The restaurant celebrated with a mariachi band, all-day happy hour and $1.05 enchiladas.
El Fenix helped define Tex-Mex. But, interestingly, El Fenix’s menu was not primarily Mexican at all when the Martinezes started serving food over a century ago. In the 1930s, El Fenix served oysters Rockefeller, chicken-fried steak and spaghetti meatballs. Eventually, enchiladas, tamales, and beans and rice made the menus. And, soon, the cuisine that the Martinezes called “kitchen food” — that means, made by the Mexican immigrants in the kitchen — would define an entire cuisine in Texas.
Today, there might not be a more famous place to get cheese enchiladas in North Texas than at the El Fenix near downtown Dallas.The history is staggering: “We’ve been through two world wars, a Depression, Korean War, Vietnam, all of that,” Al Martinez Jr., one of Mike Martinez’s grandchildren, told us in 2018, when the company turned 100.
El Fenix also used to be a place to listen to live music and dance, the family has told us. Archival photos from 1938 show couples twirling the El Fenix ballroom while diners look on. On the 100th birthday, the company painted “Don’t Mess with Tex-Mex” on the side of the building on Dallas’ McKinney Avenue. And on its 105th birthday, the restaurant celebrated with a mariachi band, all-day happy hour and $1.05 enchiladas for the first 105 guests.
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