I’ve always found it funny how whenever I bring up the long-lost Tex-Mex buffet chain Pancho’s, there’s always that one gabacho who is ever so quick to inform me that “That’s not real Mexican food!!!” as he greedily gorges on leftovers from Ted’s Café Escondido.
Sorry Chad, but Pancho’s was about as Tex-Mex as it got, especially for a chain. Founded in El Paso by Jesse Arrambide, Jr. in 1957, growing up in Texas, just about every city I lived in from Brownsville to Houston to Waco and so on had a franchise in their city, one that my parents would gleefully take us kids to after Saturday mass almost every weekend. It was cost-effective, delicious and there was even a collector’s glass that came with your jello parfait dessert.
Pancho’s was always something special that the entire familia, extended and otherwise, Mexican and beyond, always enjoyed, eating all that we cared to, raising the flag for more of those tender flautas or wonderfully cheesy enchiladas. It was a love affair that continued up until my family moved to Oklahoma City in 1989, wherein the former location on Northwest Expressway (across from where the notorious Gattitown currently resides) became a regular dining spot for family get-togethers.
From the time that my brother and I had an enchilada eating contest—I won by devouring 24 of those suckers—to the time my dad had a psychotic episode and punched me in the stomach in the parking lot—barfing 24 enchiladas all over on the side of the Delta 88—there are few restaurants I nostalgically hold close to my enlarged heart and systematically identify with like I do Pancho’s.
Even though, around that time, various rumors were spread that they served dog-food and that someone found worms in their tacos that didn’t stop me from taking my first real date—you know, the one where you drive and everything—to Pancho’s and then on to Brixton Square for a screening of Rumble in the Bronx.