Margaritas in East Hartford is not just a restaurant. It’s a mini-museum of traditional Mexican folk art.
The owners, John and Dave Pelletier — originally from Coventry, now based in New Hampshire — fell in love with Mexico in the 1980s. Ever since then they have been bringing back truckloads of handcrafts they bought in small towns throughout the country, to decorate the 27 restaurants in their chain in New England, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The restaurant at 350 Roberts St. is filled with hand-carved chairs, tables, doors and pillars, brightly painted papier-mâché wall hangings and wooden animals, Aztec calendars, handmade tiles, sconces, altarpieces, sunbursts and star lights, Dia de los Muertos dolls, mariachi figures, festival masks. Videos of artists plying their trades in their villages play in the waiting areas, to add to the countless pieces of art that create the restaurant’s ambiance.
Since 1999, twice a year, Margaritas also has welcomed Mexican artists to show off their work to the public and school groups. The most recent artists, Adelina Pedro Martinez and Federico Negrete Lopez, will be at Margaritas in Mystic on April 30 and in East Hartford on May 3, to show their work and talk (through an interpreter) with anyone who wants to discuss art or Mexico or just to try out their Spanish.
The married couple lives in San Bartolo Coyotepec. Residents of the village near Oaxaca have been potters for 2,000 years, dating back to the Zapotec civilization. The village has become is famed for its “barro negro” pottery, which becomes black because of the qualities of the clay in the region, and as a result of a unique preparation and reduction-firing process. The clay pieces are dried in the sun and then decorated and burnished with a quartz stone. Then they are put in a wood-fired subterranean kiln for many hours. When the kiln is cool and the pieces are pulled out, they are black and so shiny they look almost metallic.
Pat Picciano, Margaritas’ education-outreach coordinator, spent three years as an apprentice to an artisan in Mexico, and acts as a translator for the visiting artists.
“After the kiln gets to about 800 degrees centigrade, they cover the kiln with mud. The smoke and the heat is trapped by the mud, and there is a reduction of oxygen,” he said. “That turns the clay black. It goes in brown and comes out black.”
Martinez and Lopez will be at each location from 4 to 9 p.m. each day. margs.com/visiting-artists.
