Rosa’s restaurant owners say adios

Restaurateurs Armando and Rosa Perez enjoy the classic Hermosa ambiance they created, and now pass along to a new owner. Photo

Townies have been watching pieces of “Old Hermosa” slip slowly away, from iconic, funky institutions such as the Bijou Theaters and Either/Or Bookstore, to small, cozy corners of town such as the venerable Classic Burger joint down on Hermosa Avenue.

“Old Hermosa,” in this context, refers to the Bohemian, surfer-town informality that defined the city beginning roughly in the ‘60s – not really old considering the city’s century-plus time span. But this version of “Old Hermosa” has been slowly giving way to newer storefronts and shinier businesses as rents rise, and vintage business owners move or retire.

So, old-school Hermosans will be glad to learn that while the owners of the vintage Rosa’s Restaurant have called it quits after 37 years, they have passed the torch – and all the original recipes for burritos, enchiladas, mole and taco sauce – to a new owner who promises to carry on the Rosa’s tradition.

Bag and bottle

Rosa’s, which stands under a blue canopy on Pacific Coast Highway near Fifth Street, has exemplified easy beach city charm over the years, including a hometown practice where patrons augmented their meals by buying bottles at a nearby liquor store and brown-bagging them to Rosa’s tables.

“They would bring in whatever they wanted,” said co-owner Armando Perez, 66, who ran the eatery with the cook, his wife Rosa Perez.

People even began to bring in blenders, plug them into the wall and whip up drinks at their tables.

At one point the couple put up a sign telling people that the owners were not liable for the results of anyone’s drinking, at the advice of one patron who was a police official in a nearby town, Armando said.

In time, around the end of the 1980s, the local authorities put a stop to the practice altogether.

Among the longtime Hermosans who sometimes all but lived at Rosa’s was Steve Crecy, one of the founders of the city’s black granite sun dial monument to its military veterans.

He said the eatery “was special because the food was great and the atmosphere so friendly. It had no label, it just worked. Our son grew up eating Rosa’s meals and was proud to have his first legal beer there.”

Crecy rattled off a mouth-watering litany of menu favorites including the #14 combo plate, “the warm full-size tortilla chips with Rosa’s special salsa” and “the best carnitas in the West.”

American dream

Armando and Rosa grew up in Michoacan, Mexico. Armando began working at age 10, selling Jell-O, delivering water, making saddles with his father, making dentures in a plant in Mexico City, and returning to Michoacan to work in a refinery.

Rosa, the youngest of 10 siblings whose parents owned a grocery store, grew up cooking.

The two did not need Match.com to find each other. They lived six doors apart.

“It was a small town,” Rosa said.

The Perezes married, and came to the U.S. in 1966. Rosa was eight months pregnant with one of their four children, daughter Jackie, when they drove across the border in a 1959 Impala that Armando bought for $200.

Rosa was carrying a visa secured for her by her brother, who had preceded her to the U.S. Armando used a little subterfuge.

“I was illegal,” he said. “No papers.”

But he had a visa belonging to Rosa’s brother, and that did the trick.

Two years later Armando was sent back to Mexico, but only briefly.

“A policeman said, ‘You have papers?’ I said no, and – back to TJ,” Armando recalled.

In Tijuana, Armando paid $100 to a coyote, who slapped his photo on a forged green card and drove him back across the border for good.

About 24 years later Armando and Rosa became dual citizens of the U.S. and Mexico.

But first, Rosa went to work for her sister Celia Palomo, who had come to the U.S. previously and owned El Tarasco restaurant. Rosa learned to cook in a restaurant kitchen and wait tables, and her sister encouraged her to open her own business.

“My sister helped me a lot,” Rosa said.

She went looking for her own restaurant, and set her cap on the eatery on PCH. It was already called Rosa’s, after its then-owner.

The Perezes kept asking the owner to sell until she finally said yes. The sale price for the business was $3,500, and rent was $150. The restaurant occupied only a sliver of the building it now fills.

At first, Rosa cooked and waited tables, while Armando worked as a waiter at the Music Center in Los Angeles, and bought the produce, meat and cheese for the couple’s restaurant. Armando was such a stickler for fresh fruits and vegetables that some of Rosa’s patrons insisted on buying them, as if they were in a grocery store.

Soon Rosa prevailed upon her husband to quit the Music Center and help her work the restaurant, in addition to serving as its buyer.

“After five, six months, I said, ‘I’m tired,’” Rosa recalled.

In the early days, Rosa’s accented English would bother some patrons as they placed their orders.

“I would go to the back of the kitchen and cry,” she recalled.

On those occasions she was embarrassed to acknowledge that it was her restaurant.

“They would say, ‘Where is the owner?’” she recalled. “I would say, ‘He’s not here.’”

The restaurant began to take off after Rosa placed flyers on windshields along PCH, at the suggestion of a neighboring barber.

As she cooked, Rosa’s clientele changed from older folks to a mix, including older teenagers. Police and firefighters often favored Rosa’s.

The restaurant expanded to occupy the entire building, which the Perezes bought in the late ‘70s. Again, they persistently asked the landlord to sell, until he said yes.

Asked about the secret to restaurant success, Rosa replied without hesitation, “Always the food is fresh.”

In addition Rosa, and in time her cooks, made all her sauces from scratch.

Keeping tradition

The couple turned over the keys to the new proprietor, Rolando Galvez, on April 28, the day after their wedding anniversary.

“I cried,” Rosa said. “I cried a lot.”

Armando said it was an emotional experience when he signed the escrow papers in February.

“It was hard,” he said. “It was very hard.”

But the couple is ready for retirement, and they are confidant they leave the eatery in the good hands of Galvez, who also owns Las Brisas in San Pedro.

Galvez said he is retaining Rosa’s entire menu, using the recipes she passed on to him, and is employing the cooks who worked at Rosa’s under the Perezes. ER

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