Childhood friends Alan Ortiz and Itzel Flores have known each other since they were 5 and grew up playing soccer together in Middletown before going on separate career tracks after college.
However, the pandemic and all the changes it brought prompted them to take a fresh look at life, which led both to quit their jobs for food truck entrepreneurship.
A West Coast-style Mexican birria, which features stewed meat, was at the menu’s heart.
Two years later, after overcoming a broken truck, snowstorms, and summer heat, the duo took their budding entrepreneurship to a storefront off Dolson Avenue in Middletown.
“It has been quite a trajectory,” Mr. Ortiz told The Epoch Times at the grand opening ceremony on Jan. 13. “It is our friendship that brought us to build the dream and achieve what we have now.”
“There were good days and bad days—we didn’t always win,” Mr. Ortiz said. “But we never got down when we had a bad day; we took it as a learning opportunity and asked, ‘What can we do better?’”
Middletown Mayor Joseph DeStefano congratulated the new restaurant “House of Birria” and welcomed its diversifying the city’s culinary offerings at the ribbon cutting.
“Middletown has always been an immigrant city; it started with the Germans, Irish, and Italians, then Latinos, and now the Asians,” Mr. DeStefano told The Epoch Times. “Different ethnic groups not only moved into the city but also opened their businesses here.”
‘An Immigrant City’
“We have diverse offerings with businesses of different ethnic flavors,” he said. “When people look for an ethnic experience, one thing that comes to their mind pretty quickly is Middletown.”“It is how cities were built, and it is how we are rebuilding the city,” he added.
Last year, city officials cut ribbons on 12 new businesses in town, including a Mexican bistro, a Korean restaurant, and a department store featuring international products.
Emma Fuentes, chief of staff to New York state Sen. James Skoufis, presented a certificate to the restaurant owners and, having dined at the place weeks ago, commented on the delicious food.
Sparrow Tobin, councilman for Ward 4, which the new restaurant is part of, told The Epoch Times that it was refreshing to have a new eatery that’s a small business in addition to the fast-food chains in the area.
Lately, the city has taken advantage of state and federal grants to put in new sidewalks along Dolson Avenue for safe and easy pedestrian access to local businesses, according to Mr. DeStefano.
“These two young people had a concept that was developed in a home kitchen and took it to start a food truck business, and the food truck was such a success that they decided to go into the full sit-down restaurant business,” Mr. DeStefano said. “That is the American way, and that is entrepreneurship.”
An Entrepreneur Journey
For Mr. Ortiz and Ms. Flores, the entrepreneurship started with a trip to downtown Los Angeles in 2018, during which they tried birria tacos for the first time and fell in love with them.Upon her return, Ms. Flores began to experiment with birria dishes at home and shared them with family members and friends until one day, during the height of the pandemic, when Mr. Ortiz wondered aloud about starting a birria food truck business in the Middletown area.
“You can get traditional tacos here in Middletown, but the concept of birria was something that was still fairly new,” he said.
In 2021, they quit their jobs, got a food truck, and started serving to-go birria dishes at a rented parking lot space; they also drove to events and festivals in Orange County to get their names out.
They endured summer heat and winter storms, including having to warm up frozen pipes time and again, and “people still came up,” Ms. Flores said. “I think that was the special part about it—we were able to get that support from our clients.”
The biggest challenge came, Mr. Ortiz said, when their truck quit working suddenly and they didn’t have enough money to fix it, which could have brought an end to the entrepreneurship.
Luckily, a family member came to their help and lent them a pick-up truck, with which they hauled the food trailer and kept the business running until they could buy a new one.
“It was a very humbling experience,” Mr. Ortiz said. “We know that life is always going to present us with obstacles, but it is about how we recover from those obstacles that make us who we are.”
When they started to sell out their food supplies weekly, Mr. Ortiz again wondered aloud about moving into a brick-and-mortar space with an expanded menu and a full-service bar.
By then, their clientele hailed from as far away as White Plains and Albany.
“This is the vision that we had and created, and now we are able to offer it to the people of Middletown and beyond,” Mr. Ortiz said. “We would like to express our gratitude to our supportive customers; as Itzel said, without them, we would be nothing.”
