My Biz: Cedar Rapids eatery pairs Mexican restaurant, bakery

One easily can find family-owned Mexican restaurants in any given section of the Corridor. But what about a family-owned Mexican restaurant and bakery?

The concept is not new to other parts of the country and is common in Mexico. And in Cedar Rapids, customers of El Super Burrito and Lupita's Bakery are greeted by a wooden and glass pastry case as soon as they walk in the door - just like those they would see in the bakeries of Mexico, its shelves filled with pink and yellow, cinnamon sugar-dusted traditional Mexican sweets such as conchas and empanadas and cakes such as tres leches and flan.

All baked fresh daily in-house, the cakes and sweetbreads that owner Javier Gonzalez makes he learned to prepare from books just before he opened the restaurant-bakery combo nine years ago.

Javier goes in every morning at 5 to start cooking and baking, and Maria, his wife, said that by 8 a.m. everyone else comes in to cook the meat, beans, rice and fresh salsas.

“We never freeze anything. We cook everything that day,” Maria said.

El Super Burrito's best seller is the burrito ahogado, which literally translates as "drowned burrito." This consists of a fried burrito stuffed with steak, chicken or beef, beans, rice, lettuce, guacamole and cheese that then is drenched in green salsa - hence the “drowned” part.

After years of traveling back and forth from Temascalicingo, a small town in the southern part of Mexico, to the United States as a migrant worker in the cotton fields of California, a cook in Chicago and finally as a factory worker at Rusco Windows in Cedar Rapids, Gonzalez used his savings to start a business.

Gonzalez said that he and Maria, who have been married for 25 years, didn't want their daughters to work in a factory or in a field, so they used the experience and skills Javier gained in the Chicago restaurant.

Their two daughters and Javier's sister, Lupita, help run the daily operations.

“I wanted to excel and have a place for my family,” Javier added.

And in continuing with that hope, Gonzalez said that he hopes to open a second location in Iowa City this year.

AT A GLANCE

• Name: Javier Gonzalez

• Title: Owner
• Company: El Super Burrito and Lupita's Bakery
• Address: 3300 Johnson Ave. NW
• Phone: (319) 366-1181
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/El-Super-Burrito-Lupitas-Bakery/135258079838690