A funny thing happened on the way to the masa.
When chef D.J. Flores opened Milpa, his lauded Mexican restaurant, in southwest Las Vegas in January 2021, at the height of the pandemic, he simply wanted to survive the first year, to find an audience for his dishes harnessing tortillas fashioned in-house from imported heirloom corn that had been boiled, steeped, rinsed, shaped into masa, pressed and griddled, in the traditional Mexican manner.
“I just didn’t want to have to do burritos,” Flores, 42, has said many times over the years, referring to a survival strategy that would not have been true to his vision of Milpa.
Flores never had to do burritos. By the second year, Milpa was doing about $500,000 in revenue, and the secret dream that Flores almost couldn’t admit to himself — opening a second Milpa — began to feel possible.
But the hospitality gods have their own plans.
In the almost six years since Milpa opened at 4226 S. Durango Drive, Suite 101, Flores has not debuted another location. Instead, he launched Nocturno, a jazzy lounge with classic cocktails, in May 2025, and Cobra Clutch, a bijou redoubt of Japanese cocktail cool, in July — both in downtown Vegas, both with Luis “Lu” Lopez, a highly regarded Vegas bar professional, as his co-owner.
But the masa moment is returning.
A second Milpa is taking shape at 10624 S. Eastern Ave., Suite R, in Henderson, with a planned opening in late October, Flores said. That’s roughly the same timeline as the estimated debut of his retail line of packaged tortilla chips made using house masa.
Flores calls his group Nivel Hospitality — one meaning of nivel in Spanish is “level up” — and when the final two projects are launched, Flores’ growing hospitality empire will encompass two restaurants, two bars and a tortilla chip operation. At times, Flores’ modesty makes him seems almost an accidental mogul in the making. But on balance, he’ll take it.
“It’s challenging, the economy, the prices, but I always wanted to provide good places to go to, that service, that hospitality,” Flores said, “Now, I see it: I’m the employer. I’m providing jobs to people. I feel great about that. Let’s push forward. I know we have something great here.”
Classic cocktail romance
Serendipity has played its part in the growth, the chef acknowledged.
In 2023, when Flores, 42, began seriously scoping out digs for Milpa Dos, a real estate broker who was a customer showed him a downtown space once occupied by The Garden bar.
“I thought, ‘This doesn’t feel like a Milpa — this feels like a bar,’ ” Flores said. He ran into Lopez at Wakuda in The Venetian, a property at which they had both once worked at the same time. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I tap his shoulder and we’ll partner up on this location?’ ”
For Nocturno, 1017 S. First St., Suite 180, Lopez wrote an extensive menu — called the Bartender’s Guide, Volume One — that partitions cocktails by family and flavor profile, then by specific drinks, while mixing in a measure of cocktail culture and history.
“It will always be a nod to the romance of the classic cocktail bar, dimly lit. Fresh juices, housemade syrups and cordials, good ice — all the things that go into making a drink as good as possible,” Lopez said. Like a Queen’s Park Swizzle, an ombré layering of mint, Demerara sugar, crushed ice, bitters and white rum.
“It’s still very much a classic cocktail bar, but we’re expanding that story all over the world: classics from Japan, France, Mexico, Cuba, London,” Lopez, 38, continued, adding that the terrace at Nocturno would be coming online soon.
In its first year, Nocturno was named a semifinalist for Best New Bar, a national category, in the 2026 James Beard Foundation Awards, and was named to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Top 100 Restaurants (in the bar section) in Vegas for 2026.
“We are doing something right,” Flores said.
Japanese inspiration
Serendipity also played a part in the launch of Cobra Clutch, which occupies what had been the bar of the Houston TX Hot Chicken at 1201 S. Main St. downtown.
“The Houston Hot Chicken people weren’t using this space, and they saw what we were doing at Nocturno,” Flores said. “They approached us and we came to look at it and we thought, ‘What could we do here?’ ”
Hexagonal designs already on the walls resembled cobra scales, and Lopez had liked a drink called a Cobra Clutch during his barkeeping days in San Diego, “so we started with that for the name,” Lopez said. “The Japanese concept of it didn’t come off until later.”
Today, that concept unites cherry blossoms, brightly lit lanterns, flat-screens playing anime and ’80s Japanese TV commercials (Madonna hawking stereos, Charles Barkley slurping ramen), a hissing neon Cobra in the window and, most essential, images drawn from Japanese popular culture mantling the walls (including works by graphic artist Hiroshi Nagai, whose flat forms and colors seem like a Japanese cross between Nagel and David Hockney pool paintings). The soundtrack, Japanese city pop music, comes courtesy of cassettes, vinyl and reel-to-reel tape decks.
