El Torito to Try a Cantina Within a Cantina : Restaurants: Taqueria La Fresca will cover nearly a quarter of the chain’s typical 10,000-square-foot floor plan.

For nearly 40 years, the El Torito restaurant chain has prospered by offering its Mexican-style food with full service and a comfortable bar where patrons can drink at their leisure.

But hard liquor sales are declining nationwide, partly because of growing concerns about drunk driving, and conventional sit-down dining rooms are not equipped to meet growing consumer demand for faster service. So the Irvine-based restaurant operator is experimenting with a Taqueria La Fresca, a less-expensive “restaurant within a restaurant” that eventually could be incorporated into most of El Torito’s 143 restaurants.

The opening of the first Taqueria today in The Marketplace shopping center in Irvine reflects a growing consumer appetite for value that has restaurants offering new lower-priced menus, promotions for free meals and even frequent-dining clubs.

El Torito’s new prototype will keep regular table service. But it will also include a new self-service eatery in the cantina, or bar area, that is designed to compete with popular chains such as La Salsa and Rubio’s Fish Tacos.

The Taqueria’s menu includes simple, fresh, Mexican-style entrees prepared in a kitchen that opens into the cantina. It is top-heavy with relatively inexpensive items that take less time to prepare than fare served in the main dining room.

El Torito, which is the nation’s largest Mexican-style sit-down chain, hopes the combination of faster service and lower prices will “get patrons in and out in less time, which is important for many people these days,” President Don McComas said.

The Taqueria is also designed to wring more sales out of the cantinas, which cover nearly a quarter of the typical El Torito restaurant’s 10,000-square-foot floor plan. Those huge bar areas were moneymakers when alcohol sales accounted for more than 40% of the privately held company’s revenue, McComas said. But they are a drag now that alcohol sales have slipped to about 30% of total revenue.

El Torito, owned by privately held Restaurant Enterprises Group in Irvine, isn’t the only restaurant company coping with stalled sales of spirits. Nationwide, alcohol sales by taverns and bars slipped by 3.2% to $9.3 billion during 1992, according to the National Restaurant Assn. “The big reasons are societal changes and regulatory pressures,” association spokeswoman Wendy Webster said. “Anyone who sells liquor has come up against really tough times.”

Falling alcohol sales are doubly hard on operators who, like El Torito, stage lavish happy-hour buffets. “What we end up with are drinkers who are free eaters of our complementary buffet,” McComas said. “What we want to attract are eaters who are also drinkers.”

Restaurant industry analysts caution that while El Torito needs to address the growing demand for value and faster service, the “restaurant within a restaurant” concept could confuse customers who are content with the current configuration.

“There are a lot of risks to it,” said Janet Lowder, a restaurant industry analyst in Rancho Palos Verdes. “When it comes to a dual use, you need to do a lot of strategic planning.”

McComas acknowledged that some customers might be confused upon finding, in effect, two restaurants under one roof. “The one common entryway could be confusing,” he said. “But we think a substantial base of our customers who are already in the cantinas will become Taqueria customers.”