By Randi Ewing
This article originally appeared in the bilingual publication La Voz de Kentucky. Grab a copy.
This past July, when simply sitting in the shade would make you sweat, Maria Hernandez was happily working in the tiny, boiling kitchen at the back of her restaurant, La Cocina de Maria. The restaurant, located on North Broadway and consisting of little more than an enclosed kitchen with tables and chairs set up outside, is aptly named. It is Maria’s kitchen. It is also the result of a dream that sprang from years of doing what she loved.
“When I arrived here, I never thought about having a restaurant. I simply cooked,” says Maria, who moved to Kentucky 18 years ago.
Living with her husband on the ranch where he worked, Maria would often make tamales and food for the workers on the farm. She received compliments on her food and that was always payment enough. Then, after a trip home to Mexico, she came back with a recipe for tres leches cakes and started making them for parties and for family. People recommended her to friends and before long the orders were coming in faster than her husband could drive her to the store for supplies.
“To be honest, I didn’t even know what to charge,” she says, adding that she was just doing what she loved.
That love of cooking began when Maria was a child in Mexico, working weekdays in a woman’s home during her vacation from school. The woman was a good cook.
“I watched how she cooked, and when I would go home on weekends, I would buy all of the things that she bought to make her food at home,” says Maria.
When she moved to Lexington, Maria brought that love with her and when the cake supply store in Lexington shut down a few years ago, Maria felt a change. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to just make cakes at home, filling up a school notebook with the various orders. She wanted her own place.
“I have always been very persistent with the things that I want. Meaning, if I get an idea in my head, I go and go and go until I get it. And when you like doing something and want to dedicate yourself to that, what you have to do is search and search and search until you find where you’re headed,” she says.
Where she was headed was a little place on North Broadway and into one of the hardest businesses out there. Her husband was skeptical at first. He wanted a house for the family, but Maria’s mind was made up. They found a location and started serving food. Then a year after opening La Cocina de Maria the bottom fell out of the economy and Maria learned that loving what you’re doing is not always enough.
“That year the economy started to suffer and that was when it was hardest. I felt like I couldn’t keep going. It was too much to come to work and see that nothing was selling, that no one was coming,” she says.
Those tough days were tempered by the support of her husband. “He would say to me, ‘It doesn’t matter. You work, and soon people will come.’ He was always there. He always encouraged me, because he would say, ‘You wanted this, now wait, be patient,’” she remembers.
A little patience, a supportive family and a love of what one’s doing—that’s Maria’s recipe for a successful business. Maria’s Kitchen has weathered the economic crisis and she plans to expand into a bigger place soon. Hopefully, one in which she’ll be able to bake cakes and serve the restaurant’s tacos, tortas and tamales. Until then, she’s happy to keep working, because working at something you love, she says, doesn’t feel like work at all.
Maria’s Kitchen is located at 895 North Broadway, just past Loudon Ave.
Leave a Reply