Forager: The taqueria that rose anew from the ashes of a Mission fire.
El Gran Taco Loco rebuilds in Excelsior after Bernal blaze
Saul Chavez was not at El Gran Taco Loco, his Bernal Heights taqueria, on June 18, 2016, the day it was destroyed, his life interrupted, his bank accounts gutted.
The 41-year-old restaurateur was on a catering job when employees called him to say that Cole Hardware, the business next door, was on fire. First Chavez tried to reassure them. After the calls kept coming, worry escalating with each one, he told them to leave.
By the time Chavez was able to return to the restaurant, the fire had destroyed six buildings and left more than 50 people homeless. The fire department later attributed the blaze to a smoldering cigarette or barbecue coals that someone next door had thrown into a trash can.
Immediately after the fire, Chavez forwarded the restaurant’s telephone number to his personal cell phone. Customers called him nonstop, trying to place takeout orders, forcing him to explain over and over about the fire. It was as if he was being hounded by his own tragedy, as if it wouldn’t let him catch his breath. But each caller offered consolation as well. Some customers even called back to check in: When would El Gran Taco Loco reopen?
When would El Gran Taco Loco reopen? At first, Chavez assumed it would be a matter of months. Jets of water had turned the place into a mess — all the ceiling tiles dropped to the floor — but the equipment seemed unharmed. The city gave him $10,000 in emergency funds while he waited for insurance to kick in. Several thousand more arrived from a GoFundMe campaign set up by a neighbor.
When construction crews demolished the Cole Hardware building, exposing the upper floors of the hotel El Gran Taco Loco was housed in, Chavez realized the situation was more dire. Charred craters in the top stories looked as if Godzilla had raged down Mission Street, spewing napalm.
Then, in September, the landlord notified Chavez that a clause in his lease allowed the building owner to cancel the agreement if the space couldn’t be occupied for more than three months. The news unmoored him.
A refrain punctuates Chavez’s story: “The fire changed my life.”
Chavez had spent 15 years running El Gran Taco Loco, just two doors down from his uncle’s seafood restaurant, Playa Azul, which was also destroyed in the blaze. Chavez had three kids in private school. A house in San Leandro. He had just fixed up a taco trailer to expand his business.
He fell into a deep depression, compounded by the fact that he couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night. It was mollified by one thought: “Somewhere in my body, I have a smart heart to make me think this way: It was just money. Something you can fix,” he says.
Fixing it meant hunting for a new space in Hayward, closer to his house, until he heard that the owner of Taqueria Menudo in the Excelsior was selling the business after four decades. “Even if I don’t live here, I trust this area,” Chavez says of the southern stretch of Mission Street.
It would have been easier for him to take over Taqueria Menudo’s existing business — no reapplying for liquor licenses, no wrangling with his insurance company, no remodeling the bathrooms to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act — but Chavez had worked too hard to build his brand. So he embarked on eight months of renovation. He and a few employees manned the El Gran Taco Loco trailer at A’s games and street-food pods, and Chavez logged each appearance on Facebook.
On May 22, he finally posted, “Our first day of business at the New Location in Excelsior Neighborhood!”
El Gran Taco Loco is the first of the businesses displaced by the fire to reopen. The owner of the hotel that used to house the taqueria and the 3300 Club has put the building up for sale. Playa Azul’s renovation is stuck in limbo. Plans to build a fivestory condo building on the site of the old Cole Hardware have just been filed, and the hardware store may or may not return. Jose Marenco, who owns Jenny & Jesse, a Honduran restaurant most people know as El Paisa, says he will reopen at 3322 Mission St. this
“Somewhere in my body, I have a smart heart to make me think this way: It was just money. Something you can fix.” Saul Chavez, El Gran Taco Loco owner, on the fire that destroyed his business
week.
The new Excelsior location is glutted with light. Its 16-foot-high walls are painted in crimson, marigold and saffron so vivid you can feel the colors soaking into your skin. The menu glows on a bank of tall LCD screens, one of which flashes advertisements for El Gran Taco Loco’s truck.
It takes five screens to list all of the dishes the restaurant now sells. San Francisco taquerias, Chavez says, may have the reputation of serving Mexican fast food, but they’ve really become more like all-day diners. Tacos and burritos may be its mainstay, but the restaurant serves egg dishes from morning until night, and has added soups and entrees. “If we don’t have those options we send people to the competition,” he says.
His life resumed. Chavez now holds court from the back table, wearing jeans and a company T-shirt. Half of his former employees returned, leaving the jobs they’d found after the fire to work for him again. Even more reassuring: Although he has moved 18 blocks from the old location — he counted — customers with faces he vaguely remembers greet him as if they’ve known him forever. “What it says to me,” he says, “is that we were doing things right.”