Mario and Ivan Urtecho were young boys in 1988, living on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico when Hurricane Gilbert made landfall as a Category 5 storm.
“When the hurricane hit we saw people dying and saw all of the flamingos flying away. We were kids when we went through that,” Mario says. “People were starving to death and were asking ‘Dónde está la comida?’”
La comida. The food.
The Urtechos say they were not traumatized by the event, but it has clearly stuck with them. 35 years after Hurricane Gilbert, their restaurant is named after those calls for food. Flamingos, the bird they watched fly into the whipping winds, have become the restaurant mascot.
La Comida’s 2023 opening was a slow roll out. Despite the brothers’ extensive combined restaurant experience, getting to where they are now was an odyssey.
In the year after Hurricane Gilbert, Mario played soccer while Ivan worked as a tourist guide. The peninsula struggled to recover from the damage of the hurricane, and in 1989 the brothers decided it was “time to fly away.”
They came to Texas, and lived near Jefferson Boulevard through the ’90s while they found their footing.
Ivan was the first to fall into the restaurant industry. While working as a landscaper for a Holiday Inn, he met Jack Pratt Jr., whose father developed the hotels in the ’60s. Pratt asked Ivan to take his brand new Cadillac convertible to the carwash. When Ivan accidentally went through the wash with the car top down, the car was soaked and he assumed he’d be fired.
Instead, Pratt laughed it off and invited Ivan to work as a dishwasher at his new restaurant, Mi Casa. When Ivan decided he was ready to graduate from dishwasher to busboy, he roped in Mario to take over his old role. Then, a coworker convinced the brothers to leave Mi Casa for jobs at an up-and-coming spot in North Dallas being opened by Michael “Mico” Rodriguez called Mi Cocina.
The Mi Cocina years were foundational for the brothers.
Ivan earned the nickname Raton, or Speedy Gonzalez, for his quick work. Mario served a table without realizing George W. Bush was his customer. They worked their way up the restaurant rankings from dishwashers to “waiters doing more work than the managers,” and when it was time for Mi Cocina to expand out of Texas, the Urtechos were the ones who were called.
“Mico pulled us aside and said ‘Monday you guys are going to Kansas City,’” Mario says. “I was like ‘Uh, no, I got a girlfriend.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re going, but this time you guys are gonna go as managers.’”
The brothers arrived in Kansas City in the dead of winter, cold and confused, having never managed a restaurant before. While learning to navigate permitting processes and sales reports, the restaurant lost money.
They were sure they had made a mistake. So they called their mom.
“She said ‘You know it’s like the song by Frank Sinatra, that if you make it in New York, you can make it everywhere. If you make it in Kansas City, you can make it everywhere,’” Ivan says. “It was the best advice from Mom.”
They shut down the restaurant for two weeks and started making calls back to Dallas. The Urtechos recruited dishwashers, busboys and servers they’d worked with before, promising something big was happening in Kansas City. And, they convinced Mico that Kansas City didn’t care about margaritas. Whiskey, vodka and draft beer would bring in the crowds.
By the end of the year, the restaurant had changed course. Not only were they no longer losing money, Mi Cocina had become the post-game restaurant of choice for the Kansas City Chiefs.
The brothers returned to Dallas and bounced around other Mi Cocina locations, but the Kansas City success left them with the “energy and motivation” to open their own restaurant.
In 2014, La Comida opened in Addison. While the store was successful, the brothers wanted to return to Oak Cliff, so they shut down the Addison store in 2019.
They had trouble nailing down a building in Oak Cliff, and then the pandemic hit. The Urtechos worked odd jobs and collected restaurant supplies “little by little” in a storage unit while waiting for the opportunity to reopen La Comida.
“Like a puzzle, we put the kitchen together,” Ivan says.
On September 14, 2022, their contract for the building on the corner of Zang was finalized. It was the day of the 34th anniversary of Hurricane Gilbert.
The brothers did the entire restaurant buildout themselves. They worked early mornings or late nights, finding hours between odd jobs. And they found “the best support of (their) restaurant experience” in Oak Cliff.
La Comida’s grand opening was on August 28, 2023, Ivan’s birthday.
“I said, ‘Brother, here’s your restaurant. Happy Birthday,’” Mario says.
The menu sports traditional Tex-Mex combos and dishes inspired by their Yucatán roots. The store’s recently obtained liquor license allowed for a drink menu packed with Mexican beer and signature margaritas. The house margarita, the Flamingo, is swirled with pink and matches the rest of the restaurant.
“We have been surrounded by so many angels,” Mario says. “We want to make La Comida the place to be in Dallas.”
