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By Natalia Otero
Thirty-four years ago, Blanca Aldaco opened Aldaco's Restaurant in San Antonio, offering elegant and refined traditional Mexican food, in the style of the classic cantina of Guadalajara, where she is from. Over the years, she has won more than 30 awards, and now she has been nominated for the Texas Restaurant Association's Outstanding Restaurateur Award, which honors restaurant owners' work in their communities, leadership success, and entrepreneurial spirit.
“It is a great honor for me to be nominated because the other nominees are very well qualified people who have worked very hard, just like me. The recognition represents my 34 years of sweat and tears, with everything I have lived through," says Aldaco.
Aldaco is involved in all aspects of the restaurant: she knows how much the cheese, the tequila, and even the plumber cost. In addition, she makes sure that each dish comes out perfect. After all, she says, there is only one opportunity not to disappoint customers.
Aldaco's Dining Room
Aldaco's Origins
The restaurant opened on January 14, 1989, after her husband, her number one fan, encouraged her to share her gastronomic delights. At the beginning she made the tacos, flautas, sauces and chicken broth all by herself. As her business grew she added staff, and before long Aldaco’s became one of the most recognized restaurants in Texas. Catering plays an important role in the restaurant’s success, with high-level clients such as Marriott, Johnson & Johnson and Texas Instruments.
Aldaco says she learned her love for elegance, neatness, and refined dishes in the house of her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather was an elegant man who demanded high composure at the table. He suffered from cancer in his nose, so his smell and taste were affected.
“Since he did not have the sense of smell and taste, the food had to be very beautiful,” Aldaco remembers. “If I ate poorly, my grandfather would get angry and send me to the kitchen, but I loved that because the cooks there made corn tortillas and delicious Mexican sauces. Almost, almost I wanted to be punished so I could eat richer.”
'Put on the Coolest Music'
Today, Aldaco’s combines the elegance of her grandparents' table and the flavors and recipes of the authentic cuisine of Guadalajara. Aldaco does not use cumin or pepper, and little meat, since these are flavors that she does not enjoy so much and, for her, it is very important that everything on the menu is to her liking.
In her restaurant “all the flavors are clean but explosive,” as she describes them. An example of this is the margarita: Aldaco's trick is to mix it very well, up to 14 times, so that the cocktail comes out very cold and with fine ice. One margarita on the menu, La Bonita, does not come with triple sec and is exclusively for people who like strong liquor.
Aldaco enjoys life and accompanies it with margaritas. During the pandemic the syrup that she used became difficult to source, so she created her own syrups: one of mango and jalapeño, and another of Jamaica water and jalapeño. She uses exclusive tequilas from Mexico, such as Perrito for the frozen margaritas, Tequila Cazadores (with whom she has a very good relationship), and the classic Don Julio, Casa Amigos and Clase Azul.
Another of her culinary treasures is the tres leches cake. She says she has never been a real fan of cakes, except for the Upsidedown Pineapple Cake, a cake garnished with rum and pineapple juice. So she created her own cake, to her liking. As he describes it, the tres leches cake is a labor of love, in which eggs and sugar are beaten non-stop for 20 minutes; it is left to rest and the milk is prepared; and later — especially around Christmas time— it is wrapped in icing made with Frangelico. The cake comes with her own slogan: “Skip the old boring fruit cake, and give a tres leches instead.”
Another key to the success of Aldacos has been the team; they are all long-standing and part of the family: Andres Rodriguez, who has been the chef for 34 years; as well as Earl Eugene White, Adrian Ramos, Elba Villarreal, Henry Talamantes, Ramiro Blas and Georgina Torres, who have been working together since 2000.
Blanca Aldaco is an empowered, versatile, elegant and tasteful woman. This is reflected in the success of a restaurant that has stood out in Texas for more than three decades. As she explains it, “when you love what you do, you never work.” But she says her biggest secret is, “Put on the coolest music in the morning when you get ready, because that’s how you start the day as it should.”
Natalia Otero is a regular contributor to el Restaurante. She is based in Colombia.