Aliyya Swaby Photo
As Domingo Lopez Juarez shoveled a spatula-full of carne enchilada onto the grill in his new food truck, a smoky haze of jalapeno shot up his customers’ noses and into their lungs.
“Spicy,” Juarez said to a chorus of coughs, “is good for your health.”
That could be the official motto of La Guadalupana, the restaurant Juarez has started in a truck.
La Guadalupana offers traditional home-cooked Mexican meals, with an emphasis on the “home.” Juarez set up the food truck on his own front lawn at 282 Davenport Ave. about a month ago. Now it sits on cement blocks behind the house’s wire fence: a not-so-mobile unit.
The kitchen is a new sphere for Juarez, who worked at an auto shop in Mexico before coming to the U.S. in 1993. His wife taught him to cook Mexican food last year, while he was in a period of unemployment. She now works at McDonalds and comes back in the evenings to help him deliver food.
Juarez used to work at La Super Marqueta on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, so most of his customers recognize him, he said. During that time, he saved up money for his own enterprise, a venture that is simultaneously risky and considerably closer to home.
He started by selling food out of the truck in the middle of sidewalk in front of the house. Cold and the snow drove him back behind the gate, permanently. Now the warmth inside the truck draws customers into the restaurant as they wait for their food to cook.
An Ecuadorian couple wandered in past the wire fence and, at the owner’s invitation, walked up the steps of the trailer. They said they live just a couple of blocks down, past the small store on the corner.
“Two quesadillas,” they said. They upped the number to three, then four, as Juarez showed them the options to fill their tortillas: chicken, sausage, a few kinds of pork. He pulled out a jar of chicharrón — fried pork rinds. The couple decided on three chicken quesadillas and one with carne enchilada, a chili-marinated pork with jalapeno and sliced pineapple.
Juarez laid a flour tortilla flat on the grill and filled it with shredded cheddar cheese, let it sit a while to melt. He cooks all the meat on a small stove in the corner of the truck, every morning before he opens for business, and stores it in separate trays next to the grill, ready to be warmed and served.
To prepare the chicken quesadillas, he heated the chicken on the grill before spooning it on top of the melted cheese and folding the tortilla closed. The exact recipes for the preparing the meat are secret, he said.
“Uno guarde la receta, porque si no, imaginese!” Juarez said. “You have to keep the recipe safe, because if not — just imagine!” If customers don’t like his food, or think they can get the same elsewhere, he would lose money, he said. He’s just starting to build up loyal clientele. Juarez sees an average of five customers on weekdays, twice that on weekends. Young people who live in the neighborhood, often Mexican or Puerto Rican, stop for meals at La Guadalupana, usually to buy pork taquitos (small tacos) or cemitas, larger sandwiches.
He makes deliveries to people in the middle of their workdays, who are craving one of his meals.
For those wanting to feel the burn, Juarez tops the quesadilla with a sprinkle of chopped jalapeno and onion. Customers get a choice of three condiments: salsa verde, salsa roja or guacamole.
“Do you want guacamole?” he asked the woman. She seemed unsure.
“Is it spicy?” she asked.
“Pica un poco, doña,” he said. Just a little. The chicken is not spicy, but the carne enchilada is.
Juarez said that his 8‑year old daughter Denise Meneses sometimes eats the spicy carne enchilada for breakfast. “Doesn’t it burn you?” the woman asked in wonder. The little girl shook her head with a grin.
One quesadilla with all the trappings costs $8 and a cemita $10. Tacos cost $2. Fries cost “tres pesos,” he said.
The couple shelled out $32 for four enormous quesadillas stuffed full of spicy pork or not-as-spicy chicken. They headed from Juarez’s home back towards their own, as he saw them off from his truck window.
