RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 8.23.24

The Ornelas Family Blends Delicious Puerto Rican Food with Outstanding Latino Art

San Antonians love their Mexican food and appreciate Latino art. Dating back to the 1880s, writers and artists were fascinated with the Alamo City’s Mexican cuisine, later defined as Tex-Mex food. Now Latino non-natives of San Antonio, Manuel and Iris Ornelas and their sons, are recent contributors to the diversification of San Antonio’s Latino food options. New Mexican native Manuel and his Puerto Rican-born wife Iris are major contributors to introducing new Caribbean dishes to the palates of the city’s food connoisseurs. While bringing new food experiences to downtown and San Antonio’s Art District, the family-owned and family-run business is also highlighting Latino art, including a new roof-top mural to celebrate Puerto Rican culture.

Manuel Ornelas grew up in New Mexico and attended Eastern New Mexico University, a small college between Clovis and Roswell, New Mexico. In Eastern New Mexico, he met his future wife Iris. In the mid-1980s, the New Mexico campus sent recruiters to Puerto Rico to offer scholarships in bilingual education. Iris accepted the scholarship offer and arrived at the campus with eleven other Puerto Rican students.

A few years after meeting, the couple married, and Iris transferred to New Mexico State in Las Cruces to study medical technology as Manuel started his teaching career in a school district nearby. When Iris Ornelas finished her studies in New Mexico, she and Manuel moved to Midland, one of Texas’s oil capitals, where Iris accepted a Medical Technology Internship. But the Ornelases sorely missed the Latino ambiance they had grown up with. The couple decided to move to San Antonio, a city Manuel recalled reading about in the fourth grade. In the early 1990s, the Ornelas couple arrived in San Antonio where Manuel found a teaching post and Iris worked as a San Antonio Water Department chemist until she found a bilingual teaching position in the Edgewood School District.

Iris loved teaching and developed model programs in bilingual education. But after two decades of teaching, she fostered a profound desire to be a small business owner. She had always loved cooking and took pride in preparing meals at home based on her memory of her grandmother’s cooking in Puerto Rico. In addition, the family liked the idea of running a restaurant together, so in 2014 they spent a year preparing for a major change in their lives–to become proprietors of a new Puerto Rican restaurant based on Iris’s family recipes. The opening of Luna Rosa in 2015 in the Southside was a committed family endeavor. Iris let her job as a bilingual educator to devote fulltime to working in the restaurant. Manuel kept his education job, but their two sons joined Iris to make a true family business. Amadeus, the youngest of the two boys, enjoyed working in the kitchen and enrolled in a culinary arts program where he earned a Professional Chef certification. Their older son Omar helped with all aspects of the business from ordering food to managing the finances and helping as a bartender and waiter.

Shortly after they opened Luna Rosa on Military Drive across from Brooks City Base in 2015, they met and befriended Leo Gomez, the head of Brooks and a regular customer. Gomez, who joined Brooks with a wide range of business experience, assisted the Ornelas family at different stages of their business ownership. The restaurant received rave reviews from Southsiders and local news media. Emmy Award-winning presenter Guy Fieri of the Food Network helped to popularize the Luna Rosa in the early years. Three years after opening, Fieri brought a team of video cameramen and writers to Luna Rosa to showcase the preparation of the restaurant’s popular Caribbean nachos and chuleta kan-kan pork chops. The restaurant was featured on the widely popular Food Network in 2019.

The Southside Military Drive restaurant was popular but small. When Lisa Wong decided to move her Rosario’s Mexican Restaurant a block away to a new location on St. Mary’s Street, the Ornelas family inquired and soon closed a deal to open a much larger Luna Rosa at the popular corners of St. Mary’s and Presa Street near the Alamo Dome where the former Rosario’s had prospered for more than two decades.

The Ornelas family are also Latino art lovers. During the first phase of the opening of the new Luna Rosa, they acquired numerous works by Puerto Rican artists and began looking at works of local Latino artists. The first major art piece they acquired was by Aileen Rosario, a native of Puerto Rico, who painted the chronicle of Iris’s life in Puerto Rico. The painting depicts a rural setting with a humble cabin. A young Iris stands with her grandmother as she prepares to stir a boiling pot. To the left is her grandfather roasting a pig over an open fire. Above these figures are the native trees of the fabled Caribbean island and high above is a Luna Rosa, a pink moon can be seen in the Puerto Rican evening sky.

As a former DJ, Amadeus Ornelas contributed to the family music discussions and the decision to have artwork dedicated to the world-famous Puerto Rican rapper, Bad Bunny. Manuel stressed that all the art commissions have been carefully planned in family meetings. Calvo, a local muralist, was among the first San Antonio artists selected by the Ornelas family. Manuel met Calvo at a Southtown coffee house and was impressed with his artistic activities. Calvo is well known for his mural renderings of Vicente Fernandez at the Alameda Theatre and for a stunning mural of Selena at Alamo Candy Company on Hilderbrand Street. Calvo expressed a profound preference for Latino cultural imagery commenting to The Current that in his paintings he is driven by his mantra: “Never forget where you come from. And to keep that going because, without that, we don’t have a culture. We don’t have an identity and that’s something we should never be stripped of.”

Calvo’s indoor murals at Luna Rosa featuring the plants and native people of Puerto Rico fill an entire back wall of the restaurant. In the center is a portrayal of a Taino woman representing the original inhabitants of the Island. She is featured next to a plant where Puerto Rico’s national symbol, a Coqui, a singing frog native to the island, finds a resting spot.

The large outdoor mural on top of the restaurant roof facing St. Mary’s Street is the work of local artist Chris Montoya. The Ornelas family interviewed numerous artists and chose Montoya based on his excellent record as a muralist. Montoya’s Selena portrait on South Flores is a favorite among Southsiders. In early works, Montoya “fused graffiti with cultural symbols of pattern, textile, and Mexican American iconography.”

For the Luna Rosa room mural, Montoya painted two folk musicians on the le playing bongos and a guitar. In the center is a rose-colored quarter moon above one of the legendary colonial buildings of Viejo San Juan. On the right side of the mural, a folkloric dancer moves gracefully.

The new Luna Rosa, with a 4.5-star rating, has been open for a year and a half, and the Ornelas family loves being closer to the historic center of town. They offer excellent Caribbean dishes and plan to add a Bodega serving pastries and coffee in the morning and sandwiches at lunch. The future is bright for this restaurant that believes in a Luna Rosa [pink moon].

 

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Copyright 2024 by Ricardo Romo. All photos by Ricardo Romo.