After over 30 years, Fajitas closes its doors
The owner of Fajitas A Sizzlin Celebration confirmed the longstanding Tex-Mex restaurant in Phoenix has permanently shuttered.
For more than 30 years, patrons frequented the restaurant for margaritas and hot skillets of mesquite-grilled chicken, shrimp and tenderloin filet, served on a bed of onions with a side of flour tortillas made in-house. Fajitas has accommodated birthday parties, proposals, weddings, school reunions and numerous other special occasions.
The restaurant, like most in Phoenix, closed its doors mid-March when Mayor Kate Gallego ordered restaurants to stop dine-in service — an effort to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Gov. Doug Ducey followed shortly after with a statewide directive.
For Fajitas, however, the temporary closure would turn into a permanent one.
“The coronavirus was I guess the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said owner Melissa King, who’s been with the restaurant since the beginning.
‘It never changed’
Fajitas A Sizzlin Celebration opened September 1986 in a 7,600-sq. ft building off Black Canyon Highway, across from Metrocenter, Arizona’s largest shopping mall at one time.
King, a former manager at a TGI Fridays, started at Fajitas as a manager be
fore taking over as an operating partner.
The restaurant had a working tortilla-making machine on display and an open kitchen in the center of the dining room. She recalled how in the early years, diners didn’t understand the concept and would ask the staff how to eat fajitas.
Most of the restaurant’s decor remained the same until its closing day, such as the pink and cobalt blue tiles and the copper art, hand-punched in Texas. Philodendrons, spider plants and ivies hung from the ceiling. King insisted on living plants, bucking against the fake plants that were trendy in the 1990s.
“It never changed,” said former employee Michele Thomas. “If something chipped or cracked, (King) would go to the ends of the world to replace it so it looked the same.”
“And people would say, ‘When are you going to renovate?’” Thomas added. “And I was like, ‘Hopefully never.’ Hopefully, Fajitas looks like this forever, and it did.”
What Fajitas meant to the community
Thomas began working there 32 years ago, after eating at the restaurant for the first time on her 18th birthday. She recalled cheekily trying to order a margarita. The server who denied her would attend Thomas’s wedding as a bridesmaid later.
She worked at the restaurant for 18 years and still stays in touch with people she met working there, including King, whom she described as a mentor.
It’s a weird feeling, knowing she can never go back to Fajitas, Thomas said. It’s the place where she had her wedding rehearsal dinner, grade school reunion and 50th birthday party. Through Fajitas she met one of her best friends and her first husband, who were coworkers, and later her second and current husband, the brother of a former coworker.
“I’ve called it my vortex of love and light because I’m going to say 90% of the people in my life today are from Fajitas in some way, shape or form,” Thomas said.
Brian Climaco has been going to Fajitas almost all his life. He and his family first went there when he was a kid, on a trip to Arizona from Illinois. When they moved to Arizona in 1988, it became the go-to place to take friends and relatives from out of town. When Climaco started his own family, he took his son there.
“After my parents left, when they come back, they don’t want to go to Grand Canyon or Sedona, they wanna know when they can go to Fajitas,” Climaco said. “Even family in the Philippines, they wanna go to Fajitas.”
The closure of Fajitas makes him a little nostalgic for the neighborhood’s old charms he grew up with — eating at China Gate, an old-school Chinese American restaurant, and getting into trouble at Metrocenter, back when it had carnival rides and his sister worked at the arcade.
Metrocenter in its heyday brought in a lot of customers, especially from Black Friday through December when people were out shopping, King said. But then in 2008 the housing market collapsed and Arizona entered the Great Recession.
“We never got back to the sales we had prior to the recession, but we were able to stay open and I was very proud of that,” King said. “But it was never quite the same once the recession hit.”
‘Fajitas closing is like a death’
Fajitas faced other challenges as well. Metrocenter, once a hot spot that attracted visitors from all over the Valley, fell into decline. The restaurant’s building was aging and constantly needed various repairs, King said.
Minimum wage was raising costs and she foresaw a future challenge from nearby light rail construction, scheduled to begin August 2020, King said. But it wasn’t until during the COVID-19 closure that King decided to let Fajitas go.
“When it first started, being mandated to close, I was trying to figure out how to do (takeout) and make it cost-effective,” King said. “I just determined that we wouldn’t be able to do it and do it correctly.”
Even with dining rooms reopening May 11, the combination of limiting the number of guests while adding expenditures — plexiglass, thermometers, masks — wouldn’t have worked with the restaurant’s already small profit margins, she said.
King’s worked 50 to 60 hours a week for most of her life in the restaurant industry. This is the first time in a long time she’s not working and she feels overwhelmed, uncertain about what she’s going to do next.
Many of her current and former employees feel like extended family, which made the decision harder. But the moral support from Fajitas customers and workers has also comforted her as she processes her feelings.
“Sometimes things can’t just go on forever,” King said.
“You do go through a whole range of emotions — grief, anger’s in there,” she said “For me, Fajitas closing is like a death. Death of my baby I spent 34 years of my life taking care of. It’s not easy.”