Balmore Diaz-Paiz
Mañana Restaurant.
- Rosario Diaz and her son, Balmore Diaz-Paiz, turned their home-based side hustle into a full-blown business, earning six figures a month since 2018 after launching their restaurant less than 20 years ago.
- Diaz began selling tamales on the weekends to friends in San Fernando Valley, California after first immigrating to the US when she was 26.
- After spending seven years selling pupusas out of her home, Rosario opened Mañana Restaurant in St. Paul - her first location - in 2005.
- The recession hit Mañana hard, resulting in days when sales hovered around just $200, so the duo got creative and began selling to factory workers during break times.
- In 2017, she graduated from a 30-seat space to an over 80-seat space complete with two dining rooms and a sprawling patio, where Mañana continues to operate today.
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What started as a tamale-slinging side hustle eventually grew into the St. Paul-based Mañana Restaurant that today boasts over 80 seats smattered across two dining rooms and a patio - and nets Rosario Diaz and her family around $103,000 in revenue each month.
When Diaz immigrated to San Fernando Valley in the mid-1970's at age 26, she worked 12-hour days in a golf-club factory. On the weekends, she would send her son, Balmore Diaz-Paiz, to pick up over a hundred ears of corn that she'd use to make tamales, a traditional Mexican food composed of steamed masa stuffed with meat, cheese, and other various fillings. To supplement Rosario's meager factory earnings - a couple hundred dollars a week - she sold them for a dollar a piece to neighbors and fellow members of the immigrant community. It was a family affair.
Rosario Diaz
Rosario Diaz.
"We would take the leaves out and put them on our knees to save them to wrap the tamales," Diaz-Piaz recalled. "After that, we would peel the corn. My mom had one of those tiny grinders that you attach to the table. My brother would put the corn in the [grinder] and I would be the one cranking it. When I would get tired, we'd switch." Once the tamales were steamed and ready, Rosario would call the people she knew who wanted her tamales and they'd sell out almost immediately, netting her an average of $400 in a weekend.
Attracting customers in the Midwest
It was after moving from California to New Jersey in search of a more manageable cost of living and then eventually to Minnesota that Rosario pivoted to the pupusas - a Salvadoran corn dish similar to a Venzuelan arepa - that would become Mañana's staple. Diaz rented a single apartment in East St. Paul and found herself surrounded by a robust Salvadoran community in which no one was making one of the country's signature foods.
Just like before, Diaz spent her days working in a factory - this time packaging tomatoes - and her nights and weekends making pupusas. After being encouraged by early customers - close family and friends in her new neighborhood - to start selling her confections, she did just that out of her one-bedroom apartment. Diaz would start cooking at around 5:00 p.m. when she got home from work and sell her pupusas until 10 p.m., sometimes even later.
Balmore Diaz-Paiz
Food at Mañana Restaurant.
But Diaz knew that handing pupusas out of her apartment window was only a Band-Aid situation that was meant to be temporary. The building's manager reluctantly told her that the apartment-turned-informal-restaurant setup couldn't last forever, so Diaz and her husband eventually bought a house in East St. Paul.
"My dad made a little bench right on the back porch," Diaz-Paiz said of the effort to add waiting space for the growing number of customers his mom was attracting. "Then that's where we sold the horchata [a milky drink often made from rice and sweetened with cinnamon and sugar]. If we were going to sell pupusas, we were going to sell horchata and watermelon and cantaloupe. That's when people started sitting in our living room and our dining room, eating in there."
Any given day in the Diaz household included a collection of customers eating pupusas on a few small tables and others settling into the family's couch and watching TV while waiting for their orders.
Turning a side gig into a business
After over a year of cooking out of her home, a friend told Rosario of a small restaurant space opening up that was already outfitted with most of the kitchen equipment she'd need. In 2005, Rosario quit her factory job, refinanced her home, rented the space, bought the cooking equipment inside it, and set up the original Mañana space comprised of just over 30 seats.
Balmore Diaz-Paiz
Balmore Diaz-Paiz.
In order to keep up business during the transition, Rosario had to hire a woman to stay at her house, answer calls, and forward customers to the restaurant to pick them up because they were accustomed to calling her home phone to place orders. She then hired another woman to help her in the kitchen and the business was up and running, netting Rosario between $14,000 and $16,000 each week.
Then the recession hit
"It got to the point where it was only my mom and I working in the restaurant because that's how slow it was," Diaz-Paiz said as they experienced the heightened impact of the Great Recession along with other small businesses.
According to the Washington Post, small businesses lost 11% of their jobs between 2007 and 2009, compared to a 7% loss at large companies. Diaz-Paiz began to worry as bills piled up and sales slowed at times to just $200 a day. When he would ride home with his mother at the end of each grueling shift, she would remind him that they just had to average sales of $1,000 a day to get to where they needed to go and, in the meantime, they had to keep up hope.
To fill the gap, Rosario starting packing pupusas into ice chests and selling three for $5 at various factories in the metro area to workers on breaks. As the factories they went to expanded and hired more workers, those workers naturally became new customers and their revenue began to bounce back.
Diaz-Paiz took the marketing skills he gained from managing nine rental car stores across Phoenix and translated them to the restaurant business. He offered free meals in exchange for referrals from hotels and other local businesses and put flyers on car windshields during church rushes. Traffic to the restaurant finally began to pick up around 2012.
The last mile to six figures
Fast forward to 2014 and, as tensions grew with Mañana's landlord, a friend tipped them off to the fact that a larger space just a few blocks down was opening up. This time, the space had to be transformed from an office space to a restaurant, a feat that the Latino Economic Development Center helped them to accomplish by giving them a loan and connecting them with a grant from the Neighborhood Development Center. In combination with a loan from St. Paul's Neighborhood STAR program that awards money for capital investment projects across the city, Diaz-Paiz ended up with a combined $250,000 to get Mañana's new space off the ground.
Balmore Diaz-Paiz
Mañana Restaurant.
In June of 2017, Mañana's remodel was completed and Diaz moved to the space the following month.
Mañana still faces the struggles that any restaurant does - like finding good cooks - but any hire is family in Rosario's eyes, evidenced by the Christmas presents and bonuses she showers them with each year.
"The cooks we have, they've been working with my mom for 14 or 15 years," Diaz-Piaz said. "There are people that love cooking for a living, and there are people that don't like it. That's the thing about these girls, they like what they do."
It also doesn't hurt that the new, larger space - complete with a bar - yields six-figure monthly revenues compared to the roughly $62,000 the old location was netting.
"My mom is a very strong woman. She's a go-getter. She always finds a way to get things done the right way," Diaz-Paiz said. But he noted that they couldn't do it alone: "If the customers don't give us supper, we wouldn't [be able to] do this. If they don't support us, we can't continue the business."
Considering that Diaz-Paiz no longer has to do any marketing because word-of-mouth referrals comprise all of the awareness he needs, it seems safe to say that a waning customer base isn't anything Mañana will have to worry about anytime soon.