What does Martaja mean? The story behind our logo.
Like almost everything at Martaja, our name and logo have a story behind them.
When Jim was giving cooking classes for the first time, his friend suggested he name his company after his favorite process in Mexican cooking. The first thing he thought of was charring.
Although you wouldn’t know it by looking at many modern cuisines around the world, all food everywhere was once cooked over fire. Particularly in Europe, burning ingredients is seen as a mistake, as something only people who can’t cook do, but even in 2025, Mexican cuisine relishes the flavor a good scorching can bring out in ingredients.
Unfortunately, “tatemar”, “to char” in Mexican Spanish, doesn’t sound quite as catchy as the word for Jim’s second favorite process in Mexican cuisine, “martajar”.
You might not have heard the word “martajar” in other Spanish speaking countries or learnt it at high school. It’s a deeply Mexican term that only makes sense in the context of Mexico’s very special culinary tradition. It means to pound ingredients in a molcajete.
The molcajete is not just the Mexican pestle & mortar. It’s so much more than that! Because they’re made from rough, porous volcanic stone that degrades with time and use, molcajetes not only provide an excellent grinding surface, they also give a subtle mineral flavor to any sauces made inside them.
Ask any Mexican if they prefer salsas made in a blender or a molcajete, and I guarantee they’ll tell you the molcajete adds a certain something you just can’t match with a blender.
Where else in the world does the ground underneath a people’s feet play such a starring role in their cuisine?
As for our logo, it’s an adaptation of an image in a document drawn by the Aztecs.
When the Spanish arrived in what’s now Mexico, they ordered the most powerful indigenous group of the time to tell them about their history. The Aztec language of Nahuatl was pictographic, so rather than write the story down, the locals drew it.
The Aztecs believed they’d migrated to what’s now Mexico City from an ancestral home much further north. Archaeologists still disagree about whether they meant what’s now Guadalajara or somewhere else in the state of Jalisco, or much further north in what’s now the American state of New Mexico.
Either way, according to the manuscript our logo was inspired by, just as the Aztecs were leaving their erstwhile home, their god ordered them to split up into different tribes. That’s how the group later explained to itself that the rival peoples surrounding them when they arrived in Mexico City spoke the same Nahuatl language, but remained their bitter enemies.
The document, available for viewing at the must-do National Museum of Anthropology, shows the Aztecs weeping upon hearing their deity’s order. They don’t want to have to go their separate ways.
According to legend, the solution the Aztecs came up with was to have one last meal together before saying their goodbyes. And it’s from that last supper scene in the manuscript the Aztecs drew for the Spanish that comes the man in Martaja’s logo.
We feel the image is a perfect representation of our work. Although many guests have such a good time with us, they invite us to come and visit them in their homes, it’s not always clear if and when that will be possible. Even if we’re never able to take them up on the invitations we’re so very grateful to receive, we’ll always share with our guests memories of one very special Mexican meal we prepared and ate together.