he said. “Tacos went through the summer, but then right about this time of year when it gets cold, I want hot broth, noodles, vegetables. I want a bowl of hot goodness. And so I started ramen last fall, and that really took off. I have found over the last year a lot of really loyal customers. And I’m just really dedicated to fresh food, pure food. A lot of the dishes that we all eat are amazing and healthy dishes that we have corrupted with the way we prepare things in America. Everyone’s like, ‘This pizza’s amazing. It’s so great,’ but it could not be simpler. We should all just eat more food that’s real food, and take a little time to prepare it instead of DoorDashing everything. I wanted to offer that kind of food. So my tacos are all meat sourced from John Henry’s Meats in Millington, organic, pasture-raised. I am always buying from local farmers, preparing simple stuff, and trying to make it beautiful, and people are into it.”
That might be the present version of how Monarca started in Flint. But the lore behind the business has roots outside of the country, and mirrors Arellano’s own life and career path.
The Journey of Monarchs
Arellano describes himself as “a real Flintstone” who has lived all over the city, first on Chevrolet and Dayton on the city’s northside, with stops after that on the westside, northside, and eastside. He’s a graduate of Flint Community Schools and attended both Flint Northern and Flint Central. But his family roots extend way outside of the city limits.
Arellano’s dad, Ralph Arellano, traces back his family lineage to a state in central Mexico called Michoacán. That state has a unique connection to Michigan.
“The monarch butterfly, its sanctuaries where it goes to breed and everything in the wintertime are in Michoacán, and it also travels all that way to Michigan,” Arellano said. “To me it’s such a great symbol of me finding my way back into my culture as a young man in college. The way that the monarch babies are born in Mexico, they never even made that trip (to Michigan), and they’re not gonna make that trip with their parents, but they somehow find the same way to the same place. That connection was really powerful to me.”
Family and food are consistent themes throughout Arellano’s journey, including watching his dad hand-make tortillas every weekend.
“Every Saturday, he would get up and put his 1970s hair into a little ponytail with a Flint Journal rubber band and make the tortillas,” Arellano said. “He’d put on music, roll them out, put them on the griddle with a bunch of butter on there, and as a kid, you remember the butter running down your arm. I have a lot of those kinds of memories.”
Those include everything from mixing his own cereal concoctions together with different brands that were in the cupboard to learning about spices from what he describes as his mom’s “incredibly organized” spice drawer, to being in high school and going to Flint Public Library with his stepmom to pick out recipes.
“I would go and look up recipes and say, I want to make this dinner. Will you help me make it?,” Arellano said. “That was one of our bonding experiences.”
From a Food Advocate to Food Producer
Arellano went off to college and eventually began working in Washington D.C. as a lobbyist focused on environment and climate-related issues. He began pursuing a PhD and says he never really intended to return to Flint, but moved back when he and his girlfriend were having a baby and began working for the Ruth Mott Foundation when the foundation first formed.
“I was part of their original staff and worked there for three years,” Arellano said. “Then I made a feeble yet noble attempt to go back and finish my doctorate, but didn’t make it, and Ruth Mott invited me back to go work there again, so I ended up there another three years.”
That period of time coincided with growth in Flint in various urban agriculture food systems. That experience was so eye-opening for Arellano that it sparked another change in gears for his career.
“I got really into that work, and I was involved in everything as a funder and kind of like a facilitator in the community,” Arellano said. “I was really proud of all that work we did through those years, and when I left Ruth Mott the second time, I decided I’m gonna go open a farm. I’d been working with all these idealist farmers for multiple years and learning all this stuff, and it was so cool and so noble. I felt like I was advocating for this (urban farming), and I don’t even really know what it’s like. And I’ve always been somebody who wants to know everything firsthand. So I just quit. I started a farm that I still have in Mount Morris.”
