2024 has been terrific and tumultuous for the Houston dining scene. The year brought epic highs, with the launch of the Texas Michelin Guide; and gut-punching lows, with restaurants left in an economic lurch in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. And, hidden among the year’s foodie news was a special date – one that came to shape the face of Houston dining as we know it: the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maria Ninfa Rodriguez on May 11, 1924, in Harlingen, Texas.
The Mexican-American daughter of the Lower Rio Grande Valley would later become known as Ninfa Laurenzo, or more popularly as Mama Ninfa. Without Mama Ninfa’s perseverance, ingenuity and outsize personality, the world might not have devoured the modern fajita story as we know it.
Mama Ninfa’s 100th birthday – marked by her family in September as a fundraising party for the Ninfa Laurenzo Scholarship Fund – is an opportunity to look back at one of the greatest Houston-born culinary stories.
How It Began
Flashback to 1940s Texas when the birth of one of the country’s most popular dishes was decided by a coin toss. Ninfa and her husband, Domenic Laurenzo, a Rhode Island native of Italian descent, were living in Harlingen after their marriage in 1946, but were eager to make a fresh start.
Domenic had read that Houston and Los Angeles were two of the country’s fastest-growing cities. Both were perfect options for starting a business and raising a family, so they flipped a coin to decide which destination they would soon call home. Houston won.
The Laurenzos moved to Houston in 1949 to open a wholesale tortilla business, setting up the Rio Grande Tortilla Company on Navigation in the East End. Their family was ensconced in a wood frame home next to the factory. For two decades the Laurenzos made a good go of it until Domenic died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969. At 42, Ninfa Laurenzo found herself a widow with five children to support. And when the tortilla business began struggling, Ninfa got creative. Without any prior restaurant experience, she decided to set up 10 tables in front of the factory as a restaurant. Her menu was simple, inspired by her upbringing.
Ninfa’s opened in July 1973 serving tacos al carbon, grilled skirt steak folded into fresh flour tortillas, abetted by another Ninfa’s invention of presenting both red and green salsas. On its first day, Ninfa’s sold 250 tacos al carbon. The Laurenzos had a hit on their hands, but success took them by surprise.
“We didn’t plan on it. It just happened,” said Roland Laurenzo, the eldest of the Laurenzo children, who along with his son, Domenic, owns the popular El Tiempo Tex-Mex restaurants.
Among their first customers were folks coming from Downtown on their lunch break. “All you need is one or two lawyers from Downtown to spread the word,” said Phyllis Mandola, Mama Ninfa’s only daughter. She served as the restaurant’s first waitress, alongside her brother Jack, the first waiter. Once the tacos took hold, Jack decided they should be served on a plate with grilled onions, a refined presentation foreshadowing the fajita platter.
“We didn’t invent the fajita,” said Phyllis, who married into the Mandola family and with her husband, the late Tony Mandola, went on to operate several successful restaurants beloved by generations of Houstonians. “My mother introduced it in Houston. We always clarify it that way.” This was something novel for Houston at a time when crispy shelled tacos and enchilada and tamale combo plates were the Tex-Mex norm.
Lisa Fain, a seventh-generation Texan, James Beard Award-winning writer, cookbook author, and Texas food authority, said that while contemporary Tex-Mex was long governed by plates with brown sauce and yellow cheese, Houston authored a different outlook with fajitas: an unprocessed vibrancy of simply grilled meat with fresh vegetables and tortillas, and lashings of sprightly salsas. She credits Mama Ninfa for the shift that triggered the fajitas juggernaut. “No matter who came up with fajitas, I’ve always thought of it as a Houston dish,” said Fain. “Whether or not she was the first, she’s the one who popularized it. I always point to Ninfa as the godmother of fajitas.”
By the early 1980s, the Texas fajita craze was in full swing. Sure, there was some copying, with plenty of people in the restaurant business looking to capitalize on the trending dish. In fact, Ninfa’s also borrowed. The sizzling fajita platter, which Ninfa’s introduced several years after the original tacos al carbon, wasn’t a local innovation. “We didn’t start out to be transformational. But, there is some awe in that it sprang from my mother’s courage and creativity,” Phyllis said.
