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Restaurateur Determined to Thrive At New East Memphis Location
By FREDRIC KOEPPEL | Special to The Memphis News
Antonio Martinez
In the parlance of the sweet science, a knockdown occurs when a boxer is knocked to the mat but rises to fight again.
Antonio Martinez knows something about that principle.
In 2001, Martinez, who came to Memphis from Mexico City in 1998, was working in the computer division of a local warehousing company. One day, his boss told Martinez he wanted him to return to Mexico to help open a company branch. Martinez explained that he didn’t want to travel, Memphis was his home and his family was here.
“Fine,” said his boss, “you’re fired.”
“Whoa,” Martinez said last week, sitting at a table in his second, recently opened Las Delicias restaurant, just as the lunch crowd was dispersing. “I mean, it’s always a mistake to think that you’re – what’s the word? – invulnerable.”
Martinez, a small, wiry 51-year-old who radiates goodwill and intensity, had worked in restaurants in Mexico City as a teenager. And, before being fired, he had been making tacos and selling them out of his garage on Friday nights.
“So,” he said, “I sat down with my wife, and we talked about it, and we decided to open a restaurant.”
Las Delicias opened on East Shelby Drive in 2003, “but then,” said Martinez, “the railroad bought the property and gave us 20 days to move. We had no choice but to leave.”
Martinez moved the restaurant to an L-shaped strip shopping center off South Mendenhall Road, south of Winchester Road, and Las Delicias reopened in May 2006. A year later, when his purveyor of tortillas and chips closed, Martinez opened a tortilla shop next door.
“We bag the chips and sell them at our restaurants and at a few grocery stores,” he said, “but not to other restaurants, though I would like to. Honestly, other restaurants find my products rather expensive. We use a very pure quality corn. They can find tortillas and chips at half the price, but also half the quality.”
The decision to open a second Las Delicias wasn’t difficult.
“My goal is to stay busy and to provide for those behind me, my children and grandchildren," Martinez said. "We have no big expenses on Mendenhall, we could have just stayed there, but I want this solid foundation for the future.”
The space at 4002 Park Ave. had been empty for about a year. It has earned a reputation in the local restaurant community as a black hole.
For decades, the prominent space at the shopping center’s east end was occupied by Kennedy View, a diner-style restaurant whose name referred to the old Kennedy Veterans Hospital across the street.
In more recent memory, it was home to Audubon Café, which closed in 2002 after changes in ownership. Luna Rossa, an Italian restaurant, opened at the end of 2002 but closed in 2006, followed by Wang’s China Bistro, which didn’t last two years.
Martinez is not superstitious.
“No, that doesn’t bother me," he said. "Before me on Mendenhall there were four restaurants that went broke. A lot of people told me, ‘It’s a bad spot (on Park), you will fail,’ but we broke the bad spell on Mendenhall, and I’m hoping to break the bad spell here.”
His son, Mauricio, 28, and now running Las Delicias on Mendenhall, was delivering tortillas one day and passed the empty store with the “For Lease” banner stretched across the façade.
“He called me and said that he thought he had found the place for us,” Martinez said.
Martinez called the number on the sign and reached Dede Malmo at Malmo Memphis Real Estate, who said, according to Martinez, “Hey, I know you. I’m one of your regular customers.”
“You know, that space was empty for a year before Antonio signed the lease,” said Malmo, “and in that time, I probably got a call every day from someone wanting to rent it, but the wrong people, inexperienced and undercapitalized. I would say, ‘Are you in the restaurant business?’ and they would say, ‘No, but I’ve been cooking great food for my family for 20 years.’ We didn’t want to rent to someone who’s going to fail. Having restaurants that fail cheapens the brand."
Malmo offered Martinez a discount on the rent. After a little back-and-forth, he dropped the lease amount, $4,800 per month, to $2,250 a month for the first year, going to $2,500 in the second year.
The 5,000-square-foot space – much larger than the 1,800 square feet at the Mendenhall location – requires some changes. The increase requires more professional and efficient service.
In addition, the audience is different. On Mendenhall, it’s not uncommon for most of the customers to be Hispanic.
Las Delicias on Park, however, draws a Midtown/University District/East Memphis crowd, and however fanatic those customers may be about authentic Mexican food – and Martinez will go to the mat over the authenticity of his Mexico City cuisine – they want free chips and salsa, and they want cheese dip on the menu.
“I’m sure it’s an adjustment,” said Malmo, “but I don’t think Antonio is losing any sleep over cheese dip.”