Laura Carrizales and Mel Arizpe opened their West Dallas eloteria Locura before the outbreak and have continued to serve customers while building their brand and expanding their menu. (Photo by Arnold Wayne Jones)

Restaurateurs are soldiering on in the face of sheltering rules

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES  | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com

The social distancing protocols have wreaked havoc on all our lives and livelihoods, but few businesses have been harder hit than restaurants. But in this time of transition some entrepreneurs in food service are forging ahead.

Hand-tossed crust (with gloves on!) from ZaLat: The pizzeria is thriving during the lockdown because of the delivery-and-pickup business model; the company will shortly open its seventh store in the gayborhood. (Photo courtesy Kathy Tran)

“Like everybody else we’re dealing with the zombie apocalypse — it’s like we’re living in a movie,” says Khanh Nguyen, founder of ZaLat Pizza.  “We’re undergoing lots of changes.”

But in the midst of this hubbub, ZaLat is doing something few businesses are right now: Expanding. To the company’s six existing pizzerias, Nguyen is readying to open a seventh in the heart of the gayborhood.

The new ZaLat, located at Throckmorton and Lemmon, completed construction before the shelter-in-place rules and has just received its occupancy certificate from the city; it is slated to open its doors for pickup and delivery on April 13, from 4 p.m. to midnight at first, then eventually normalizing to the 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. hours common at other stores.

It helps, of course, that pizza is perhaps the role model of eat-at-home cuisines, where delivery and pickup are folded into the structure. And business is kinda booming.

“Our numbers are holding, and we have not had to reduce staff, though we have contracted hours,” Nguyen says. “Lunch is not a thing [right now], and there is not after-bar eating because there aren’t any bars open, but we are doing the same amount of sales from dinner to midnight that we were doing all day ’til 4 a.m.” On average, ZaLat’s flagship shop on Fitzhugh produces a pizza every 20 seconds during peak hours; UberEats has named that location the no. 2 spot for its drivers to pick up… in the world. But Nguyen hopes the new store will be a game-changer.

“I’ve actually wanted to be in the [gayborhood] from the start,” says Nguyen, who began his career as a restaurateur when he opened the Vietnamese restaurant Dalat in 2011. (Dalat continues to offer curbside service during the lockdown.) “I’ve been in Dallas for a very long time — I party over there all the time. We had a hard time finding a spot on Cedar Springs, but we wanted to be fairly close. When the neighborhood comes back online, that’s one of the busiest spots in the whole city.”

He wants to integrate into the character of the community as well; not only will the Lemmon location be nicknamed “the rainbow shop,” they are redesigning the company logo (a superheroism “Z” emblem) in rainbow colors and plan to commission a muralist to paint the store in a spectrum. “I love what the city did with the crosswalks and want to see if we can [recreate it],” he says. “Our crew is super excited about the location.”

Revised laws permit restaurants to deliver alcoholic beverages; ZaLat throws in the option of ordering toilet paper as a courtesy. (Photo courtesy Kathy Tran)

Nguyen is as enthusiastic about his crew as they are about the company. ZaLat has offered full medical and dental benefits (including for same-sex partners) for two years, as well as a 401(k) and upcoming stock-purchase options. He even has a tattoo artist on retainer who will bestow long-time staff with the company Z. (“Even our outside counsel has one!” Nguyen crows.) The employe manual is actually a comic book about a service-industry worker disillusioned by colleagues who don’t care and is motivated by the cape-clad crew at ZaLat.

”We’re trying to make a difference and are super proud of the pizzas,” Nguyen says. “If your heart’s in it, it will come through [in the food].”

Launching a restaurant during a quarantine — or any time — is surely a stressful venture. But you wouldn’t know it by walking into Locura, an elotes-centric street-food restaurant that started service in February in West Dallas.
“Not the best time to open a restaurant,” chef and co-owner Laura Carrizales smiles with good-natured irony, while acknowledging that it’s not the best time to anything in the current environment.

It is a perverse twist of serendipity, then, that the name chosen for this unique counter-service… ummm… eloteria (?), Locura, translates into “Madness.” The name had nothing to do with the current state of the culture. Carrizales, with her partner — in life, business and la musica — is Mel Arizpe; together, they have performed for several years as the singing duo Mi Diva Loca (a play on mi vida loca, “my crazy life”). The singing gigs have been on hold since November, when they decided it was time to pursue their dreams of restaurateurship.

