In 1977, Campbell Taggart, one of America’s biggest bread companies, paid more than twenty million dollars for El Chico. It had never run a restaurant in its life, and it did not want the seventy-nine Mexican dining rooms that came with the deal. What the bakery wanted was in the grocery store: the frozen dinners and canned Mexican food coming out of a plant in Dallas. Five years later, a beer deal forced the bread company to sell the restaurants back to the family, and even the frozen dinners, the part worth all that money, did not stay put.

The whole story began with a woman selling tamales at a county fair while her children played music to draw a crowd. Her name was Adelada Cuellar. In the 1920s, she was a sharecropper’s wife in Kaufman County, southeast of Dallas, raising twelve children on land that belonged to someone else. She had come up from northern Mexico and married Macario in Laredo in 1892.

Their grandson liked to say she would not give Macario her hand until he agreed to move to Texas. Farming could not support a family that size, and the one job skill she had was cooking Mexican food. So she used it. At the Kaufman County Fair, she sold tamales and chili while the kids played their instruments to pull people to the stand.

Her profit was three hundred dollars, more than the farm made in an entire year. The family tried a real restaurant next, a small cafe in downtown Kaufman with their own name over the door. Adelada, now called Mama by everyone, did the cooking. The Depression closed it, so the five oldest boys, Frank, Mac, Alfred, Gilbert, and Willie Jack, went out on their own and opened little cafes in places like Shreveport, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City.

Some closed. Some stuck. In 1940, four of the brothers came to Dallas. With a five-hundred-dollar loan from their mother, they opened a restaurant on Oak Lawn Avenue.

Frank joined his brothers in 1949, and the five of them put everything into one chain. By 1950, they were running five restaurants, and Dallas had started calling them the Mama’s Boys. In 1960, the company put that right in its ads: Like Mama, like son. But the most important thing the brothers did in those years happened outside the dining room.

At the end of 1949, they decided to start canning. The plant was on Leslie Street in the Trinity Industrial District, and by March of 1950, El Chico cans were on grocery shelves in Dallas and Fort Worth. Chili, enchiladas, tamales still in the husks, enchilada sauce, hot sauce, and even tortillas in a can, opened with a key like a canned ham. Production tripled in nine months.

Then, in 1953, the family got sued in federal court. A man who owned a well-known nightclub in Greenwich Village called El Chico said the name was his. The court split it down the middle. The family could keep El Chico on the restaurants, but it had to come off the cans.

The cans switched to the family’s last name with a pronunciation guide printed right on the label: Cuellar. Sales dropped hard. A name shoppers already knew had been traded for one most of them could not pronounce. The family appealed, and in 1954, they won the name back.

In 1955, they went into frozen food. The plant put in a freezing system that could freeze six thousand dinners at a time in an hour and a half. By 1962, El Chico products were in grocery stores in twenty-two states. That year, the food business and the commissary merged into El Chico Corporation, with sales over five million dollars a year.

The canned and frozen side alone was grossing more than two and a half million. By the early sixties, El Chico had a second business that did not need a dining room at all. It fit in a grocery freezer case, and it could go anywhere a truck could. The restaurants were what people remembered, though.

When Six Flags Over Texas opened in Arlington in 1961, the family ran the restaurant in the park’s Mexico section. Most visitors had never seen Mexican food, so the menu carried chicken fried steak and fried chicken with a tamale or a taco tucked onto the side of the plate where the fries would usually go. For a lot of those visitors, a tamale next to their chicken fried steak was the first Tex-Mex they ever tasted. That location, open about seven months a year, ended up with the highest sales of any El Chico in the chain.

In July of 1966, Princess Grace of Monaco wanted Mexican food for the Monte Carlo Centennial. The Dallas singer Trini Lopez told her the best Mexican food he knew of was at El Chico in Dallas. So Willie Jack and his nephew Claude loaded a plane with ingredients, flew to Monaco, and cooked dinner for Prince Rainier, the princess, and their guests. A tamale stand at a county fair to a dinner in Monaco in forty years.

In 1968, the company went public, selling 172,000 shares. That made the Mama’s Boys millionaires, and their mother lived to see it. She died the next year at ninety-seven. After the stock sale, El Chico started selling franchises.

Over four years, they granted twenty-two franchises, and those restaurants did not make money. Gilbert, who was running the company by then, was blunt about it. Everybody was franchising, so we thought we would, too. His verdict was just as honest.

It turned out to be the worst thing we ever did, because at the time we weren’t equipped to maintain standards. The franchising stopped in 1972. The chain kept growing anyway, forty-four restaurants in 1970, then seventy-nine by 1977. But the seventies were also when the chain got tired.

The family kept a tight grip, not many outsiders made it into management, and the restaurants started showing their age. Sales and profits sagged. So, by the time a buyer came calling, the family had a restaurant chain that looked its age and a grocery business that was humming. Campbell Taggart was based in Dallas and enormous, more than a billion dollars a year in baked goods.

Its products reached 98 percent of American households. It had grown so big buying up other bakeries that the Federal Trade Commission barred it from buying any more. If it wanted to keep growing, it had to buy something that wasn’t bread. That is how a bakery ends up shopping for a Mexican restaurant chain.

The frozen and canned food side made up a third of El Chico’s revenue, and it was doing well while the restaurants weren’t. It also fit right beside a company that was already in nearly every grocery store in the country. It wanted the frozen dinners. From where Campbell Taggart sat, it was a smart buy.

It knew factories and grocery shelves, and the food side responded. Executives found a lot of waste and outdated methods in the El Chico commissary. The company’s president brought in portion controls, cost controls, and new automated equipment, including a tortilla machine that turned out eight hundred corn tortillas a minute. They doubled the frozen line up to twenty-seven entrees.

