Small businesses awaiting change in the winds in downtown Edinburg

EDINBURG — Lawyers and clerks from the Hidalgo County Courthouse fill the small dining room, takeout orders wait for delivery in tightly tied bags in the kitchen, a lonche is burning in the oven, and owner Simon Madera just discovered yesterday’s lettuce is already brown.

A table of regulars is angry about the wait for their lunch, says the lone waiter — who doubles as the delivery driver — as he grabs the takeout and heads into the rain for a delivery to a nearby bank. Madera knocks down the price and offers the customer a gift certificate.

“He was cool about it,” Madera said. “People have a different approach when you’re just honest with them. ‘Look, we’re swamped. We’re backed up because of the weather.’”

As city leaders wait on a consultant’s report on how to revitalize Edinburg’s struggling downtown, Madera is one business owner pushing his vision of a thriving eatery in a district crowded with legal offices and tax accountants.

Having quit his job at a bank and now considering taking leave from graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, Madera is back in his hometown in the Rio Grande Valley and trying to turn Xalisco Mexi-Café into a profitable restaurant amid the doldrums of Edinburg’s downtown.

When court is in session, a steady stream of customers trickle in for the lunch, but when night falls, or the weekend arrives, the courthouse quiets and downtown Edinburg is dead. During lunch two weeks ago, Madera said he would rather be on the floor talking, schmoozing and building a clientele, but with sales higher than expected, he had to work the kitchen alongside his mother and grandmother.

“I’m so assertive and my mom’s so passive that it works really well,” Madera said from the kitchen at 112 S. 12th Ave.

For now Xalisco relies completely on the lunch crowd, but for the restaurant to have longevity it will need to expand its customer base, Madera said.

To that end, Madera now consistently keeps the restaurant open late on Fridays and Saturdays, offering discounted beer and even putting on concerts. He has scattered flyers on the campus of the University of Texas-Pan American, and he has even crashed college house parties to promote his eatery.

But he’s not sure if he will renew his license to sell alcohol. If he does so, his business will become more of a bar. His other option is to abandon the idea altogether and focus on food, he said.

Madera opened Xalisco in 2008. He grew up in the kitchen of his mother’s eatery, Esther’s Catering Co., the orders for which are now filled in Madera’s kitchen.

“I grew up hating what my mom did for a living,” he said. “I fell in love with it because it’s like having a child. You work in it and it turns into a passion.”

Madera saw downtown Edinburg as an untapped resource — a place prime for investment to turn the empty buildings, law offices and novelty shops into a charming downtown shopping district similar to how McAllen revitalized South 17th street.

Edinburg’s downtown renaissance hasn’t yet come to fruition, a lesson that Mary Ann Ortiz learned after opening a floral shop down the street from Madera six years ago. At Divine Ideas Bridal and Flower Shop, weekend business is abysmal when there are no school dances or weddings to boost customer traffic, Ortiz said.

Business is also bad when it rains. The streets flood and waves sometimes roll over the curb, up the gentle slope of the sidewalk and through the front door of Divine Ideas, Ortiz said.

Then there are Mondays, when the courthouse parking lot is reserved for jurors, she said. Lawyers and others with courthouse business take up the street parking, preventing her customers from finding a spot.

“People just pass by here,” Ortiz said from her shop at the corner of South 12th Avenue and East University Drive. “There’s little shopping centers here and there, but I don’t know what it’s going to take to get people to come and shop Edinburg.”

At a cost of $100,000, the city expects to have a report from the downtown revitalization consultant within a year. Meanwhile, Madera, who occasionally sleeps in his restaurant’s office, will decide whether to move toward a bar-like business model or stick with the restaurant model. He also must decide whether to return to school in a few weeks.

He explains his commitment to the restaurant with the story of how he helped his mother build her catering business into a more professional operation.

“It had a lot to do with how much my mom worked and how we didn’t see a big profit. My mom alone used to make double (the food) that I made today, but she never really had the support,” he said. “When I got involved and I made a little bit of money, rather than go buy a house, I wanted my mom to have something with her name on it.”

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Sean Gaffney covers business, the economy and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.