Serrano had been in the restaurant business for a long time.

“I am from Mexico City and grew up there,” Serrano said. “My grandfather owned a restaurant. So I grew up in the restaurant business since I was little. We always had something to do for my grandmother. I knew what I was getting into.”

Antonio and Serrano became an item and shared a dream to own their own restaurant. They left Mexico City together and headed for Madison where they married and set about fulfilling their dream. Serrano’s uncle had purchased El Pastor Mexican Restaurant on S. Park Street in South Madison in 2000 and Antonio went to work for him.

By 2009, Antonio and Serrano were ready to fulfill their dream and purchased El Pastor.

“We are happy working together,” Serrano said. “I guess I was the best business partner that he could ever find because I grew up in the restaurant business. I knew I could never give up. My grandmother never gave up.”

The restaurant is like a small child that always demands the attention of its parents. It takes a special commitment to be a restaurant owner.

“What is demanding is first the hours,” Antonio said. “We need to dedicate a lot of hours to our business. We have to be here before anyone comes here. And then we leave after everyone leaves the restaurant. That is a big thing, the commitment. We don’t go to parties. We don’t do any other things. We have to be here and we have been doing this for a long time now. The other thing is we don’t get to bring the family together all the time. I missed a lot of my kids’ games. And Maria gets stressed out because she has to drive them back and forth to the games. On top of that, she has to come and help me. She helps me before she picks the kids up too. Sometimes we have dinner together. Because we have the restaurant, it makes sense for us to come over here. That pretty much what we do. The part I miss most is to be home at 5 p.m. and that doesn’t happen.”

“At the same time, you are with your family,” Serrano added. “I am with my husband and my kids are here while we work. It is rewarding over time to see families that have little kids now. Those little kids come with their own families to eat at the restaurant because they came here and we serve them. My children have also grown up with the restaurant as well. They work with us. They are learning. And it is rewarding at the end of the day.”

When they first took over the restaurant, El Pastor was open seven days per week. Antoniko and Serrano realized that they did need a built in breather from the restaurant.

“We have been closing on Sundays for about 10 years now,” Antonio said. “We said, ‘Well, if we don’t make money, that’s fine. We are tired and we need a day off.’ So we decided to close on Sunday. Sometimes, we open occasionally for a big party — weddings and stuff like that. But we try not to. But we don’t do anything on Sundays. We go to church in the morning and we go out and have breakfast or lunch somewhere else. We don’t cook at home on Sundays. We just relax. We spend time together all the family. If we go somewhere, we all go together.”

Owning the restaurant and having to be there constantly while it is in operation is a real time constraint as it is rare to come to El Pastor to eat or get a pick-up order and not see one or the other — if not both — there. It makes for a full day because family is important as well.

“You learn that to work during the day and then you have to think about the business and what we have to do with the children,” Serrano said. “Then you come and you switch the tape and talk about something else. It’s nice that my children are growing up like I did and loving the restaurant business, just like I did with my grandma. Sometimes I remember my grandmother. I think she would be so proud seeing this and passing it on to my children all the knowledge that we learned from her. The biggest challenge is being able to be at the restaurant, but also to separate out family life. It’s hard because we are committed to the business. And at the same time, we have responsibilities in the family. But at the end of the day, everything works out. We just trust everything works out and it happens.”

On some levels, owning a restaurant is like owning a family farm. It’s all hands on deck in order for the business to survive.

“Three of our children work with us now,” Antonio said. “Having family work with you is how a small business can afford to exist. We have to work. It’s not like we are going to hire so many people. That would be nice. But when you own a small business, you do everything. You have to cook. You have to serve. You have to do inventory. You have to do sales and the books. That’s basically what we do.”

What has also been a challenge is existing with a relatively small profit margin. Any problems must be dealt with by Antonio and Serrano. There is no slack to hire additional help.

“Through the years, there are times when we can’t find employees,” Antonio said. “For a year or two, my wife and I were working back and forth in the kitchen and in the dining area. We were about to quit. But then we found good people, so that saved us and we were able to continue. It’s been many years and many challenges. Now we know how to handle all of those challenges. We’ve gotten good at it.”

For Serrano and Antonio, part of the pleasure of being in the restaurant business is the people they meet and the friendships they have formed over the years.

“I enjoy meeting and talking with people and serving them and pleasing them,” Serrano said. “I enjoy making sure that the food is good for them. I enjoy seeing them leave with a smile because they liked the food. People come back over and over. And we have met people through generations as well. I really enjoy it. We are a part of this community. We have seen different leaders of the community here. And they come back and they send people. People say, ‘Such and such sent us here. We are interested.’ It’s nice we have the support of the community. We have seen that through the years. Our advertising is the word of mouth from our customers.”

