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.