Juan Contreras saved $3,000 the slow way. As he has told the story over the years, he spent seven years working as a janitor at Love Field and at Tyler Street United Methodist Church before he had enough to lease a little building on West Jefferson Boulevard. In 1989 he opened a café there and named it El Padrino, after a restaurant he had worked at back home in Nuevo Laredo.
Thirty-seven years later, his family has been told to leave.
Cafeteria y Loncheria El Padrino, at 408 W. Jefferson Blvd. in Oak Cliff, will close at the end of December. After a change in property management, the lease was not renewed, and the family was given less than three months to move out.
His son, who shares his name, broke the news on the restaurant’s social accounts in October. He did not dress it up.
“Honestly it’s not a surprise,” he wrote. “With Bishop Arts and all the development interest around it, something was bound to happen eventually.”
Anyone who has spent time on Jefferson knows the place. The dining room is small, the building is a former hamburger stand that dates to around 1949, and the Texas Theatre is a short walk down the street. The family’s Facebook page still sums it up in one line: serving your favorite Mexican antojitos since 1989.
That means tacos, tortas, and a full Mexican breakfast that has kept the doors opening at 8 a.m. for decades. In the early 1990s, the elder Contreras went on Univision to show viewers how he built a torta. After that, the lunch line regularly ran out the door.
This is the second time Bishop Arts has pushed an El Padrino off its block. For years, the family also ran a walk-up taco stand on West Davis Street, a few blocks north. They lost that lease in 2013, right as the district was turning into the place it is now. The Jefferson café, the first restaurant Juan Contreras ever opened, carried on.
His son has spoken about it plainly. The little Oak Cliff restaurant was his father’s dream, and in his words, “He’s been feeding this neighborhood since 1989.”
There is some good news in all of this. The family’s second El Padrino, in Pleasant Grove, is not affected and will stay open. The Contreras family has also said it is looking for a new space in Oak Cliff, so the name may not leave the neighborhood for good.
For now, the Jefferson Boulevard location is running on its regular schedule. Doors open at 8 a.m. every day, closing at 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and at 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Unless something changes, the last plates go out at the end of December.
If you have a regular order there, or if you never got around to going, the next two months are the time. The number is 214-943-3993.
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