“It’s been rewarding working in this area of the city of Madison because we get to see different kinds of people,” Antonio added. “It’s a mix of cultures here. To be willing to serve them, it’s very rewarding. I get to meet everyone, leaders and local neighbors who live around here. I also see people who have moved and come back. People have moved to Europe. And when they come to Madison, they usually stop by and say hi to us. We get people who have moved to Florida and retired. We had friends who used to come here for a long time and retired to Florida. And once in a while, we go and visit them because they became our friends. So being a part of this community means a lot to me. This is the Hispanic community that lives and the African American community as well. We serve them a lot. And we get the Anglos also being close to the downtown area. It helps a lot and you get to meet so many different people.”

In some ways, having developed these friendships and having so many people come back year after year keeps Antonio and Serrano focused on quality.

“Our signature dish is El Pastor Tacos, which is a marinated pork,” Antonio said. “But also the Hispanic community comes a lot for the soups. We make lamb soup that people don’t find anywhere else. We make pozole, menudo, which is a honeycombed tripe soup and beef soup. We make all kinds of things and most of the Hispanic clientele love those soups. They just come for those. They are a meal in themselves. They are a big bowl of soup filled with a lot of meat and stuff like that. Customers come because everything that we make is from scratch. And we can’t fool them. They know. People know what they are eating. We start early cooking, preparing everything for lunch or dinner. There are recipes that take a long time. We really have to coordinate the timing to make sure that everything is fresh and produce the products that people have been eating for a long time. And we have to be consistent. That’s hard. And we somehow coordinate and organize this timing so that we can be profitable still.”

And serving authentic Mexican food allows Antonio and Serrano to please the diverse palates of their customers.

“Mexican food is based on vegetables,” Antonio said. “We add meat, but the basis is vegetables. So we are very safe here. If people have gluten allergies, we are really safe from gluten also. We can satisfy a lot of customers, whether they are vegetarian, vegan or meat eaters. We can cater to all of them.

In order to be authentic, El Pastor tries to buy as many ingredients it can from Mexico.”

“There are so many ingredients that come from Mexico like peppers,” Antonio said. “Some of the Mexican greens we can find in the U.S., from California or Texas. Before, a long time ago, it was hard to get things. Now I think it is easier with the Free Trade Agreement that the U.S. and Mexico signed. We are able to get a lot of products from Mexico. They are fresh and good quality.’

But they have had to be flexible in order to get quality ingredients.

“We always try to get the products from one vendor,” Serrano said. “But sometimes, when it is pretty expensive, we need to switch and find a new vendor. I think one of the challenges is the prices are very expensive sometimes. One week it is the lettuce and the next week it is the tomatoes. The challenge is that we still have the same price for the customer.  So what do you do? You just need to look around, find and hunt and be back and forth to find quality and a good price. That’s the big challenge.”

One of their biggest challenges have been the duo impact of higher inflation and higher prices on items from Mexico due to the Trump tariffs.

“I think we have been hit by inflation first,” Antonio said. “That was really hard. As soon as the tariffs started coming up, it is even worse. It is what it is. People don’t want to spend money also. It’s not only inflation and the tariffs, it’s also the economy. When there is inflation or the economy goes down, the first thing that people are going to cut is the restaurant because it is a luxury. It’s not a necessity. We feel that first. When I start noticing that orders are down, I say, ‘The economy is going down.’ And that is exactly what happens. We can predict it.”

South Madison is undergoing a lot of change due to a relatively fast pace of development. As we conduct the interview, the strip mall across the street is in the last stages of demolition. And with new growth comes higher property values and higher property taxes, which could have forced El Pastor out as the owner was faced with rising costs and more lucrative development opportunities. Antonio and Serrano positioned themselves to take advantage of the development.

“We know that the city of Madison is tearing down a lot of buildings,” Antonio said. “This month, they tore down a couple of buildings over here. We knew it was coming. And one day, I talked to the YWCA and they were renting too. We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if someday we would own this building?’ And they said yes. They asked me if I was really interested and I said yeah. ‘Maybe I buy this part and you buy that part. We’re only going to do it if you are going to do it.’ We needed to keep the restaurant here because if the building got sold and they tore it down, we weren’t going to open another restaurant. We really wanted to keep the restaurant here on Park Street because we’ve been here for a very long time. I think people deserve to come over here. YWCA bought it and sold us this part. And we were able to secure the restaurant building. I pay a little less in mortgage than I used to pay in rent. We are in really good shape here.”

El Pastor is going anywhere and its authentic Mexican foods will delight South Madisonians and the community at large for generations to come. It’s all in the family. And that is what makes Antonio’s and Serrano’s story so compelling. They are the epitome of the immigrant ethos, continuing the values that really make America great.