Diana Delgado has much to be thankful for this week.
Eleven months after a suspected drunk driver drove through the front door of her family’s Taqueria Pico de Gallo restaurant in South Tucson, customers are once again filling the dining room, ordering the house-favorite horchata, birria tacos on housemade corn tortillas and coctel de elote.
Diana Delgado, a co-owner of Taqueria Pico de Gallo, pours a cup of horchata for a lunchtime customer on Nov. 21.
“With what we’ve been through, I’m thankful to God, so thankful for his mercy and his goodness,” she said a few days before Thanksgiving. “And I’m thankful for our community. Especially the community. They have not let us down.”
The family’s ordeal began in the early morning of Christmas Eve 2022, when a suspected drunk driver drove a vehicle into the front entrance of the family’s 30-year-old Mexican restaurant.
The car caught fire, destroying the main dining room and causing extensive damage to the middle dining room, forcing the family to close the restaurant.
Two months later, on Feb. 24 — the 33rd anniversary of the day Ignacio and Antonia Delgado opened the restaurant at 2618 S. Sixth Ave. — they started serving a streamlined menu for takeout and delivery from the back of the building. They also reopened the small raspado shop on the other side of the property that had been closed for several years to allow for limited dine-in.
They had to wait until April to start rebuilding the restaurant.
“We thought everything was going to be grandfathered in and it was not,” said Delgado, who owns the restaurant with her father.
Everything had to be brought up to current city and county codes, which meant hiring an architect to draw up new building plans. They had to replace the electrical system and rebuild the entire restaurant; the front counter area and basement were the only original areas untouched.
While work was ongoing, the restaurant continued operating, but Delgado said they were making just enough to cover the payroll.
“My dad and I lived off our credit cards for the past year,” she said.
Eleven months after a fiery crash, lunchtime customers return to a fully re-opened Taqueria Pico de Gallo.
Delgado said the work to date has cost the family $235,000; insurance only covered $76,000, she said, so she and her father had to take out personal loans to save the business that her parents started as a pushcart near their home at West Ajo Way and South Clark Avenue when Delgado was 16.
They sold horchato, pico de gallo and coctel de elote and two years later, Ignacio bought a second cart and operated it on the sidewalk on the corner of East 36th Street and South Sixth Avenue. He paid rent to the owner of the small building on the property. The owner lived in the basement and used the rest of the building for storage, Diana Delgado said.
After five years of renting the sidewalk space, the Delgados bought the building and lot and moved Taqueria Pico de Gallo indoors. They painted the building a bright Oaxacan gold with orange-ish trim and painted the restaurant’s name in blue above the window near the front door.
Delgado remembers the first day they opened on Feb. 24, 1990, in the middle of the popular Tucson rodeo week. As the rodeo parade passed along the avenue in front of the restaurant, people started commenting on the name.
“People were like, ‘What’s a taqueria?,’” she recalled. “People had no idea what a taqueria was. Now everyone is calling their restaurant a taqueria.”
In those first few years, the family added a main dining room and then a second dining room. Customers would flock into the restaurant at lunchtime ordering fish and shrimp tacos, shrimp albondigas and fresh-made corn tortillas. Five years later, they bought the land stretching to the corner and expanded again onto the west side, including adding the raspados building.
The restaurant on a good day is known to pull in a few thousand dollars in sales; over the last year, they were lucky to clear $300 to $500 in takeout sales, Delgado said — an 80% drop.
“We were just making enough for our employee wages,” she said.
Laura Carranza, a cook at Taqueria Pico de Gallo, prepares an order of tacos with a side of rice and beans during lunchtime.
On Halloween morning, Delgado and her crew had figured they would still be doing takeout while they waited for their certificate of occupancy to be approved.
“We didn’t know we were going to open that day when the fire department came and gave us their approval,” Delgado said.
Delgado said her daughter posted the reopening on Instagram and before they knew it, the restaurant was packed. Their first day sales topped $3,700, matching their pre-closing average.
As she reflects on the past year, Delgado said she has a lot to be thankful for, including her community.
“Our community has been so incredible,” she said. “We stand together united as one to help each other out. I’m very grateful for that.“
A mural in the parking lot of Taqueria Pico de Gallo, 2618 S. Sixth Ave., represents owner Diana Delgado’s family story, starting with her parents marriage.
Taqueria Pico de Gallo is open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Follow them on Instagram at @taqueria_pico_de_gallo.
South Tucson Police Department officials say a suspect was seen igniting the Aug. 13 fire that scorched the historic South Tucson eatery, Crossroads Restaurant.
