Lala’s Cafe is a place that’s easy to overlook but hard to forget. Driving east from Laredo on State Highway 359, the half-hour journey to Mirando City passes through rolling swells of mesquite and prickly pear that can lull a driver into complacency. Blink and you’ll miss the nondescript junction with Farm-to-Market Road 649, which turns into a main street resembling an abandoned ghost town—at least on its quieter days.
Despite 70 years of history, Lala’s still clings to its old fiberglass sign, now missing part of its first two letters due to years of wear and tear. Opened in 1953, when Mirando City was still riding a financial high from a 1920s oil boom, the restaurant has seen fortunes come and go. An oil gusher in 1921 quickly sprouted a vibrant ranch town that supported a bank, a post office, drug stores, hotels, and two movie theaters within its first decade. Today, many of those markers of newfound wealth are boarded up on Main Street—rows of parked trucks in front of the weather-beaten structure housing Lala’s the only remnant of a bustling era.
Enjoying this article?But enter the café’s creaky wooden door and the town bursts to life. Digging into the eatery’s signature Mexican plate, or waiting for a table by ice chests stacked in the entryway, are an assorted clientele of ranchers, law enforcement officers, and tourists passing through town. Come winter, you can also count on an influx of camouflage-clad deer hunters, many of whom are represented in pictures lining the walls, proudly displaying their white-tailed quarries.
Since reaching Lala’s can prove a haul, guests don’t have a problem waiting a little longer to be served by its minuscule staff, if a single person can even be considered a “staff.” That lone worker is usually Noemi Jackson, the granddaughter of founder Eduarda “Lala” Banda Rodriguez. Jackson can be seen juggling her duties in the kitchen and serving guests hungrily awaiting a taste of puffy tacos, bean-shrouded chalupas, and cheese enchiladas submerged in a warm bath of chili gravy.
“We do things exactly the way my grandma Lala used to do it,” Jackson says, as she hustles back into the kitchen.
Almost all of the dishes on the restaurant’s menu start with the same bowl of raw masa. Jackson learned to cook under the tutelage of her grandmother, who taught her the dynamic versatility of the ingredient. The various offerings are executed effortlessly, as she flattens balls of masa in a tortilla press, dips them into a vat of frying oil, and rolls them with Longhorn yellow cheese. Whether incorporated into a chalupa or enchilada, the earthiness of the tortilla base is heightened by the sharp, house-made serrano hot sauce that requires a warning courtesy of a wooden sign hanging on the wall: “Our hot sauce is not medication – Please do not take after meals.”
Despite her passing in 1973, Jackson’s grandmother is still intimately tied to the history and gastronomic palate of Mirando City today. Born near San Luis Potosí, Mexico, Rodriguez and her family entered the country through Laredo and made their way to Mirando City in 1922, just a year after the town was founded by wildcatter O.W. Killam. A cook and housekeeper for several families that came in search of an oil fortune, Rodriguez would eventually establish the town molino, or mill, grinding dried corn into masa.
All these years later, Jackson fondly remembers her grandmother’s business as a unifying symbol of community and togetherness. For instance, during Christmas posadas, Rodriguez would lead the town in cooking tamales and hojarascas, the soft sugar cookies also known as pan de polvo. Perhaps that’s why in F. Michael Black’s 1972 book Mirando City: A New Town in a New Oil Field, she is described as “the best goodwill ambassador Mirando has.”
“She wore so many hats,” says Maria Luisa Solis, a 91-year-old Mirando City native and longtime customer of Lala’s. “She cooked, she cleaned, she ran the molino, she helped kids like my sister prepare for their Holy Communion—but to us she was just Lala.”
Since Mirando City’s peak in the late 1920s, its population has dwindled from 1,500 down to just 222 residents, according to the 2020 census. And one of Lala’s reliable customers, the Laredo Air Force Base, shuttered in 1973. But the restaurant remains a timeless magnet for South Texas travelers and Native Americans who flock to the area to partake in the ceremonial peyote cactus that grows along the town’s border.
On Main Street, just a few blocks away from the restaurant, the evidence of change can be seen in the contrast of rusted oil derricks that sit against a backdrop of white wind turbines twirling above the desolate terrain. But Lala’s, still employing relics like its antique milk dispenser and cash register, seems to exist in a bubble—impervious to the transformation going on outside its doors. Or as Jackson likes to say: “Lala’s hasn’t changed because the recipes have never changed.”
LALA’S CAFE
649 Main St.,
Mirando City.
Mon-Sat,
6:30 a.m.-3 p.m.
361-586-4224
