Miguel Martinez opened a one room eating place on McKinney Avenue in the Dallas barrio then known as Little Mexico in 1918, and it became El Fenix. He had left Hacienda del Potrero in Nuevo Leon in 1911, worked as a labourer for the Dallas Railway and Terminal Company, and washed dishes at the Oriental Hotel at Commerce and Akard. The Handbook of Texas has him enlarging the cafe, renaming it El Fenix and turning the menu wholly Mexican in 1922, and the Texas Historical Commission lists the business from 1918 among the state's long established ones. The restaurant on McKinney Avenue today is the flagship rather than the original site. El Fenix had moved into a former food market at 1608 McKinney by 1926. The clearing for Woodall Rodgers Freeway took that address, and the restaurant opened across the street at 1601 in 1965.
Faustina Porras Martinez, Miguel's wife, has an entry in the Handbook of Texas in her own right. Born in Chihuahua in 1900 and married at fifteen, she cooked tamales at home to serve in the restaurant, had twelve children of whom eight reached adulthood, and was survived by more than forty grandchildren when she died in 1990. Miguel died in February 1956 of a heart attack at his house in the village he had come from. The family sold the company in 2008, after ninety years.
Getting there
32.7876, -96.8050
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