“My grandmother initially started feeding migrant farmers. My dad’s family is originally from San Antonio and they came up here when he was about 14. He talks about that trip from San Antonio to Imlay City being the first time he drove a car. They were migrant workers, and while my grandmother never worked in the fields, she fed everybody and was a phenomenal cook. That's really where Hernandez Mexican food began and has evolved to what we have now.
We had always wanted to open a restaurant, but after retirement. Then some other things that happened in our life that made us think, ‘Well, maybe it's time now.’ We saw this building came up for lease, so we went ahead and did it in October of 2021.
Both of our kids are in the food business, and they got bit by the bug as well. So, the restaurant became a partnership with our kids where we said, ‘We're all in on this together.’ They agreed, and they do a lot of the day-to-day operations running it.
It's evolved with our daughter, because her actual trade and what she loves to do is bake. She's a pastry chef and she does all of the cookies and cakes and stuff that we make here. She also sells her own cakes out of here too, that you can call in and order. She's our opener, so she comes in and does a lot of the initial cooking with my recipes or my grandmother's recipes that I've written down and told her, ‘This is what you do, you do not change it.’ Then our son usually comes in during the afternoon and we like to call him our maintenance guy, too. If something goes wrong when our daughter comes in, she calls him. One morning the water was sputtering, and she was on the phone with her brother in a heartbeat, like ‘I don't know what's going on, but I need you up here.’
Our food comes from the heart and it's our family. Family is the most important thing to us and always has been. That's the way we were raised. I have a sister and a brother who live 90 miles away. We live in a perfect triangle, with one in Belleville and one in Olivet. It's a phone call and they're here, or I'm there. It doesn't matter and we do it with pride and that's all there is to it.
When people ask me like, ‘You're not open on Sunday and Monday?’ I say, ‘We're not because while we’re a family business, we also need to be a family.”
“We know our regulars. They come in and it’s like, ‘How's your mom doing? Is she still okay?’ Being a local business, we really get to know our neighbors and our community, and they get to know us. When you get out into a strip mall or burger row, it's not like that. I like the fact that we don't have a drive thru and people have to come in and we have to interact with each other. As we all know, after we came out of 2020, that went away. Now we're getting people filtering in we're starting to try and bring a lot of that back face to face and getting to know your neighbor, and that's important.
We especially enjoy the downtown area. Little downtown communities are dying. But we wanted to be more in a downtown area because they have a bigger and better sense of community than ‘burger row’ or a strip mall somewhere.
There are people who are walking their dogs or a handful of neighborhood kids who come in and get their bottles of Coke a couple times a week. I used to walk home from school, all the way on the other side of town. I remember looking in the windows saying, ‘If I save my allowance, I might be able to get that or grab a little snack on the way home.’ As cheesy as the idea of small-town America sounds, we really wanted to be a part of that. We refer to this place as our ‘cute little family taco restaurant’, because that’s what we really think of it.”
– Deanna Hernandez Schlaud and Zac Schlaud, Hernandez Mexican Food
Written by Phil Eich, Storyville
This project was created in collaboration with the DDA (Downtown Development Authority) & Michigan Main Street for Hernandez Mexican Food