Santos Aguilera, famous for his hidden cafe on Fort Worth’s North Side, dies at 93
Aguilera’s Cafe in Fort Worth’s North Side was a staple, despite its lack of signage. Its walls were decorated by a menagerie of photos featuring the who’s who of North Texas, from mayors to congressmen to police chiefs to military leaders.
It was also Santos Aguilera’s claim to local fame.
The white house with bright teal trim at 2005 N. Grove St. was a hidden gem, serving up fried chicken on Thursdays and enchiladas on Fridays. The food was so good, in fact, that people from all over drove down the back roads to reach the diner with no sign and no menu.
“(The sign) blew away in a storm and I never replaced it,” Aguilera said in a 2006 Star-Telegram article. “The people who are going to come here know where it is.”
Aguilera died Friday of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 93.
The World War II veteran kept his business running for 55 years until he retired in 2018. His restaurant was like the setting of a good TV drama: a hole-in-the-wall with no menu, an owner who would cook you anything you wanted (assuming he had the necessary ingredients) and customers who all knew each other.
Aguilera and his restaurant were the focus of stories and featured in lists in Texas Monthly, the Dallas Observer, Fort Worth Weekly and the Star-Telegram.
He was 34 in 1961 when his parents, Jose and Rosa, rented a former cantina and opened a cafe to serve nearby factory workers. His father had come to the Stockyards from Pueblo Nuevo, Guanajuato in Mexico, in 1914 and married his mother, a girl from Monterrey.
In the 1970s, the restaurant lost its sign and went through rough times as factories in the area closed, but the food and personality kept the place alive, even when the family was down to its last $75.
Priceless tamales
The restaurant’s biggest claims to fame: fried chicken made with a secret recipe, cheese enchiladas that had everybody from politicians to blue-collar workers drive from all over the Metroplex, and tamales so good they literally saved the restaurant from being bulldozed.
In 2001, after Aguilera received a letter from the Fort Worth school district asking to buy or condemn his property to build a parking lot in its place, his friend Jim Lane suggested using tamales as a bribe.
“He said, ‘Santos, they’ll never tear your place down once they’ve tried your tamales,’ “ Aguilera said with a laugh in a 2001 Star-Telegram article. “I had no idea it would work.”
Lane handed out the tamales at a school board meeting and watched most trustees take a bite. Then he announced, “Those are from Santos Aguilera’s. That’s the place y’all are trying to tear down.”
Then-Board President Gary Manny grinned in surprise, and then said, “I hope we’re not the ones trying to tear it down.” When Lane told the story, Manny said the decision to put a parking lot where the restaurant was should be “reviewed.”
Later, an associate school superintendent told Lane that the tamales would be spared.
The tamales were so good that Aguilera’s daughter Rosemary Rodriguez remembers one year making around 18,000 to sell or, in a lot of cases, give away for Christmas.
‘A lot of great people’
While many knew Aguilera for his cafe, Rodriguez said the business was just an expression of who Aguilera was as a person.
“He loved people,” she said. “He loved people and he used that restaurant and the food to show how much he loved people.”
Aguilera said in a 1999 Star-Telegram article that the people were what made his cafe.
“I enjoy the people,” Aguilera said in the article. “They give this such a great atmosphere. ... We don’t have a menu. We don’t even have a sign. We just have a lot of great people.”
Lane, a friend Rosemary said was more like a brother to her father, said he has enough memories about Aguilera to keep him talking for a couple of years. But one of his favorites came from a time Fort Worth philanthropist Ed Bass and Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy were in the restaurant.
Lane said he walked in, saw the two sitting at a table in the back and went to tell Aguilera.
“I asked him if he knew Ed Bass was eating in his restaurant and he just looked at me and said, ‘Who’s Ed Bass?’“ Lane said. “I thought that was the funniest thing. He didn’t care about the important people or the unimportant people, he just cared about people.”
He also remembers the time Aguilera had a fire in his kitchen in 1999. Firefighters came to put out the fire. The community, hearing that Aguilera didn’t have insurance, raised money to help him rebuild the kitchen.
“My customers saved me,” Aguilera said in a 1999 article in the Star-Telegram. “Some gave us equipment. Some gave us supplies. A guy I’ve never seen before knocked on the door and said he was coming to help us out. He gave some money.”
But the best part of that memory, Lane said, was that when Aguilera invited the firefighters back for a thank-you breakfast, they gave him a fire suit.
“They joked about him having the firefighter’s suit so that next time he could put out his own fire,” Lane said. “Santos thought that was great. He kept the suit in the restaurant until he retired and closed down.”
Family atmosphere
Aguilera was proud of his hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a term he said in 2006 was high praise for his cafe.
“I hear it all the time,” he said. “It just means that it’s a great little place where you meet a lot of people.”
But he was even more proud of his family.
Rodriguez said Aguilera’s love for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren was just as much a defining characteristic as his cafe.
She remembers annual trips to Galveston or Corpus Christi, where Aguilera would gather his family and take them to play on the beach, swim or see the Galveston Naval Museum.
Being a Navy veteran who fought in the South Pacific during World War II, Aguilera thought seeing and stepping foot on a warship was an important experience for his family, Rosemary said.
Either family by blood or through the cafe, Lane said anybody who came into the restaurant would feel like they belonged. It’s just how Aguilera could make people feel.
“After your first visit, any time you went into his restaurant he always knew who you were,” Lane said. “And when he talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the room.”
Aguilera said in the 1999 article about rebuilding after the fire that he felt like all his customers were a part of his extended family.
“My customers have been like a big family,” Aguilera said in the article. “My own family has been helping do all the work. But everybody has made us feel like part of a bigger family.”
Aguilera is preceded in death by his grandson, Mario Trujillo III, and his brother, Joe Carmon. He is survived by his sister Antonia Guajardo, six children, nine grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson.
Funeral arrangements have not been completed, but Rodriguez asked anybody who wants to make charitable donations in his memory to give to Parkinson’s research.
This story contains information from Star-Telegram archives.