“There’s not much past the ’90s,” Lopez said of the look and sound of Cobra Clutch, which feels drawn from a cocktail joint off a neon-filled Tokyo alley.
A trio of cocktails
A small sign marks the entrance to the bar, on the California Avenue side of the building. Cobra Clutch seats only 24, so you ring the buzzer, add your name to the list and wait to be called.
The cocktail program at Cobra Clutch is “more tropical and Japanese than Nocturno,” Lopez said. “We focus on bright tropical flavors: coconut, wasabi salt, yuzu, banana, Japanese rum, whiskies, vermouths. Our flavor profile is tropical Japanese, but with the classics as a foundation, always.”
Consider the Roma y Ginza as a characteristic specimen. The name nods to Roma Norte in Mexico City and the Ginza District of Tokyo, two neighborhoods known for their cutting-edge cocktail bars. The drink balances the brightness of tequila and the subtle smokiness of bacanora (another agave spirit), with a shake of orange for citrus and a savory-spicy wasabi salt rim.
“It’s our version of a margarita,” Lopez said.
Or look to a matcha martini, the Cobra Clutch take on an espresso martini: a matcha cream float gives way to boozy depths of green tea gin. Highballs, a mainstay of Japanese cocktail culture, are built from one part Japanese whisky (from eight choices) and three parts Japanese soda water, the classic ratio.
The soda water, Lopez said, “is highly carbonated, with a bubble structure similar to Champagne, so it’s highly effervescent.” Cobra Clutch highballs are chilled by ice imported from Japan. Yes. The ice arrives in insulated containers, either in segments for highballs or in blocks for shaving.
“Everything is precise, so every cocktail has the consistency it should,” Lopez said.
A new press for new tacos
Back at Milpa, there’s a new automated tortilla press; previously, the chef and his kitchen team operated a hand press. New tacos are also the order of the day: suadero with crisp brisket, onions and salsa verde; ribeye with guacamole, onions, salsa macha (Mexican chili crisp) and cilantro; and a breakfast taco (difficult to find in Vegas) with scrambled eggs, chipotle salsa, bacon and pico de gallo.
Although the breakfast tacos at Milpa feature corn tortillas, they’re often made with flour tortillas elsewhere, something that led Flores to consider whether he might expand his tortilla operation. “Maybe down the road, I could develop a scratch flour tortilla. Do them from scratch, hand-rolled, why not?”
The original Milpa has done something right, too, with Flores twice named a Beard semi-finalist for Best Chef: Southwest and the restaurant twice included in the R-J’s annual Top 100 Restaurants.
No. 2 at double the size
Milpa Dos almost wasn’t Milpa Dos. Flores liked the space, a former restaurant, because he wouldn’t have to undertake a new buildout, but the landlords wanted to return the premises to retail. The chef convinced them otherwise.
“They went to Milpa, they loved it and they said, ‘We’ll only do a restaurant deal with you,’ ” Flores said. “I feel like it’s a whole new audience in Henderson, an untapped market.”
Milpa Dos will seat about 60, twice the size of the first Milpa, and will offer a coffee and bar program, more tostadas and ceviches, pan dulce baked in-house and dinners with special menus.
“I’m already looking into a third location. I want it to be in the northwest,” Flores said. “My goal is to eventually hire more chefs and talented people. Maybe I’ll open another kind of restaurant I can do with the chefs I hire. We need more chef-driven restaurants.”
‘A different game’
The chef’s line of packaged blue and yellow corn tortilla chips is called Ciembra, Spanish for “sowing.” The name Milpa was already a federally registered trademark for masa and tortilla chips, but Ciembra, Flores said, at least has the advantage of a similar agricultural association (milpa means “cornfield”).
The chef said he’s found a co-packer in Los Angeles that would source heirloom corn from Milpa’s suppliers in Mexico and transform the varieties into masa (and then chips) using Milpa’s methods.
“This to me is exciting, a different industry, a different game,” Flores said. “I think our guests want to taste the masa, taste the corn. I’ve been wanting to do this, but in the back burner of my brain, but now that everything is developing and growing, we could move forward, but slowly launch it.”
You never know where great masa will take you.
Contact Johnathan L. Wright at [email protected]. Follow @JLWTaste on Instagram.