Gallup hopes for more neighborhood restaurants
Red or green? It’s all good at Genaro’s

Frances Romero grabs a plate of enchiladas and tortillas off of the line at Genaro's Café on Hill Ave. on Wednesday afternoon. Romero has been working at Genaro's Cafe for the past 31 years. Recently Genaro's was remodeled with an expansion to the dining area to accommodate more customers. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The legacy of Frances Villanueva will live on as long as Genaro’s keeps serving food.

And, with its recent remodeling, everyone expects that will be a long, long time.

Villanueva was the mother of Genaro Villanueva, who back in 1975 decided, along with Eddie Padilla, to buy a small restaurant in a residential area near downtown Gallup and develop their own menu. The two decided to call the new restaurant Genaro’s because the name was generic enough that it didn’t quite make people think Mexican or Italian, the two mainstays of the restaurant business in Gallup at the time.

When the two took it over, the building housed Pizza Pantry. Before that it was a bookstore and before that it was one of many homes on the block.

But there was just something about the area that appealed to the two partners. It was close to downtown, close to the city government and it could serve that area of town as well. The only problem was the small size of its dining area and its lack of parking.

But the two men also had a secret weapon — Frances Villanueva’s recipes for stuffed sopapillas and chile rellenos.

“Every Mexican restaurant in town had their own versions of these dishes,” said Bailey Padilla, Eddie’s brother, who came to Gallup in 1977 and stayed after serving 20 years in the Navy. He’s now 69 and is the restaurant’s operations manager.

Those two dishes are by far the most popular items on the menu, and Bailey Padilla said the recipes that Genaro’s mother brought to the restaurant and kept promoting until the day she died earlier this year at the age of 96 have served the restaurant and its customers well over the past three decades.

What’s also special about the stuffed sopapillas, he said, is that, unlike some other restaurants in the area, the restaurant doesn’t scrimp on the use of guacamole or its size. “It’s so big that many people cut it in two and share it or take half of it home with them,” he said.

Another major reason why people keep coming back, he said, is service and quality.

Frances Romero, sister of the original Genaro, has been working as a waitress at the restaurant since it first opened in 1975.

“We have people who eat here and then leave the area for 10 and 15 years come back to see if it is still open,” she said. Of course it was, and more often than not, Romero will be able to remember what their favorite items on the menu were.

So when Germaine Garcia and Rozanne Murphy took over two years ago, said Bailey Padilla, they looked at the restaurant and kept what made the restaurant popular and decided to change what was not.

Because it was a former home, the amount of space available for eating was smaller than almost any other restaurant in Gallup, which meant that at lunch time and on Saturdays, the demand for seats surpassed the restaurant’s capacity. And although there was parking to the side and behind the building, it was unpaved and when the weather got bad, customers learned that they would be taking a major risk by parking in the muddy parking lots.

And even if you managed to get a seat, the atmosphere was dark and the tables were crowded together.

This was definitely a restaurant in great need of remodeling.

So this past summer, the restaurant closed down for six weeks, added on space on the west side and purchased the home next door so it could be torn down and paved for a parking lot.

The result is a brightly-lit restaurant that has almost double the seating capacity and still has members of the Padilla and Villanueva family helping to serve the food, so the tradition continues.

Bailey Padilla said he has seen an increase in customers in the few weeks it has been open since the remodeling and almost to a man, the reaction of the restaurant’s customers has been very positive.

After all, for its loyal customers, Genaro’s is their home away from home.