Restaurant Owners Concoct Their Own Recipe for Success

Francisco and Martha E. Jaurigue arrived in Alhambra from Mexico in the 1970s penniless and undocumented, and soon fell into the harsh rhythm of long work days for low pay in the area’s factories.

With a 2-year-old toddler to care for, Martha, then 21, stitched garments. Francisco, then 20, assembled camper shells. Both struggled to save while sending money home to their families in Mexico.

Today, the Jaurigues are the operators and owners-to-be of Flamingo Hills, one of Pomona’s most elegant dining spots, perched off Fairplex Drive with spectacular night views of the city below.

“I never wanted to work for anybody else, not here or in Mexico,” Martha, now 39, said in Spanish recently, dressed in a gingham business jacket and adorned with gold jewelry. “Even when we arrived, we both decided we wanted to have our own business.”

Their journey from Alhambra to the expansive dining rooms of glass, white linen and tropical fish was slow. A stint as Pomona’s first curbside taco vendors in 1979, for instance, ended abruptly when the city cracked down on parked catering trucks.

And their first restaurant--a small converted office space on West Mission Boulevard--was launched with such a tiny nest egg that it relied on a motley collection of tables donated by friends. Customers, Martha recalled, often brought their own chairs or ate seated in their cars outside.

But now, the Jaurigues say proudly, they’ve arrived.

Visitors to Flamingo Hills drive through wrought-iron gates down a eucalyptus-lined lane that borders a pricey custom-home development and faces the Mountain Meadows Golf Course.

At the restaurant’s entrance, a cascading waterfall empties into a pond, filled with baby lobsters visible from the gently arcing footbridge that leads inside. The multitiered, glass-walled complex seats 2,000 and covers half an acre, including five outdoor terraces, two dance halls, a bar and a banquet room complete with pool tables and a bandstand where the Jaurigues hope mariachi music will soon serenade weekend brunch-goers and private parties.

The couple have been running the restaurant for several months and are purchasing it and the land it sits on from Anaheim-based Specialty Restaurants Corp. for $2.1 million, Francisco said. The property will be in escrow for two more months. Previous operators of the restaurant, which has seen a high turnover in recent years, had leased the facility.

“We’re a little bit nervous. It’s such a big investment, and the economy is not very good right now,” he said.

Francisco, 38, is quiet and soft-spoken, shyly opening up to share his dream, pondered during years of hard work, first in Mexico City and then here, to one day own his own restaurant.

Martha, on the other hand, is ferociously resolute, an attitude that she says carried her family through years of tight times.

“We never thought about losing our business. And we’re not thinking of it now,” Martha said. “I believe that it’s a matter of determination--that it comes from within.”

Francisco was born in Arandas, a city in the Mexican state of Jalisco known for its giant antique bell. One of 12 children in a poor family, he started working after finishing second grade. At 15, he left Arandas for Mexico City, where for several years he worked in various taquerias.

“The economic situation at home was very bad, so I had to leave,” Francisco said of his decision to leave Arandas.

While Martha, from a family of six children in the town of Jiquilpan, Michoacan, continued her schooling to the college level, both of them were bringing money to their families by the time they turned 8, Francisco said.

Francisco immigrated to Alhambra, where his cousins were living, and Martha, whom he knew in Mexico, joined him a few years later. They married in 1976, and after a year the Jaurigues moved to Pomona. Soon after, Francisco found work assembling motor homes, while Martha worked in related jobs, such as painting the cabinets and shelving for the recreational vehicles.

On the weekends, however, they donned their entrepreneurial hats: selling used clothing, and taking trips to the countryside in their used pickup to buy fruit that they later sold to local markets.

In 1979, with $2,000 in his pocket saved from selling fruit and working construction jobs at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, Francisco purchased a catering truck from a friend. The couple parked the vehicle on Eleanor Street and East Mission Boulevard, and promptly began cranking out an all-taco menu that delighted their Latino customers.

“It was hard, because we really didn’t have any money. To start your own business without money is crazy,” Francisco said, grinning.

The Jaurigues’ first business enterprise came to a halt after seven months, when they were slapped with a fine from the city and ordered to stop serving from the street corner. The stroke of bad luck prompted them to buy their first restaurant.

In 1980, with $8,000 in savings that was devoured in one month by routine expenses, the Jaurigues opened Tacos Jalisco in the converted office space on West Mission Boulevard. The name was derived from Francisco’s home state of Jalisco.

After four years, they saved enough money to buy the property at 595 W. Mission Blvd., where the current Tacos Jalisco sits across the street from the old one. It took another three years of saving before the Jaurigues could start building the new restaurant, which opened in 1990. The couple will continue to operate it, they said.

“It all went in steps,” Francisco recalled.

The Jaurigues couldn’t afford an architect. So Martha took on the task herself.

“I went to the store and bought pens in red, green and blue,” she recounted. “I drew the plumbing lines in blue, electric lines in red. . . . When the health inspector saw it, he said, ‘What’s this?’ But it worked.”

While Flamingo Hills has been unstable over the last few years, community leaders say the Jaurigues may be able to rescue it.

Francisco Suarez, a Pomona lawyer and Latino business leader, had particular praise for Martha. “I think the person who’s buying (Flamingo Hills) is a shrewd businesswoman and that she’ll be able to turn it around,” he said.

The Jaurigues plan to keep the current menu, which includes such hearty entrees as shrimp creole, baby back ribs and blackened breast of chicken, but they are also adding Mexican seafood dishes.

“It cost us a lot of work. But we got here. With the help of God,” Francisco said. “To get to this point--without money, without English, and at first without papers, was very hard.”

Francisco and Martha each speak fractured English, picked up in part from their six children as they grew. But the couple’s plans to pore over language textbooks together at night were often postponed when they came home exhausted, they said.

Both became legal U.S. residents after a 1986 federal law offered amnesty to immigrants who had lived and worked in the United States since 1982.

While many immigrants arrive in the United States from Mexico with the intention of working for a few years and returning home, the Jaurigues attribute their success in part to their commitment to stay.

“I love Mexico very much, but my home is where I live. Our roots are in Mexico, but we never thought of going back,” Martha said.