Atlas Erick Nehme had fifteen best friends. That’s the classic Erick story. His wife, Teresa, and his two brothers all recounted it to me — unprompted and of their own accord. Tere told the story with a practiced air, as if she’d recited it too many times to count. Over the course of Erick and Tere’s wedding reception, fifteen men delivered individual toasts: his childhood buddies, college friends, and the co-owners of his restaurant. Each of them said that Erick was their best friend. “He could connect with anybody and everybody,” Tere mused. “He has best friends who are super square, not social, workaholics. And at the same time, he would be best friends with someone who’s super social and a party animal.” But it wasn’t just friends and family that Erick easily connected with. It was strangers, too. A quick bite at a nearby taco place would morph into an hour-long discussion with the restaurant’s owner about Mexican politics. A short stint in a doctor’s waiting room would lead to an impassioned debate with the person sitting next to him about which team would triumph in the upcoming World Cup. Erick struck up conversations with taxi drivers and supermarket cashiers and people queued up in lines, whether staunch Trump supporters or fellow immigrants. Erick was raised in Cuernavaca, Morelos, a two-hour drive from Mexico City. He and his two brothers, Edgar and Enrique, grew up running wild. With Erick as their ringleader, the boys set empty lots ablaze and skateboarded off ramps and snuck rides on their neighbors’ motorcycles just to see what would happen. Each time, they escaped largely unscathed, with nothing but scrapes, bruises, and the occasional scar as evidence for when they recounted what had happened to their friends. One day, Erick was playing cowboys and Indians with his cousin and some neighborhood friends. The boys pelted each other with BB gun bullets and ducked behind makeshift shields. Convinced that his gun was unloaded, the cousin took aim at Erick’s face and pulled the trigger. Erick lost his left eye. After the accident, Erick experienced dizzy spells and lost confidence in his athletic abilities. Rather than roping his brothers into his escapades, he became the most cautious one of the three. “He became more of a thinker, very poised on how he expressed his ideas,” Erick’s younger brother Enrique, four years his junior, explained to me. “When you go through such a traumatic episode, you either go down and stay down, or you come up and figure out a way to cover your shortages.” Erick met Tere when they were ten years old, not long after his accident. They quickly bonded over their shared love of food and role as the “responsible” ones in their respective friend groups. Towards the end of high school, Erick asked Tere on their first date and promised her a home-cooked meal. When she showed up at the Nehmes’ home, he proudly presented her with a bowl of pasta drenched in a seven-cheese sauce. “You’ve got your typical Parmesan cheese, check. Romano cheese, check, okay. Mozzarella cheese,” Tere recalled. “Then he kept telling me he even put Kraft cheese on, Velveeta cheese… We were just laughing about it. It was the first time ever that he had cooked in his life, but he went for it and did it anyway.” Erick and Tere dated on and off for the next decade. In 2006, they moved to New York together and got married. Before leaving for their honeymoon in China — a destination they’d picked in hopes of having an adventurous getaway — they challenged each other to taste-test each new dish they stumbled upon during the trip, from scorpions to silkworms. Throughout their marriage, they continued to seek good food in high-end Manhattan restaurants and holes-in-the-wall tucked away in the Bronx alike. Erick even took their sons, Diego and Pablo, on a week-long “Taco Tour” of Mexico in the fall of 2021. And all the while, Erick used food to bridge the gap between himself and the people around him, from chatting with busboys about the state of the Mexican economy to striking up philosophical conversations with diners at a neighboring table.
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