A Mexican meat market will open its fourth location in the building that for three decades housed a popular Tucson restaurant.
Once renovation work is finished in the fall, Rancheros Carniceria is moving into Roberts Restaurant at 3301 N. Grant Road. Owner Luis Lopez said he hopes to be open by October or early November.
Lopez said demolition work inside the building is complete. He’s now waiting on the city to approve his renovation plans for the 2,364-square-foot building where the Bartke family flipped pancakes and fried eggs for 30 of Robert’s Restaurant’s 42 years.
Boyd Bartke, son of the restaurant’s founders, sold the business in September 2021 to Tucson businessman Kyle Knutson and his partners, who ran the restaurant until January, when they sold it to Lopez.
Lopez, an Hermosillo native who grew up in Tucson, said he bought the business in January with the idea of opening a midtown location for his Mexican meat market. With the years-long Grant Road widening project set to interrupt business near the restaurant, Lopez figured the meat market could survive the interruptions.
Robert’s Restaurant is along a stretch of Grant not far from North Country Club Road that is scheduled to be widened as part of a multiyear project approved by voters in 2006. The city in May started the third phase of the project, from North Alvernon Way to North Swan Road. Work is expected to take until the end of 2026, city officials said, and no timeline has been announced for the final phase, which is about a block from the restaurant.
“I think as a meat market I can make it through a road widening, but a restaurant won’t,” Lopez said. “It’s a different kind of business. Most of your customers at a meat market are coming from five minutes away. With a restaurant, customers are coming from all over town.”
Lopez, 39, kept the restaurant open until May, when he quietly closed it.
“We had to make the decision if it was going to be remodeled to stay a restaurant or remodel to be a meat market,” he said. “Before I bought it, the whole idea was to make it a meat market.”
The closing was the final chapter in a story that started in the 1960s, when Robert Bartke met the girl of his dreams and popped the question. Donna Bartke was one of two daughters of Gus and Kay Balon, who had a small restaurant on East 22nd Street named after Gus. (Gus Balon’s Restaurant, 6027 E. 22nd St., opened in 1965 and is still in business.)
Bartke was a beat cop with the Tucson Police Department, but after he got married, he joined the Balon family business and worked at the restaurant for 11 years before he and his bride decided to strike out on their own, said their son.
They opened Robert’s Restaurant initially on East Speedway and North Alvernon Way in 1978 and moved it to its Grant Road location 14 years later when the city was planning road widening work on Speedway, their son said.
Boyd Bartke worked at the restaurant all of his life and ran it for 21 years after his parents retired in 2002.
“That was a jewel for us,” he recalled on Wednesday, July 10, from Oregon, where he and his wife moved last April.
Robert’s Restaurant tore a page from the Gus Balon playbook, creating a space where regulars felt at home and everything was scratch made, from the famous cinnamon rolls to the peppery sausage gravy dressing up to the hand-pounded chicken fried steak served with two eggs. Burgers, tuna melt and grilled cheese were go-to lunch staples, or you could go fancy and order the ribeye dressed with chimichurri and served with smashed Yukon Golds for around $16, one of the most expensive dishes on the menu.
“We weren’t the greasy spoon; we were in between a nice, fancier breakfast restaurant and a diner, but not a greasy spoon,” Bartke said.
Regulars, a majority of which leaned on the older side, were greeted by servers who stood with the family 20, 30 years. Bartke said most of his kitchen staff was with him for 10, 15 years.
“We had people who would come twice a day,” he recalled. “They would come in for breakfast and they were back for lunch or an early dinner.”
The restaurant regularly boasted wait times pre-COVID, but after the pandemic, business slowed down much like it did at restaurants around the country as diners were cautious to return. Bartke said that when he went back into the 80-hour-a-week grind after the pandemic, he had something of an epiphany: He realized that he was coming up on 30 years working at the restaurant, 20 of those “driving to the same building.”
When Knutson and his two partners approached him about buying the restaurant, Bartke sold.
“I didn’t sell it because it was failing. I was tired,” he said.
When Lopez opens Rancheros Carniceria on Grant, it will be his fourth store. After working for years with several south-side mom-and-pop stores and grocers, he opened his flagship meat market in the former mining town of Mammoth, 60 miles north of Tucson, nine years ago. He opened the second location in Catalina five years ago followed by the third at 7627 E. Speedway Blvd., near Pantano Road.
To learn more about the meat market, visit facebook.com/rancheroscarniceriaoficial.
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