Israel Vega is a nurse practitioner who dabbles in renovating classic Chevys and is a founding member of a Rio Grande Valley-based semi-pro soccer team. Since January, you can add co-owner of a Los Fresnos coffee shop to his portfolio. PJ’s Coffee is a shop he co-owns with his business partner and fellow Los Fresnos native, Adam Abrego. They wanted to create a sense-of-community kind of place where people could gather…
Playing the long game in scaling up a business is a cumbersome process and often met with disinterest from would-be partners. Karina Saldivar’s Amor Y Pan in Brownsville was established as a successful health lifestyle market and bakery by 2024. Her business ambitions always extended outward beyond one location to getting her products on grocery store shelves. Getting to that goal via phone calls and introductory e-mails and receiving no…
La Pale’s store on International Boulevard in Brownsville is a vibrant ice cream shop featuring Mexican-style desserts. A big whiteboard in Daisy Alcazar’s back office at La Pale Frozen Bar in Brownsville tells the story of a small business making the leap to something much bigger. “HEB COUNTDOWN 48 DAYS TILL PICKUP,” is written in big blue letters. The message was written in late 2024 before the first delivery truck…
A battle-worn firefighter’s helmet rests on a shelf over the bar at Chris Cuellar’s restaurant in Weslaco. The rigors of the job he held for over 10 years in service to his community would take a physical toll. Injury problems would compel him to leave the Weslaco Police Department and bring a need to reinvent himself while still being a young man. Being a restaurateur is a thought that had…
Gaby Cueva doesn’t mind being seen as a disruptor. In fact, she wears the label with pride. A disruptor was formerly referred to as an individual who causes disturbances or chaos. Today, the term also denotes a person who causes a noticeable or even radical change in a market through innovation. Cueva has been disrupting the taco and café scene in the upper Rio Grande Valley in recent years, and…
The “pan chiquitos,” as Albaro De La Garza calls them, started out as miniature versions of sweet bread for his then-young children. De La Garza’s kids often didn’t finish off a full-size empanada or a fluffy concha pastry. So, De La Garza and his baker at the time at the Mercedes panaderia made them smaller. The child-sized Mexican sweet bread of De La Garza Bakery and Cake Shop in Mercedes…
H-E-B recently announced its finalists for the 11th annual Quest for Texas Best competition and representing the Border Region is La Pale Frozen Fruit Bar. Owners Daisy and Gerardo Alcazar will join nine other Texas-based finalists in the coming days in Dallas, competing for a combined $70,000 in cash prizes and a chance at placement on H-E-B’s shelves. Launched in 2019, Gerardo and Daisy Alcazar embraced a family tradition of…
Sonia Marroquin contemplated naming her ice cream shop the Golden Spoon or Golden Scoop. She also seriously considered investing in a franchise. The shop she envisioned had its own vibe so Marroquin decided to go to school instead – the ice cream school. This wasn’t Marroquin’s first trip to school. She earned her undergraduate degree at The University of Texas at San Antonio before gaining acceptance into the highly competitive…
The space now taken by The Deep End restaurant and entertainment center has lived many lives over the years on the west side of Harlingen. The spacious Business 83 location has been a dance hall, a honky-tonk and sports bar, among other variations. Under new ownership, there is a fresh concept with investments in facilities that have reimagined dance floors and traditional bar setups into a place suited for family…
The first time Lamar Jones saw his bottles of gourmet barbecue sauce lined up on the shelves of an H-E-B store he felt like a musician hearing one of his songs on the radio for the first time. “It was surreal to see it,” Jones recalled of that 2016 memory. “To see something I started making in my kitchen and then developing it to a brand being sold at H-E-B,…