THE CUELLAR BROTHERS OF EL CHICO'S

Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, I ate with friends and family often at a popular Tex-Mex restaurant called El Chico’s. Today it's a franchise operation serving mediocre food, but when I was a kid El Chico was owned and operated by the Cuellar family, and for my taste, the best Tex-Mex in Texas.
     Years later when I was working on the El Chico account at a Dallas ad agency, I got -- or rather, created -- a chance to do a commercial with the Cuellar brothers Frank Sr., Mack, Alfred, Gilbert, and Willie Jack. I had written it to sell food, of course, but even more so (without the knowledge of my boss), I simply wanted to talk to the brothers and coax from them nostalgic musings to juxtapose with "beauty shots" of various menu items.
     The two-hour long recording session went smoothly. The guys had thick accents, but I managed to get some really good quotes. My favorite: When I asked if El Chico’s Mexican food was like that in Mexico one of them replied, “We don’t make our food for Mexican tastes – we make it for American tastes.”