The Corn Ribs of Riverside: A Meditation on Heat, Hustle, and Dirty’s Sandwiches

The Corn Ribs of Riverside: A Meditation on Heat, Hustle, and Dirty’s Sandwiches

As told to me by AI Joan Didion

In Riverside, California, where the Santa Ana winds carry the faint tang of citrus and diesel, where the Inland Empire stretches like a taut canvas of ambition and exhaustion, a peculiar dish has taken root: corn ribs. Not ribs in the sense of bone and marrow, but corn—shucked, quartered, curled under heat into a shape that mimics meat, a sleight of hand that feels both ancient and absurdly modern. Here, in the kitchens of Orangecrest, a Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation called Dirty’s Sandwiches is serving these corn ribs, slathered in a homemade ají verde sauce, a Peruvian green concoction that burns and soothes in equal measure. To eat them is to taste the collision of histories—agricultural, cultural, personal—on a paper plate in a suburban cul-de-sac. It is to stand, for a moment, at the intersection of Riverside’s past and its restless present, where the act of cooking becomes a quiet act of defiance.

The Corn Rib: A Brief, Fractured History

Corn ribs are not old, not in the way of stone-ground tortillas or the maize deities of Mesoamerica. They are a 21st-century invention, born in the frenetic crucible of social media, where food is less sustenance than spectacle. The dish emerged around 2020, a viral TikTok trend that exploded during the pandemic’s long, claustrophobic months, when people craved novelty and distraction. The recipe is simple yet perilous: take an ear of corn, slice it lengthwise into quarters, coat it with spices or sauce, and grill or bake until the kernels curl inward, resembling ribs. The name is a nod to this visual trick, a playful mimicry of pork or beef ribs, but the appeal is primal—crisp, sweet, smoky, a texture that demands you gnaw and savor.

The origin story is murky, as most viral phenomena are. Some credit Yumna Jawad of Feel Good Foodie, whose July 2021 TikTok video racked up over a million views, for popularizing the dish. Others point to earlier posts, anonymous home cooks or street vendors in Mexico or Southeast Asia, where corn has long been grilled and slathered with chili and lime. By 2023, the hashtag #CornRibs had amassed over 107 million views on TikTok, a testament to its staying power. Unlike other fleeting food trends—cronuts, rainbow bagels—corn ribs endured, perhaps because they are cheap, adaptable, and inherently theatrical. You can dress them with barbecue sauce, chipotle mayo, or, as Riverside’s Dirty’s Sandwiches has chosen, a fiery ají verde that whispers of Peru’s highlands.

Corn itself is no stranger to reinvention. Domesticated in Mexico some 10,000 years ago, it spread across the Americas, then the world, carried by colonizers and traders. By the 19th century, it was a staple in California, grown in the fertile soils of Riverside’s citrus belt, where the land was once a patchwork of orange groves and cornfields. The corn rib, then, is less a break from tradition than a continuation of it—a new chapter in the story of maize, reshaped by a generation that fetishizes both authenticity and innovation.

Dirty’s Sandwiches: The Home Kitchen as Frontier

Riverside, with its 330,000 souls and its sprawl of tract homes and strip malls, is not the first place you’d expect to find culinary revolution. Yet it was here, in 2019, that the county became California’s first to embrace Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations (MEHKOs), a legal framework born of Assembly Bill 626 that allows home cooks to sell meals from their kitchens. Riverside’s MEHKO program, now six years old, has issued permits to over 230 operators, most of them women, many of them immigrants, turning domestic spaces into micro-economies. It is a quiet rebellion against the gatekeepers of the restaurant industry, a way for the marginalized to claim a piece of the American Dream without a lease or a loan.

Into this landscape steps Dirty’s Sandwiches, a MEHKO sitting down a dirt road in Orangecrest, a neighborhood of mostly tidy lawns and two-car garages. Dirty's is a chef, who hustled to open his own kitchen at home, after the downtown restaurant he worked in shut down and, a baker, who quit her day job to pursue her passion of adding flavor, not just sugar, to her desserts.

Operating under the county’s strict but liberating rules—no more than 90 meals a week, no third-party delivery, no raw oysters or alcohol—Dirty’s is less a business than a manifesto. Their menu, which rotates like the seasons, features sandwiches (fried chicken, the kind that make you question your life choices), sides, desserts, and a Jamaican-style “wash” that’s more lemonade than lemonade has any right to be. But it’s the corn ribs, introduced in 2025, that feel like a statement. They’re not just food; they’re a performance, a nod to the viral age, served with a homemade ají verde sauce that elevates the dish from gimmick to revelation.

The Ají Verde: A Sauce with a Past

Ají verde, the spicy green sauce that accompanies Dirty’s corn ribs, is a Peruvian export, though its roots are contested. Traditionally, it’s made with huacatay (a marigold-like herb), ají amarillo (a mild, yellow Peruvian pepper), cilantro, garlic, lime, and a creamy base of mayonnaise or queso fresco. In the U.S., where fresh huacatay and ají amarillo are scarce, cooks like those at Dirty’s make do with jalapeños and cilantro, blending them into a sauce that’s bright, spicy, and creamy, with a heat that lingers like a memory. The version at Dirty’s, as described on their menu, likely leans on local ingredients—jalapeños for bite, cilantro for freshness, perhaps a touch of vegan mayo or cotija cheese for richness. It’s a sauce that doesn’t just complement the corn ribs; it completes them, turning sweet, charred kernels into something complex and alive.

Peruvian cuisine, like Riverside’s MEHKO movement, is a story of adaptation. Ají verde, in its homeland, is a table sauce, drizzled on everything from roasted chicken to boiled potatoes. Its journey to California mirrors the migration of corn itself—carried across borders, reshaped by necessity. In Dirty’s kitchen, the sauce is a bridge between the global and the hyperlocal, a reminder that even a home cook in Orangecrest can channel the Andes.

The Weight of It All

To eat Dirty’s corn ribs, dipped in their ají verde, is to confront the weight of history and the lightness of invention. There is the corn, born in the ancient fields of Mexico, now sliced and grilled in a Riverside kitchen. There is the sauce, a Peruvian heirloom adapted to the realities of a California suburb. And there is the MEHKO itself, a fragile victory for the home cook, a reminder that food, at its best, is not just about eating but about claiming space, telling stories, defying the odds. An homage to the people that belong here.

Riverside is not a city that shouts its virtues. It is a place of quiet hustles, of citrus groves replaced by warehouses, of people who keep going because what else is there to do? Dirty’s Sandwiches, with their corn ribs and their ají verde, is part of that hustle. They are not changing the world, not exactly, but they are changing the way we eat in it—one plate, one kitchen, one bite at a time. And in that act, there is something almost sacred, a fleeting moment of communion in a world that feels increasingly fractured.