‘Hole-in-the-wall’ Mexican restaurant in Fresno turns 50. Can it stay true to its roots?

The wallpaper hasn’t changed in 50 years at Cuca’s, the little Mexican restaurant in downtown Fresno.

It’s black damask over what looks like brown wood paneling.

On Christmas night nearly 50 years ago, the current owner’s uncle stayed up late smoothing the paper onto the walls in preparation for the restaurant’s Dec. 26 opening.

As the restaurant at Kern and F streets approaches its milestone birthday, most Fresnans are more acquainted with its younger sister, the Cuca’s on Olive Avenue in the Tower District that opened in 1999. The restaurants are run by a mother-daughter pair — Margaret Sifuentes and Gina Daniels.

The Chinatown location was the original Cuca’s — and it’s still going strong.

It was there when the downtown neighborhood thrived. The owners plan for it to be there long after a massive new modern high-speed rail station is built two blocks away.

Author, poet and Fresno native Gary Soto wrote an entire book inspired by an experience at Cuca’s. And a photo of the time musician Freddie Fender stopped by, smiling in a booth with the founder, Cuca herself, still hangs on the wall.

“They are — not sure I want to say hole-in-the-wall, but that probably describes them pretty well — that is really a gem in Chinatown,” said Jan Minami, a project director with the Chinatown Fresno Foundation.

So, what’s changed over the years?

Almost nothing.

It’s still cash only.

It still serves wienies and eggs.

It still has just four booths and nine stools lining the counter. That includes the seat farthest from the door, where Cuca used to sit and direct her granddaughter to get a customer more coffee or tortillas.

“Some people come in and they say, ‘You need to upgrade, change the wallpaper,’ and I go ‘No, I won’t,’” said Sifuentes, 71, who now runs the restaurant.

Who is Cuca?

Cuca is Refugia Salcido. Her picture is on the back of the menu. She died in 1997 at age 74.

Refugia translates to Ruth in English. And similar to the way people named William go by Bill, many Ruths in Mexico go by Cuca, Sifuentes said.

Salcido started a different restaurant down the street a year or two earlier, but it was in the back of a bar and families couldn’t take their kids.

So Cuca’s was founded in 1973. Sifuentes — one of 10 kids — and almost everyone else in the family, has worked there. Here, daycare meant bringing your kids to work so everyone could keep an eye on them.

Sifuentes remembers plunking her daughter, who now runs the Tower District Cuca’s, in a grocery cart inside the restaurant when she was small.

“That was my play pen,” joked Daniels, 52.

The much larger Tower location, near Van Ness Avenue, opened nearly 30 years after the original, and Daniels eventually took it over.

When Daniels raised her own kids there, she upgraded to putting them in a booth.

The food

The menu at the Chinatown Cuca’s hasn’t changed much over the years.

Eggs with chile verde is the most popular dish, though technically, bacon is the top-selling food.

“Everybody, no matter what they order, has to have a side of bacon,” Sifuentes said, noting that Cuca’s bacon is thicker and fried.

You can get eggs paired with steak, nopales (cactus), and Spam. And there are those “huevos con wienies” on the menu — eggs with wienies.

The restaurant still makes Cuca’s original secret recipe for chile Colorado, beef in a thick red sauce, served with eggs and french fries, or rice and beans.

“I have not given that recipe to anybody, which I have to, because if I die, there’s goes that,” she said.

The original Cuca’s is tiny, and since it doesn’t have a lot of room for extra coolers, it sticks with a limited menu.

The much bigger Tower Cuca’s has more room to store ingredients and hence a bigger menu. So it has chilaquiles, pozole and much more.

Cuca’s inspired a book

Fresno-born writer and poet Gary Soto spent a lot of time in Chinatown as a kid. His family lived not far from the arched Fresno sign on Van Ness declaring it “The best little city in the U.S.A.”

He loves Cuca’s hearty food, he said in a phone interview with The Bee from his home in Berkeley.

“Whenever I had money, that was the place to go. I like the ambiance. I like the booths,” he said.

An experience at Cuca’s inspired his book “Buried Onions,” published in the late 90s.