Transformational it was. The trend resulted in a seismic shift in Tex-Mex cuisine that found a foothold in the national restaurant scene, with large chains getting in on the sizzling fajitas platter bandwagon. While the origin story may have gotten lost and embellished, the fajitas trend threads always lead back to Houston.
Jeffrey Savell, Vice Chancellor and Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University, likens Ninfa’s role in fajitas to Steve Jobs’ hand in improving the personal computer. “However you look at it, if they weren’t the originator, by golly they perfected it,” said Savell. “There’s probably nobody on the face of the earth who has sold more than they have.”
Texas Proud
Success, they say, has many fathers. The evolution of the modern fajitas dish is no exception. Throughout Texas, before and after Ninfa’s popularized it, fajita culture was embedded in local foodways. According to Texas A&M University research, fajitas originated in the border areas of South Texas and have been eaten there since the 1930s. Ranch hands working in South and West Texas were often given lesser cuts of beef, including beef skirts, as partial payment. Workers would feed themselves by grilling these “throwaway” cuts over mesquite fire coals.
“Ninfa’s is the first thing I think of when I think of fajitas. Ninfa’s is the mother ship,” said food and travel writer June Naylor, a Texas food authority and cookbook author. “I’ve always understood that it came from the frontera along the border.”
Naylor, a sixth-generation Texan, calls fajitas the most identifiable Tex-Mex dish and one that has emerged as a Texas culinary birthright. “We claim it as rightfully as we do chicken-fried steak, queso, or King Ranch casserole,” she notes. “It’s a purely Texan thing, and of course there’s a sense of pride in that.”
Almost as quickly as the grilled beef strips became popular, fajitas morphed and blurred. The widespread demand for outside skirt steak, the original fajitas meat that was an inexpensive cut, quickly drove up beef prices. The fajita platter was no longer an inexpensive proposition, leading restaurateurs to use other cuts for fajita platters, including inside skirt, sirloin flap, flank steak, and others. The demand for fajitas put chicken, pork, and other proteins on the sizzling platter.
Today, it’s not uncommon to see a fajitas spread decked out with salmon, tuna, pork carnitas, quail, sausage, and baby back ribs. There are even wagyu steak fajitas propelling the world’s priciest beef into the starring role of a dish that was once made with what some considered offal.
Endings and New Beginnings
The golden days for Ninfa’s were sweet, but numbered. As the Ninfa’s legend grew, making Mama Ninfa the most famous Tex-Mex restaurateur of her generation, so too did its footprint. Rapid expansion in the 1980s put Ninfa’s in multiple locations in Houston and in other Texas cities.
That growth, coupled with overcapitalization and mounting debt, eventually became its undoing. The family-held company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1996 and was sold in 1998, ending the Laurenzo family’s involvement in the business that bore Mama Ninfa’s name.
Mama Ninfa, the woman who created an empire with her homespun Texas Mexican fare, died of cancer three years later at age 77. Her legacy continues to loom large in Houston as a vivacious public figure who buoyed tourism, put Houston on the culinary map, and inspired women and Hispanics to succeed in a multicultural, business-savvy city.
“Mama Ninfa did a great job of building a terrific brand. I’ve never heard anyone say a truly bad word about Mama Ninfa,” said Niel Morgan, owner of Legacy Restaurants, which acquired the brand and the original Ninfa’s intellectual rights in 2006.
Morgan said he bought Ninfa’s because he cared about the restaurant and its future. It’s a part of Houston’s history that Legacy intends to preserve and polish with the same respect and enthusiasm that continues to draw the fajitas faithful to the two restaurants called the Original Ninfa’s. Last year, the house that Mama Ninfa built, the Original Ninfa’s on Navigation, celebrated its milestone 50th anniversary. It remains the epicenter of fajitas lore and legend.
While the fajita platter is Texas through and through – invested with cowboy culture and border fusion history – it also speaks to Houston gumption and the city’s place as an incubator of culinary bravado.
Mama Ninfa would be proud.
