Excerpts of the SF Gate article "The mystery of the Bay Area's many Celia's Mexican restaurants" by Grant Marek. July 11, 2024

Celia Rodriguez was born Oct. 13, 1928, in La Mesa, Jalisco. One of 13 Rodriguez children, she grew up in a small, humble town with no paved roads in the hills of western Mexico and attended school in next-door Cuautla. She left for the U.S. in the mid-1950s in search of a better life with her husband, Perfecto Lopez, immigrating to San Francisco with legendary guitarist Carlos Santana’s family and the Jaras, who founded both San Francisco’s La Taqueria and Suprema Meat Co.

Celia and Perfecto would work a combination of odd jobs and 16-hour shifts in SF restaurants to save enough money to finally bring their four children to the States and eventually open a restaurant of their own in 1961: Celia’s Cafe, a tiny, 10-stool classic American diner in the Outer Sunset. But it took almost two full years before Celia would serve anything other than hash browns and eggs at the diner.

The couple tripled the size of Celia’s — buying the lot behind the original diner space, plus the TV repair store next door on Judah Street — rebranded the much larger space as Celia’s Mexican Restaurant and reopened their doors to a largely Irish neighborhood trying Mexican food for the first time.

The most obvious person to ask about the Celia’s mystery would be Celia herself, but the restaurant’s matriarch died in 2012 at the age of 83, a year after seeing two of her grandsons — Phil Havlicek and Salvador Lopez — take over the now-63-year-old institution in the Outer Sunset. I met the cousins on a breezy Tuesday in June before opening time, sitting at a high top just a few feet away from the ubiquitous Celia portrait. Havlicek and Lopez — both dressed in all black — look (and banter) more like brothers than cousins as they try to explain how the matrix of Bay Area Celia’s restaurants came to be.

“The real special thing about my grandma: She knew that Mexican food was the vehicle for a better life,” Havlicek says. “It’s a true immigrant story. She understood that through hard work and know-how, she could help other people lead a better life, so she’d help anyone who was willing to work hard and come up (from Mexico) and try.”

Havlicek tells me that sometimes 40-50 people would stay at his grandma’s house, where she’d teach them every aspect of running the restaurant — from waiting tables to running the kitchen to managing the front of house. When they were ready, she’d help them open their own Celia’s, no strings attached.

“Tía Celia taught my dad all of her recipes in six months,” says Celia’s niece Isela Rodriguez. Isela now co-owns the San Bruno location with her father, Rafael.

San Mateo and Palo Alto Celia’s locations opened in the mid-1960s and proudly flaunted their “Celia’s #2” and “Celia’s #3” monikers in newspaper ads at the time. Fremont opened across the bay in 1970, and in 1971, San Rafael joined the fray. (Victor Escobedo and his brother Miguel grew up working at their parents’ San Rafael Celia’s location — they’d go on, along with Escobedo’s wife, Jodi, to open Papalote in 1999.) All of the locations have Perfecto on the initial lease according to public records, along with the hand-picked new owners.