Soto was eating at a booth when a muscular man came in selling two heaping stacks of onions. They were stolen from a field, he said, and he was trying to make a few bucks.

The cook shooed him out. But not before Soto decided to throw the man some cash, handing over $5 each for the stacks.

“When we paid up and left the restaurant, I couldn’t even lift one,” he said. “He was really strong.”

The memory of it stuck with him.

“It’s the Chinatown experience,” he said. “It’s not going to repeat itself.”

The book features a young man dealing with gangs and violence. It centers around a metaphor of a giant onion buried underneath Fresno that “produces heat and produces tears,” Soto said.

Customers

In years past, mailmen and the cops who walked the neighborhood beat often came in to eat, along with plenty of attorneys.

Today, it’s not necessarily people who live or work nearby who come, but generations of regulars from Selma, Fowler and all parts of Fresno.

Sifuentes has customers she’s known since they were still inside their mothers’ wombs. And others who share memories of coming here decades ago with family.

“They’re crying because they remember coming here with the grandparents 50 years ago,” she said.

On a recent morning Salvador Diaz of Fowler was sitting in the booth next to Sifuentes with his family.

He’s been coming here “since ‘85, since her mama was here, Cuca.” Today, he’s with his wife Melba and their daughter Angelica, who everybody calls Geli.

“I think it’s the best,” he said. “If we want something good to eat, we go to Cuca’s.”

They didn’t even order, Melba said. Waitress Mercedes Carrillo, who’s worked there for 22 years, saw them coming and got her regular chile colorado order started.

Both Cuca’s locations have had their share of hardships, including the COVID-19 pandemic. And the power bill? “It kills us,” Sifuentes said.

She was thankful Cuca’s was cash only when COVID hit — she had no debt built up from using credit.

Both mother and daughter praise their landlords for charging reasonable rent. (The downtown building is owned by another Chinatown entrepreneur, the owner of Central Fish.)

But it’s the customers who have kept the business going, Sifuentes said.

Even when dining rooms were forced to close and do take-out only, customers brought their own little tables and chairs and ate on the sidewalk.

“For us to succeed for 50 years, it’s because of the regulars,” she said.

Chinatown

Cuca’s isn’t alone in its longevity in Chinatown.

Across the street, Kogetsu-Do has been making mochi and other treats for 108 years and many other businesses have been around for decades.

They’ve all seen Chinatown change over the years.

Sifuentes remembers when the neighborhood was “beautiful,” with benches and trees. Now, she bemoans the graffiti and tents set up by homeless people.

But change is on the horizon.

High-speed rail is coming to the city, and a new station that will straddle the Union Pacific railroad tracks just steps away from Cuca’s.

Many hope it will revitalize Chinatown, that travelers from far-flung cities will get off the train and sample the neighborhood’s diverse restaurants. The mayor wants it to be an “international culinary district.”

Downtown Fresno is also getting $250 million in state money, at least $20 million of it paying for street improvements, sidewalks, curbs and gutters in Chinatown and downtown.

Chinatown will also get a share of a $66.5 million climate-related grant promising environmental and economic benefits. And more money for housing is coming.

But Sifuentes is skeptical.

“In my lifetime, I will not see the fast train,” she said.

She thinks The Monarch, the newly built apartment building with 57 units two blocks away, is beautiful, but it didn’t bring in new customers.

She’s anxious about the work that will rip up the streets, knowing Cuca’s will lose the only parking it has.

“But again, my loyal customers, they find a way,” she said.

Minami, from the Chinatown Foundation, said she understands the fears of business owners who worry that gentrification might push them out.

She and others are working hard to make sure that the unique little businesses, their regular customers and the “Chinatown experience” Soto spoke of don’t get lost in the change.

“We absolutely do not want to lose that,” she said. “I want to see a Cuca’s that is just like Cuca’s 10 years from now.”

Soto, the author, echoed her feelings. Even though he lives in Berkeley and doesn’t have much family left in Fresno, he said he thinks about Fresno’s Chinatown all the time.

And Cuca’s is a key part of it.

“I think all Fresnans should eat at Cuca’s,” he said. “I really want this restaurant to continue.”