Carrizales had the background — by training, if not experience. She studied culinary at El Centro, then attended Texas Woman’s University where she obtained a degree in food service management. Both women, being of Mexican descent, wanted a way to showcase the flavors of their upbringings.

“Growing up in Brownsville on the border, we would go across to Matamoros a lot and there were eloteros — basically ‘corn men,’ selling corn on the cob dressed with all the good stuff: mayo, cheese,” Arizpe explains. “We wanted to keep that tradition— anywhere you go in Dallas where [restaurants] do have elotes, it’s usually in a cup and not necessarily fresh corn.”

Chef Laura Carrizales developed a number of elotes recipes, all for traditional corn-on-the-cob consumption. (Photo by Arnold Wayne Jones)

“We shuck ours fresh,” Carrizales adds, they steam it and finish off on an open flame; down the road, they may start offering a version in a cup.

But while the style may be traditional, the flavors are largely the result of Carrizales’ flights of fancy. (“I don’t cook,” says Arizpe. “I have a degree in music! But for a year, I was the taste-tester.”) Among the unique recipes: a lemon-pepper wing elotes; a Middle Eastern za’atar recipe (both started out as special “elotes of the day” and worked their way onto the permanent menu); even house-made ranch (all the sauces, in fact, are made in-house). Anything, Carrizales says, that “tastes good with corn and butter.” (Although, I ask: what doesn’t? “Well, fruity stuff doesn’t work,” she has discovered.)

while elotes were the inspiration, the menu has expanded to include tapas-style small bites with a variety of influences: a pork belly dressed Carrizales’ take on an Argentine chimichurri (I tried it; it’s heavenly); the Locura fries, which Carrizales describes as a “Mexican poutine — green pico and pork gravy;” a pozole Frito pie, which Arizpe says has been her own go-to dish when the kitchen it busy.

Of course, the kitchen hasn’t been as busy as these new restaurateurs might have hoped when they signed the lease last fall for what had been the original Trompo space (Trompo has since moved to Bishop Arts). Initially, they had intended for Locura to be full-service; it was only after working with the city that they learned they had too few parking spaces for that and had to operate as take-out.

“That was a huge bummer” at the time, Arizpe admits, “but it ended up being ideal because we got to stay open. We still do our to-go orders and have added UberEats and Doordash.”

The couple has been buoyed in part by the support of the community. They were added to a list of small businesses, which has helped. Friends have volunteered their services helping build the website and taking photos of the food. Colleagues from Arizpe’s day job stop by for lunch.
They’ve also done their best to brighten the space with a colorful mural. Some old Trompo customers still pop in and immediately notice the changes. “They often say, ‘It looks happy in here!’ Then we tell them about the menu and if they like it, hopefully they’ll be back,” Arizpe says.

Return customers would be magnificent, but for now they are still trying to expand the customer base. Shelter-in-place restrictions “have slowed down business — we’re not where we wanted to be,”Arizpe says. “We’ve done pretty good in the short time we’ve been open. We’re just gonna keep going and expand with our delivery options. As long as people keep ordering food! We’re doing something right. People are really enjoying the food. Our attitude is, ‘Let’s kill it.’”

The ZaLat Rainbow location, set to open April 13, is located at 4007 Lemmon Ave., ste. B. ZalatPizza.com.
Locura: Small Bites in Dallas TX is located at 839 Singleton Blvd. #50. LocuraDallas.com.

…………………………..

Teach a man to fish…

Restaurants are also adapting by turning your home into a kitchen. Asian Mint continues to offer curbside and delivery of prepared meals, but last week it began selling cook-at-home kits with all the ingredients necessary to make dishes, including pad Thai (pictured), potstickers, tom yum sound and spring rolls. And what makes it a kit rather than just a grocery delivery service? The inclusion of recipe cards that walk you through the prep step-by-step.

It’s a boon for Asian cuisine, since many of us probably have less experience in that category than, say, boiling pasta or fricaseeing a chicken. And the process is easy to follow.

Of course, the advantage of cooking at home is the ability to tailor a recipe to your own taste, so wanna add a stick of cinnamon to the tom yum broth, as I did? Go for it. You can steam or fry your dumplings, according to taste. And sprinkle as much of their proprietary spice mix — called Drama Queen! — as you can handle. Plate as you choose for maximum impact, as I did here and voila! You’re a chef.

— Arnold Wayne Jones

Asian Mint isn’t the only restaurant offering cook-at-home kits: Meddlesome Moth, Nosh and Primo’s all have various ingredient-and-instructional packs for your home-cheffing delight.