The farm is not active right now, but at one time, the farm was producing eggs, salad greens, root vegetables, and some fruits that he was selling at the Flint Farmers’ Market’s previous location on Chavez Drive. His presence in the old Farmers’ Market, experience in food systems and urban agriculture, and programming and foundation work led to him playing a key role in helping conceive the design of the commercial kitchen at the new Farmers’ Market when the old Flint Journal printing plant was being renovated. Arellano also did other consulting work before being recruited back into full-time work in the Michigan Governor’s Office of Foundation Liaison, where he spent about five years and worked through the peak of the Flint water crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That was a wild ride, like five years of craziness, but I ended up quitting because I was burned out and had run out of steam,” he said.
He moved onto a position based at EARTH University in Costa Rica, managing relationships with funders and foundations for a USAID program there for three years.
“It was the most amazing place I’ve ever been,” Arellano said. “I finally got my Spanish down really good and got to use it every day and loved the work, it was all sustainable agriculture work. But when they closed USAID, I lost my job and just got a letter (from the U.S. government) that said, ‘Your work is no longer in line with American values.’”
Resources at Home
As he was plotting out his next steps, starting a food business made sense both because of his passion for cooking and because of his connections in Flint’s growing food scene.
“I was a pretty crappy farmer, but I can cook,” Arellano said.
When he was getting started, Arellano reached out to Tony Vu, the chef and entrepreneur behind The Kickback. Vu’s nonprofit, Flint Social Club, started at the Flint Farmers’ Market and has supported several chefs and food entrepreneurs by connecting them to resources, support, and training to get their business ideas launched. Several of those businesses now operate out of The Kickback space on Saginaw Street and, like Monarca, also do events and pop-ups all over Flint and beyond.
“I called Tony to tell him I wanted to start something and he literally said to me, ‘Oh, you’ll kill it, man, you wanna start tomorrow?,” Arellano said. “He said come down, we’ll help you, support you, give you the use of the space and equipment and you’re gonna work with all these super cool people, and you still get to speak Spanish. It was a dream come true, man. Leaving Costa Rica was hard, I was coming home and thought there would be nobody to speak Spanish to.”
But many years prior, those roles were actually reversed. Vu still remembers being young in his career, just starting out in the Farmers’ Market kitchen Arellano helped design and not really knowing his way around. He’d rented the kitchen and was doing prep in there, but wasn’t fully confident within the space yet.
“Stephen just happened to be there that day, and come to find out he was the guy who designed the kitchen,” Vu said. “We just had this very casual, awesome conversation that is still like a core memory in my cooking experience to this day. When I came into that environment, I’d never worked in a kitchen before. He just broke down the design of the kitchen and basically gave me a playbook and the logic behind it all.”
When their roles reversed, Vu had the utmost confidence in Arellano’s ability to create a successful food business and couldn’t wait to help him.
“Even before I knew what food he wanted to make, I knew about who he was as a person and his ability to express himself through a dish,” Vu said. “So I was going to do whatever I could to help him.”
Arellano’s menu and locations are advertised on his Facebook page. He said he’s becoming more mindful about his social presence thanks in part to other people in The Kickback and Farmers’ Market ecosystem whose social media skills he’s noticed, using 810 Tings, owned by Nate Campbell, another Flint Social Club alum who now has a business at the Farmers’ Market, as an example.
“We connect with each other in different eras, in different lifetimes, different things like that, and at the end of the day, we’re all bonded by this love for each other, for community, for Flint,” Vu said. “We find ourselves in these really fortunate spaces to be able to help one another out and be there for each other.”
That sharing of knowledge, resources, and food is part of what has created a growing, grassroots food scene in the city.
“That’s what that’s all about, is us exchanging and supporting each other and buying each other’s food and being like, ‘Oh, you should try that. Have you tried Victoria’s chimichurri (from Sweet Home Argentina)? You gotta try that,’” Arellano said. “There are foodie people who are starving for more options. So what we’re all doing here in our little cauldron of people is just making awesome, beautiful legacy food. People are carrying their culture here and giving it to us on the street. The ability to have that diversity and share in it is what makes a city great.”
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