SILER CITY — In a small, white-sided building that once housed Rojo Canela, a bakery owner has opened up a new Mexican restaurant — and he did it all on a whim.
“If you ask me why I grabbed it, well, I don’t even know honestly. Seriously,” owner Bernardo Gallegos Rodriguez told the News + Record in Spanish, laughing. “... It’s something that I don’t know how I got into, really, but we are trying to move forward to see what happens.”
The restaurant — named San Marcos Taqueria y Buffet — officially opened last month at 315 East Third Street about two and a half months after its predecessor, Rojo Canela, closed. Gallegos Rodriguez also owns and operates Melanie’s Bakery in downtown Siler City, as well as another bakery in Biscoe.
And how did a baker come to open a restaurant? It’s the result of one friend’s persistence and the baker’s own willingness to try something new.
Gallegos Rodriguez used to eat at Rojo Canela and became friends with the previous owners, who approached him about buying the building. He hesitated at first.
“He (Leo Davalos) had already been saying to me for a year, ‘I will give it to you, I will give it to you, I will sell it to you, and I’m like: ‘Man.’ I said, ‘What am I going to do here? I don’t know anything about food. I don’t know anything,’” he said. “And then whenever I came, he would tell me and tell me to go ahead, that he would sell it to me.”
Yet despite his reservations, Gallegos Rodriguez gave in shortly after Rojo Canela closed and decided to give the restaurant business a try.
“When I took it over, the first plan was to rent it to someone else, but then I said, well, because it’s already there, let’s try it out for a while,” he said. “I said if we can’t, we will rent it to someone else who has more experience.”
With a laugh, he added, “But it’s funny because — what is this man doing in a restaurant?”
Inside, not much has changed since Rojo Canela closed. Gallegos Rodriguez removed the chimney, brought in a buffet station, and painted the walls a honey-flavored yellow. He also brought in a little piece of home by naming the restaurant San Marcos after his hometown’s most famous festival in Mexico.
“It’s called San Marcos because the place where I am from, there’s the San Marcos Cathedral, which is a church,” he said. “It’s San Marcos Square, which is like a garden, and the San Marcos Fair. It’s the largest fair in the whole country; it’s the best known. … People from all over the world go to that fair.”
Gallegos Rodriguez hails from Aguascalientes, Mexico, where every spring residents celebrate the Feast Day of Saint Mark with a large fair known in Spanish as the Feria Nacional de San Marcos. The fair starts in late April and runs for three to four weeks.
The restaurant is full of references to the fair — from the rooster statue greeting customers in the doorway to the Temple of San Marcos at the top of each menu. Beyond mariachis, games and charreadas (Mexican rodeos), cockfighting and bullfighting are some of the fair’s most famous activities.
Among other menu items, the restaurant serves tacos, quesadillas and carnitas (Mexican pulled pork), though Gallegos Rodriguez said the empanadas are one of San Marcos’ most popular dishes, along with carne asada (grilled steak) and tacos.
“(The empanadas) are fried and have cheese inside and the meat you want — steak, chicken, barbecue, carnitas, sausage, (Mexican) barbacoa,” he said. “We put whatever they want in one. We decorate them with lettuce, tomato, avocado, cheese and sour cream.”
People can also try the restaurant’s aguas frescas, or Mexican fruit drinks, and on the weekends, San Marcos has been serving up hot soups, like menudo and beef stew — what Gallegos Rodriguez describes as a Mexican tradition.
“Many people drink on the weekend and the next day they come to eat their spicy broth,” he said. “They come, have their broth and one or two, three beers and they relax. It’s the custom that maybe the ancestors had that you drink and the next day you have a broth and the hangover goes away.”
He added with a laugh, “That’s why the broths are made on weekends.”
Opening his restaurant hasn’t been a smooth ride, though, Gallegos Rodriguez said. Disaster first struck just after San Marcos opened: two cooks he’d hired left after a few days — leaving him and another worker to pick up the slack.
“I told myself, ‘Well, I won’t know what to do, but there are the cooks I got (that will know),’” he said. “No, they left me after two days. Some didn’t want to work. As soon as we opened, one lasted one day and the other lasted about four days and then they left.”
So far, the restaurant has had both American and Hispanic patronage — “a little more Hispanic,” he said — and it’s been enough to support the restaurant’s expenses. But it’s still been a bit slow some days.
The restaurant is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
“There are times when a lot of people come to lunch from 11 to 12 or from 11 to 1 and from there it dies down,” he said. “Sometimes there is nothing left in the afternoon, and sometimes it is the other way around. ... Since we’re just starting, many people don’t know us, so we don’t have an established clientele.”
He’s also worried about what the town’s decision to re-route parts of Third Street could mean for his business, but he’s forging ahead with plans to increase San Marcos’ offerings, especially a buffet.
Originally, he said, that was the plan all along — it’s even in the restaurant’s name — but he couldn’t right away, since opening a buffet required him to submit an application completely separate from county-mandated inspections, especially during a pandemic. Now that COVID cases numbers have been decreasing and vaccinations rising, though, Gallegos Rodriguez plans to apply soon.
“For many people, it’s what they want. Many people don’t have time to come and wait for someone to cook for 10, 15 or 20 minutes, like those who work and see that they have half an hour for their lunch,” he said. “They want to arrive, serve themselves and eat. This is why I am doing it ... I believe that this COVID thing is passing, and hopefully, God willing, they will give me the permission.”
Right now, Gallegos Rodriguez said his biggest hope is that his restaurant will survive, and he’s doing what he can to pull it off. But it’s not just about building a successful business, he said; it’s also about creating more jobs for the community.
“If right now there aren’t any sales because we’re starting, I have three or four workers,” he said. “Imagine when it goes up. There are jobs for more staff. I was talking to a person the other day, and he said, ‘Why do you give him a job? If you can do it.’ But I say no, it’s really about sharing something that’s blessing you right now, and if you can give more people jobs, then you’ve got to do it.”
Reporter Victoria Johnson can be reached at victoria@chathamnr.com.