Opening a Mexican restaurant in Houston, Texas, where “there’s 10,000 Mexican restaurants” can be risky, Fajita Pete’s founder Pedro “Pete” Mora said.
For Mora, being the hypothetical 10,001st Mexican restaurant in the metro area proved successful, especially on Friday nights when he’d see a line out the door and a wait to get a table. “We had to make tamales and hand out little margarita samples to keep people entertained while they waited,” he said. “It was a pretty cool environment and it was a very ‘neighborhood’ joint.”
Mora opened the restaurant, called Poblano’s, in 2002 before graduating from the University of Houston. His mother told him: “Start now, because you think you know everything. Then you have the energy while you’re young and, if you fail, you don’t have anything. So, who cares?” he recalled. “Thank God I was dumb enough to think I knew everything, because if not, I wouldn’t have stuck it out through all those tough trials at the beginning. It was a blessing.”
He managed to sign a lease on an abandoned building with a landlord who gave Mora a year to get the full-service restaurant up and running without any costs. “But I had to do everything myself. So, a typical immigrant story, right? Walking uphill both ways,” Mora said. “We made all the tables in our garage, we painted the place, did all the work necessary to open it because we obviously didn’t have any other way to fund it.”
But running a large restaurant came with large costs. The restaurant was 6,300 square feet and employed 22 servers, 17 cooks and a few bartenders. He noticed new efficient concepts popping up that operated out of smaller footprints, had slimmer menus and fewer employees. “That really struck me,” Mora said. “If they’re getting smaller, then I should get tiny.”
In 2008, he found a 1,200-square-foot restaurant—itself smaller than his former restaurant’s kitchen—and consolidated the menu to lean into customers’ need for convenience. His customers were surprised at the change, but Mora said if he hadn’t taken that risk to open Fajita Pete’s, he likely wouldn’t be in the restaurant business today.
But that change didn’t come without its complications. Not long after opening his new restaurant, Hurricane Ike hit Texas and shut down much of Houston, Mora said. He never lost power, but he’d just received a delivery of thousands of dollars’ worth of products he knew he’d be unlikely to sell. Because so many homes were without power, communities came together to host cookouts to ensure people were fed. Mora wanted to join in.
“A cousin and I jumped into a truck. We didn’t even have our logo on the van yet. We’re just driving around in an unmarked van, knocking on doors with no lights on, Hispanic guys in a very well-to-do area,” he joked.
He told a community organizer to gather families for dinner at Fajita Pete’s, where they could get free fajitas that evening. The restaurant fed about 80 families that night, and that helped spread the word about the new business, which has a heavy emphasis on catering and delivery. More than 98 percent of sales on average come from pickup orders, delivery or catering.
Today, the brand has more than 30 locations in major Texas markets, plus Chicago and Pittsburgh. Mora wants to expand more in Texas, but he’s willing to go anywhere with the right operator, he said.
Startup costs for a Fajita Pete’s franchise range from $194,500 to $667,700, and typical restaurant footprints are about 1,000 to 1,500 square feet. The average unit volume in 2023 was $1.2 million and average per-ticket sales were $82.
Fajita Pete’s could get a 120-person catering order for an office or a 10-person order for a family.
“You get the mix of everything, but those high tickets really allow you to set up your business for success,” Mora said. “The advantage of catering is that once you get it … you know how to order for it. You can schedule for it. It’s inherently less waste in the model.”
That efficiency is a huge draw for franchisees. “We make five to seven things only,” Mora said. “With that efficiency, you can really strike when the iron is hot.”