Well, damnit. This is sad news: Escondido, the tiny, family-run Tex-Mex joint on Butler Street closed last Friday. Damn it. I knew they were struggling. Last December I spoke with owner Juan Herrera and he said they’d already closed their dinner service because business turned bad after The Salvation Army Carr P. Collins Social Service Center opened across from Parkland Hospital on Harry Hines Boulevard. The 161,000 square foot center, which houses up to 600 homeless people a night, backs up to Escondido. In the December post, Herrera said, “We have people walking all over the neighborhood and begging our customers for food. The 7-11 was getting robbed and they closed. So I had to close my restaurant at night. I just had to let employees go.”
Escondido served Tex-Mex out of that building for 35 years. Emma, Maria, Nancy,and Juan we will miss you all.
Update:
William Pacheco step son of owner Juan Herrera sends this note:
After reading your blog, it left me with the impression that we closed because of lack of business, which is not quite why we closed. The only reason why we closed our doors was because of the new Parkland. When we heard that there was going to be a new Parkland built next door, we knew that soon enough the owner of the land would end up selling to Parkland or we thought the city would take the property over for Parkland. Either way we knew we only had years left when we heard news of the new Parkland. Over the last year when we began to physically see buildings being torn down we thought the end is coming. The end of Escondido that it is, but we kept our doors open. It wasn’t until the morning of March 21st of this year when the owner of the building and some of his business partners gave Juan Herrera the news of his life. He was asked to vacate in about 60 days or so. Now while we thought that he had been given the right number in order to sell, that wasn’t the case. The owner of the land did not sell but rather partnered up with a parking garage company. So sometime this year there will be a parking garage at the corner or Butler and Redfield where Escondido stood for 39 years under the same family ownership.
