Somewhere around 5 p.m. every night, the lights come up at Javier’s Gourmet Mexicano on Cole Avenue and the regulars start drifting in. There’s no lunch here and never has been. Javier’s does dinner, and it has been doing dinner since 1977. Do the math and you land on a big one. Next year the place turns 50, and Javier Gutierrez is still the name on the sign. That doesn’t happen much in Dallas.
Gutierrez was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Mexico City before his family moved to Texas when he was 12. By the time he opened his own restaurant he was still in his twenties, and he knew what he wanted to cook. He wanted the food of the capital, the more continental style he grew up eating, with tenderloin and red snapper on the menu instead of combination plates.
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