Juanita’s Mexican Café & Bar broke culinary and musical ground when it opened at 13th and Main streets in 1986, as a visit with one of its founders, Mark Abernathy, reminded us.
The announcement earlier this month of the restaurant’s closing gave us an opportunity to reminisce with Abernathy, a veteran restaurateur and owner and executive chef of the restaurants Loca Luna and Red Door in Riverdale.
With so many Mexican restaurants to choose from now (Tex-Mex and California-Mex and Mexican-Mexican) in central Arkansas — not to mention Brazilian, Honduran, Salvadoran and Venezuelan — it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary Juanita’s was.
Mexican food in Little Rock at the time meant “Mexico Chiquito, Browning’s, Casa Bonita, Taco Kid,” Abernathy said. “When I moved to San Antonio I thought the heavens had parted when I got hold of real Tex-Mex stuff.”
Abernathy, born and raised in Little Rock, spent 13 years in San Antonio, and every time he returned to Little Rock to visit, he’d be reminded of what the city lacked in terms of Mexican food.
When his father became ill, Abernathy thought it was time to come home “and give this Mexican restaurant idea a try.”
He negotiated with Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which was working to rejuvenate that portion of Main, to buy the building at 1300 Main.
“At the time, everybody thought that I had lost my mind because the expressway ended down near where Martin Luther King [Drive] is,” Abernathy said, referring to Interstate 630. “But I knew that it was going to open all the way through in about six months. Having lived in San Antonio, I had a pretty good feel for what that was going to mean when the expressway ended up going right by the restaurant.”
“To my surprise, Madison Guaranty not only sold me the building at a good price but offered to finance the restaurant, which, you know, banks are not too crazy about restaurants,” he said. “So I had a building and I had financing and so I went out and looked for a couple of partners.”
He found them in Frank McGehee (father of restaurateur Scott McGehee; Frank McGehee died in 2005) and Jean Gordon, the well-known Little Rock social justice and peace activist.
“And in spite of all my friends telling me I was crazy, it was a huge success,” Abernathy said. “We had lines out the door for a year. It was THE spot.”
First, there was the food. “We really introduced a whole different level of Mexican food to the market,” he said. Juanita’s made its own flour tortillas, offered vegetarian novelties like spinach enchiladas and mushroom fajitas, and “our hot sauce and cheese dip took cheese dip to another level.”
He and McGehee developed a white cheese dip that debuted at another restaurant the partners opened in 1990, Blue Mesa. The dip made its way onto Juanita’s menu, and Arkansans learned that cheese dip could be a transcendent experience.
And then there was the music.
Abernathy first opened a gift shop, Quapaw Gallery, next to Juanita’s and he started “a little music program.” His band, the Torpedoes, played a couple of nights a week in the back of Juanita’s bar and people lined up to hear them.
Then “the Cate Brothers would come and play in that little bar. And Trout Fishing in America, and a couple of other acts popped in that I had known because I was involved with music down in San Antonio,” Abernathy said. So he closed the gift shop, removed a wall and hired Benny Turner as a talent buyer and co-producer of Juanita’s shows.
“We tapped into a real goldmine there because we realized that all these great national-level bands were coming through Little Rock on their way to bigger cities. They were going from Dallas to Memphis or Dallas to St. Louis or Nashville to Oklahoma City. Everybody kind of had to go through Little Rock on their way.”
The bands would stop in Little Rock, often to debut new material, and play at Juanita’s. The venue was small but it was friendly, and it featured professional sound and lighting, Abernathy said. “And the music room just took off.”
“I mean, we had Jefferson Airplane. We had Joan Baez. We had Tito Puente. John McLaughlin, Edgar Winter, Leon Russell, Eddie Money.”
But by 1996, Abernathy was ready to start his own restaurant, Loca Luna, and sold his share of Juanita’s to McGehee and Gordon. And soon Juanita’s, which has had a succession of owners in the subsequent years, will be no more, its move from South Main to the River Market District several years ago having failed to revive the brand. But for a while, for Abernathy, it was a beautiful thing.
“Those 10 years at Juanita’s were a lot of fun,” he said. “We made money and had a great time doing it.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