And around 1980, the frozen line got a new name: El Charrito, the little cowboy. After all that fighting over the name on a label, the frozen dinners didn’t say El Chico anymore. One of them, the Saltillo dinner, a three-compartment tray with a beef enchilada, a cheese enchilada, Spanish rice, and refried beans, became a freezer staple for a lot of families in the eighties. The restaurants went the other way.

Campbell Taggart had no restaurant experience, and it didn’t hire anybody who did. It went for growth. Twenty new El Chicos opened in seventeen months, the biggest opening run in the chain’s history, and many of them sat a long way from the commissary in Dallas, which made them expensive to supply. When the numbers turned, the company did what a manufacturer knows how to do.

It cut costs. In a restaurant, cost cuts end up on the plate, and the food and service slipped across the chain. Years later, a member of the family gave the kindest summary anybody has offered. Campbell Taggart was a fine company with good intentions, but as a manufacturing giant, the company’s focus was on cost control and management efficiencies, which unfortunately isn’t compatible with operating a chain of restaurants.

In November of 1980, Campbell Taggart finally brought in a restaurant man, Richard Rivera, a senior executive from Steak and Ale. He saw the concept was sound and spent forty to fifty thousand dollars a restaurant on remodels, pushed manager training, and redid the uniforms, the menus, the signs, and the logo. Slowly, the chain started to come back. Then came the beer.

In 1982, Anheuser-Busch, the brewer behind Budweiser, the world’s largest brewery at the time, agreed to buy Campbell Taggart. Shareholders approved it in October in a deal reported at somewhere between 560 and 570 million dollars. The problem was sitting in the restaurants. All but one of El Chico’s eighty-four restaurants served liquor, and state and federal laws kept a company that made alcohol from also selling it at retail.

A brewer couldn’t own a chain of Mexican restaurants pouring margaritas, so the restaurants had to go. The frozen and canned food business and the commissary in Dallas could stay with Campbell Taggart. The bread company kept exactly what it came for. The part it never really wanted was the part the law made it give up.

Rivera tried to buy the chain himself in a leveraged buyout and couldn’t pull it off. Then the big names showed up: W. R. Grace, Pillsbury, General Mills.

They all lost to Gilbert Cuellar, one of the original Mama’s Boys, in his seventies. He bid $12. 6 million, well above anybody else, and backed it with a guaranteed personal loan. Rivera explained how one family outbid the conglomerates.

Gilbert knew El Chico’s potential worth and knew he could organize a management team to keep the company on track. The family had El Chico back, more than forty years after the brothers opened on Oak Lawn. Gilbert brought in his son, Gilbert Jr. In 1985, the younger Gilbert was thirty-one and president of a chain with seventy-six company restaurants and seventeen franchised ones in eleven states.

It was expected to bring in about a hundred million dollars that year. He knew what had carried it. El Chico has survived because of the family. Gilbert Sr.

died in July of 1986 at seventy-five after a long illness. His employees called him Mr. Gilbert. A company spokeswoman said his business was his life.

When he wasn’t at the office, he was out looking at possible restaurant sites or in the kitchen cooking. By the next year, the company had more than a hundred restaurants and over a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. After his father died, Gilbert Jr. pushed the company toward newer, pricier ideas: a burger place called Cactus, an upscale Mexican dinner house called Casa Rosa, a spicier regional concept called Cantina Laredo.

In 1991, the company even changed its name to Southwest Cafes. In 1992, the board voted Gilbert Jr. out as chief executive and turned the company back toward El Chico. One industry analyst put it bluntly.

The younger Gilbert liked chasing new concepts, and that’s what cost him his job. The numbers were tired. By the close of 1995, the company counted 101 El Chicos in fourteen states. Sales at existing restaurants fell two and a half percent in 1995 and almost three percent in 1996.

That year, the company took a 9. 4 million dollar charge tied to closing six restaurants and writing down others and reported a loss of about three million dollars. In December of 1997, shareholders approved a sale at $12. 75 a share in cash.

The deal closed in January of 1998, and El Chico became part of what is now Consolidated Restaurant Operations. El Chico never went bankrupt. It just kept getting smaller. The frozen dinners stayed with the bread company through the beer merger and for about another decade.

Campbell Taggart kept making them, reworking the recipes in 1985, adding new products, and giving the boxes new graphics. Then Anheuser-Busch decided its bakery should just be a bakery, and under a new chief executive, the company started selling off whatever wasn’t bread. At the end of December 1993, Campbell Taggart sold the frozen line to Alex Foods, a Mexican food company out of Anaheim, California. The frozen enchiladas didn’t go with the bread, and the company put it plainly.

Nearly every household in America bought bread regularly, while Mexican food reached a much narrower group of shoppers. The frozen line had been part of the bread company for sixteen years. And now it was gone, too. The restaurants kept getting smaller as well.

Around 2013, an industry publication counted fifty-three in the United States. The Waco El Chico, a family’s regular stop for nearly fifty-five years, closed in September of 2017 because the state needed the land to widen Interstate 35. The company spokesman told customers, please dine with us in Temple. In March of 2020, the pandemic closed the company’s restaurants for a while.

That same year, the last direct descendant of the family still working for El Chico retired. Today, El Chico’s own website lists eleven restaurants in the United States, four in Texas, four in Oklahoma, and one each in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. One of the Texas ones is in Rockwall, northeast of Dallas, where a server named Robert Mojica, who has worked for El Chico since 1982, calls out to customers as he comes out of the kitchen with a tray up on his shoulder: be careful, hot plate. On the back wall of that dining room hang two murals that first went up in 1949 at the Inwood Village El Chico in Dallas, the same year the brothers decided to start canning.

They’re still on the wall.