It’s a warm morning in Roscoe Village, and the Guatemalan restaurant El Tinajon has not yet opened for lunch. Owner Olga Pezzarossi’s four grandchildren–Daniella, Pablo Antonio, Nathan, and Anthony–are lined up at a table, eating fried plantains, black beans, corn chips, melon, and eggs. Olga’s mother, Adelaina, is polishing glass vases filled with fuchsia, orange, and aqua flowers while two of Olga’s daughters, Wendy de Borde and Karina Bastidas, adjust the tables for lunch.
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Pezzarossi originally came to Chicago from Guatemala in 1969. She met her first husband here; after he died, she needed a way to make a living and found a job drying silverware in the cafeteria at Illinois Masonic hospital. She worked her way up from silverware to manning the steam table to cashiering to serving in the doctors’ dining room–“all in six months,” she says. Finally she got a job typing in the hospital pharmacy, during which period she also worked part-time as a cocktail waitress and did medical paperwork. “We all learned real fast to be independent,” says de Borde, who manages El Tinajon, with her grandmother supervising the inventory.
A few years ago Pezzarossi moved back to Guatemala so Claudia, her daughter by her second husband (from whom she is divorced), could learn about Mayan culture. She returns to Chicago two or three times a year to drop off a load of spices, reconnect with her staff and family, and oversee preparation of her Guatemalan specialties, many of which are family recipes.
“When I was 24 I said to myself, by the time I’m 40, I have to have a business or live on Lake Shore Drive in a high-rise with a convertible car and a good job,” Pezzarossi says. By 33, she had her restaurant. At about the same time, she was also running Chicago’s first Guatemalan beauty pageant. “It was my dream when I was young to be the queen in my school, but my mother didn’t let me,” she says.
