Herbert Delgado is tired. He’s just finished a meeting with his meat purveyor, and he’s got a phone call on hold. The 44-year-old chef and owner of La Fonda Latino Grill still has to go over the evening’s specials with his wife, Beatriz, and it’s already 11:30 AM; the lunch hour approaches.
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That first restaurant was started by Herbert and his mother, Livia, in 1984. “The recipes were all in her head,” he explains. “I had to watch her closely so I could make the same dishes every day.” They had moved to Chicago with Herbert’s two sisters just two years earlier from Cali, Colombia, and thought opening a restaurant would be a good way to make some money. Four years into the business Herbert met Beatriz, a Cali native herself, who began frequenting La Fonda both for the company of other Colombian expat regulars and for the hearty plates of plantains, red beans, and rice. In 1990 the two were married. Their son Alexander was born that year, and soon after Beatriz began working side by side with her new husband and mother-in-law.
“We were out of business for 13 months,” says Beatriz. “We had no mailing list, so I kept forwarding the phone number to my cell phone or home, and would tell people, ‘We’re almost there, we’re gonna reopen soon, be patient.’”
“I still have to serve some of the typical Colombian dishes, otherwise my old customers will get mad,” says Herbert. And if they decide to take a pass on the daily lunch buffet of no-nonsense Colombian home cooking–chicken, flank steak, potatoes, tripe soup–they can always sink their teeth into one of Delgado’s favorites: a plato montanero, which should give anyone a week’s fill of protein, starch, and cholesterol. The hefty portion of fried pork rind, red beans, white rice, a fried egg, sweet plantains, and steak brings a smile to Herbert’s face. When he sees one of those orders going out of the kitchen, he knows there are fellow Colombians in the house.
