Like Dorothy taking her initial steps into Oz, the colors are the first thing you notice when you walk into Taqueria El Palenque. Reds, blues, oranges and yellows in shades that would make a Crayola box jealous explode from every booth and table. An adobe church is painted on ceramic tiles below the pass from the kitchen to the dining room. On the back wall of the main dining room, a tangerine-colored background sets off the indigo denim of a man kneeling in a fresco-style painting and … wait … is he holding a rooster?
Yes. Yes, he is. Don’t make it weird.
In fact, look a little closer and you’ll notice there are actually quite a few chickens adorning the restaurant, and for good reason. In Mexican Spanish, “palenque” generally refers to both an arena specifically for cockfighting and, more broadly, to the whole party going on around a cockfighting event. The rooster-centric mural on the back wall of the main dining room, with the sombrero-and-denim-clad man and his trusty cock cautiously eying another rooster, anchors the theme, while the brightly colored decor makes the party aspect feel authentic.
Authenticity is a priority for owners David and Marlin (pronounced “mar-LEEN”) Martinez, both in the decor and the food that they serve.
“When we opened,” David said, “my brother-in-law had experience in other restaurants, and he helped with the first menu. But we changed it a little [after he left] to make it more authentic.” When asked why that mattered, Marlin smiled. “We want our food to taste homemade, like the foods we grew up with,” she said. “You have to use authentic recipes to do that.”
Jess Miller“That’s why we got these, too,” David said, gesturing toward the table where he, Marlin, photographer Jessica Miller, and I were seated. The top was decorated with a hand-painted, stylized picture of vaqueros on a cattle drive, done in a black-and-white palette with splashes of crimson and brown. “When we were remodeling, we didn’t want to keep the tables that were already here when we bought the place,” he said. “So we ordered these from a company in Guadalajara, and they made them and shipped them directly to us.”
The tables and — especially — the booths are gorgeous, with hand-carved and hand-painted tableaus of bullfights, cockfights and blue-gray agave fields. Dozens of roosters, some posed as if in mid-fight and some just chilling like chickens tend to do, were painted onto chair backs through the restaurant as well. It’s clearly custom work.
As if reading my mind, Marlin answered my next question before I could ask it. “They said we could have them painted however we wanted, so we picked out the art and colors for all of the tables and chairs.”
Along with Best Mexican Food in Central Arkansas, El Palenque was a finalist for Best Tortilla Chip in this year’s Arkansas Times Readers’ Choice awards. The accolades are warranted. Their chips somehow manage to be impossibly light and crispy, while simultaneously being thick enough to deal with the heartiest salsa or cheese dip, and they have a distinctive fresh-corn flavor.
Jess MillerAs it happens, those fantastic chips are another detail Palenque treats with care.
“We get fresh tortillas and chips each day, so nothing is sitting in the cooler for days,” David told me. The tortillas and chips come from La Tortillería Brenda in Southwest Little Rock, which one of David’s brothers owns. “They don’t freeze them before delivering,” David said, “and we don’t freeze them once we get them.”
This made-fresh-never-frozen ethos was a common refrain as I asked the Martinezes what regular customers are quick to recommend. The shrimp in their very popular burrito de camarón? They come from Del Campo A La Cuidad, a Mexican grocery store on South University owned another of David’s brothers, and are cooked to order. As for the pozole (available on Saturdays, but only during cold-weather months) and the menudo (available on Sundays year-round), they’re made the same morning they’re served. The cinnamon-spiced horchata that outpaces even Mexican Coke as their best-selling beverage? Rest assured, someone is whipping up a new batch each day.
Running a restaurant this way isn’t easy, and there are plenty of shortcut items Palenque could order that would require less time and labor. But the Martinezes see hard work as a virtue.
“We tell our three children that nothing in life is free,” David told me. “If they need money to buy something they want, they earn it by helping at the restaurant.” It’s the kind of mindset you would expect from two people who have worked for everything they have, and as it turns out, that’s true of the Martinezes.
Originally from Guatemala, Marlin immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1995. David, 17 at the time, immigrated to the United States from Guanajuato in central Mexico the following year. Though they would not meet until years later, when David accompanied his niece to Marlin’s mom’s birthday party, both settled in Little Rock and started working whatever jobs were available.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the quality of the food they produce today, neither Martinez dreamt of being a restaurateur when they arrived in the mid-’90s.
“Back in Mexico, my mom would cook food and sell it out of our house,” David said, “but I didn’t think about owning a restaurant. I worked with my brother at a Chinese restaurant in town for a while. That was my only restaurant experience.” Marlin laughed and shook her head when I asked what restaurant experience she had. “Nada. None.”
Sometime in 2010, David’s brother told him that a small restaurant space was available in the same Rodney Parham strip mall that houses Layla’s Gyros & Pizzeria. Though other Mexican restaurants had failed in that location (Remember Su Casa? Me neither!) the Martinezes jumped at the opportunity and bought the place.
Even with the location’s prior resident being a Mexican restaurant, Marlin said, “there wasn’t much here.” Dozens of hours of elbow grease later, the Martinezes opened El Palenque’s doors to customers for the first time on Jan. 20, 2011.
In late 2019, the computer repair store next door went out of business, and the Martinezes bought that space, more than tripling their seating capacity. While many businesses would not have survived an expansion four months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, David and Marlin doubled down and used the pandemic’s shutdown of in-person dining as an opportunity to remodel the entire restaurant.
“I worked for years doing construction and framing, so I was able to do a lot of the work myself,” David says. He spent the pandemic’s early months knocking down walls, installing decorative bricks, painting, and building the vision that he and Marlin had for their restaurant. “See that church?” he asked, gesturing with visible pride toward the tile mural below the kitchen pass. “That’s an actual church from my hometown. I designed the mural, and we had it made while we were remodeling.”
Amazingly, despite spending much of the pandemic turning two buildings into one cohesive space, and despite inflation’s mighty hand, the Martinezes have kept El Palenque’s prices more or less the same as they were pre-pandemic. “We’ve only raised prices twice in the 12 years we’ve been open,” Marlin noted.
That’s not because they don’t think it’s worth it. The Martinezes know they are putting out fantastic food; they would just rather that you discover that for yourself than try to convince you.
“Come try our food and see if it’s good,” David said when I asked what he would say to the uninitiated. There was a quiet confidence in the way he said it, as if he’d said it many times before and never lost the wager. “See if you like it. If you do, tell a friend about us. If you don’t, well …” He shrugged slightly and did not finish the sentence. No point in wasting time with hypotheticals to the contrary.
