Enrique Hernandez Vergara won’t tell you where he found that five-pound porcini. And he won’t tell you the secret to his grandma’s turkey mole poblano, which once pleased the palate of a Mexican president. He has carried the secrets he learned in her Puebla, Mexico, kitchen all the way to Bolinas, where he’s been pleasing customers at the Coast Café for 13 years.

What made that halibut dish so special? What gave that ribeye such a nice bite?

“Corazón y magia,” he says. “Heart and magic.” 

That’s all he’s going to tell you.

When Mr. Hernandez arrived at the café, the food was inconsistent, according to longtime customers of the cozy, wood-paneled establishment across from Smiley’s Schooner Saloon. Since then, he has brought passion, commitment and good cheer to the kitchen, and those ingredients suffuse his cooking.

“I’ve had some of the most fantastic meals there,” said Josh Churchman, a Bolinas fisherman who has supplied the restaurant with hundreds of pounds of rockfish, salmon and crab over the years. “It’s a cut above. You could go to a high-end restaurant in San Francisco and not have anything better.”

Mr. Hernandez immigrated to the United States 22 years ago, landing in West Marin because his wife had relatives working at the Station House Café. Though he started out as a dishwasher and busboy, he already knew a lot about cooking. By the time he was 14, he was working as a pastry chef in Mexico, and he could bake anything: sourdough, focaccia, croissants, baguettes, pizza—whatever required nothing more than yeast, water, flour and good culinary instincts.

His skills did not go unnoticed by his bosses in West Marin, who quickly realized he could do more than make pots and pans shine. After just a week at Deborah’s French Bakery, located where the Inverness Park Market’s Tap Room now stands, he was promoted to baker. The same thing eventually happened at Priscilla’s Pizzeria and Café, where Saltwater Oyster Depot now operates in Inverness.

One morning, Priscilla realized they were out of dough. 

“I can make it,” Mr. Hernandez volunteered. “It’s easy for me.”

At first, she thought he was joking, but it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t. Seeing how much he enjoyed cooking, Priscilla encouraged him to take classes. After three months of courses in San Francisco, Mr. Hernandez was put in charge of the kitchen. 

At the same time, he worked as a busboy at the Station House, where he was eventually promoted to line chef. He needed the second job because his wife, Guadalupe, had an all-consuming job that did not generate income: caring for their son, Pablo, who contracted a virus when he was 10 months old that left him paralyzed from head to toe and unable to speak.

“He’s a very special boy,” Mr. Hernandez said, opening a photograph of Pablo, now 16, on his phone. “I love him.”

Mr. Hernandez’s boss at the Coast Café, owner Roseanne Lavoy, allows him a flexible schedule so he can help at home as needed. But the kitchen runs smoothly without him because he has trained his sous chef and line cooks to do the job on their own.

On a recent Saturday evening, Mr. Hernandez stood over the stove, turning out orders of mushroom tofu risotto for the vegans, grilled ribeye for the carnivores and—for anyone with functioning taste buds—fresh halibut on coconut rice drenched in guajillo beurre blanc. 

“I created this sauce especially for this fish, and it’s very tasty,” he said. “I make a lot of sauces, but the guajillo sauce—a lot of customers come to the restaurant to try it.”

Whenever this dish goes out to someone’s table, the plate comes back so clean, the dishwasher could practically put it straight on the shelf, said Patrick Sullivan, the restaurant’s manager. “It’s got a perfect balance, with a little bit of spice and a little bit of sweetness,” he said.

While Mr. Hernandez works the grill, the rest of the team, clad in white uniforms, focuses on whatever task they have been assigned. There’s not much chatter.

A line cook named Carlos makes tonight’s appetizer special, scallop aguachile, carefully placing raw scallops in an elegant stack. He dresses them with finely sliced red onion and jalapeños and a drizzle of lime juice and cilantro oil. He circles each plate with slices of bright green avocado and places a few red nasturtium petals on top.

In a smaller kitchen out back, Eric Argueta, the sous chef, stirs a pot of beef broth that has been simmering for three days, while his brother Santos makes sourdough bread. A sign on the walk-in freezer reads: Mantener limpio y ordenado—Gracias. Keep clean and organized—Thank you.

Most of the staff had never worked in a kitchen before Mr. Hernandez recruited them, but Mr. Argueta had worked for three years as a dishwasher at Madcap, a San Anselmo restaurant with a Michelin star. He started as a dishwasher before moving up to second in command.

Mr. Hernandez gives everyone a chance to move up, including the current dishwasher, who turned down the offer of a cooking job because it looked too stressful.

“He’s a leader and a great teacher,” Mr. Argueta said. “If you make mistakes, he shows you how to do better. He’s tough and demanding sometimes, but that’s how it has to be to keep a kitchen running.”

At the Coast Café, every scrap of fish and fowl—fish heads and chicken feet, beaks and bones—gets tossed into a pot and slowly simmered to extract every last bit of flavor. 

When local fisherman Jeremy Dierks showed up with a 150-pound bluefin tuna last year, they broke down every bit and even sucked the jelly out of its spine—a special treat for the staff. “He doesn’t waste anything,” Ms. Lavoy said. “For a lot of chefs, that’s an economic decision. But for Enrique, it’s about honoring the ingredients. It’s love.” 

One of Mr. Hernandez’s favorite things to cook is lamb, which he wraps whole in agave leaves and smokes for 16 hours. He forages his own mushrooms, including a five-pound porcini and an eight-pound cauliflower mushroom he discovered in a secret patch in Bolinas. Don’t ask where.

At just over 5 feet tall, Mr. Hernandez is the shortest man in the kitchen, but he nevertheless fills the room. He never shows up without his chef’s jacket and hat. “I wear the uniform every day to show respect for the job,” he said.

The most important lessons Mr. Hernandez learned came not in cooking class, but in the kitchen of his late abuelita, Luisa Ramos, his mother’s mother and one of the most celebrated mole chefs in Puebla, the birthplace of mole. The sauce is a carefully blended mix of 28 ingredients distinguished by chocolate and a complex blend of chilis and spices.

Ms. Ramos never told him how to make it. He just learned by watching. From the time he was 6, he would fetch the firewood his abuela used to heat the enormous cauldron in which she stirred everything together with a spoon nearly the size of a kayak paddle. It took two days to chop all the ingredients and blend them with the necessary precision.

One of Mexico’s most famous chefs raved about her recipe in a national newspaper, and she once prepared it for a Mexican president. Mr. Hernandez thinks it was Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexico’s 60th president, but it was so long ago, he’s not sure.

Mr. Hernandez serves her mole at the Coast Café just twice a year, on Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day.

“I’ve had many moles, but none compares to my grandmother’s,” he said. “It’s a secret recipe that can make you a millionaire in Mexico.”