My wife’s cheeks rose and reddened with joy as she requested flour tortillas and butter at Midland restaurant Hijos del Máiz. The server said he’d be right back. She was delighted when he returned with an acrylic tortilla warmer and a bowl of butter pats. Inside the warmer were three large, glossy flour tortillas folded into triangles. She regaled me with stories from her childhood in Arlington about eating at Mexican and Tex-Mex restaurants where flour tortillas with butter on the side was the standard complimentary appetizer. But her excitement was short-lived. The tortillas were good, she said, but they weren’t the kind of spongy discs she was raised eating and continues to prefer. Hijos del Máiz’s chips and salsa, made in-house, were better.
These days you’re more likely to have chips and salsa offered gratis before a Tex-Mex meal. The appetizer tempts diners to absent-mindedly stuff themselves with oily carbs and (often, but not always) salsa from a jar while the cooks focus on the quality of the main dishes. Its prevalence may be traced to mass-produced chips, such as Tostitos, becoming more popular and accessible in the seventies. But once upon a time, things were better. Many Texans fondly remember restaurants’ practice of serving complimentary tortillas with individually wrapped squares of butter.
Patricia Sharpe, who served as Texas Monthly’s restaurant critic for fifty years, recalls tortillas and butter’s surprising predecessor. “Back in the fifties, it was a basket of saltine crackers,” she says. “At least, that was true at the big, popular restaurants with both Anglo and Mexican customers in Austin, where I grew up.” Sharpe believes soda crackers accompanied by runny red salsa were popular because they were quick and cheap, and therefore a solid way to keep customers occupied while their orders were filled. “Kitchens were already slammed cooking enchiladas, rice, and beans,” she says. Corn tortillas were served alongside entrées. “They were soft and hot. We buttered them and rolled them up like cigars to eat when the food arrived.”
Some restaurants, such as La Fonda on Main, established in San Antonio in 1932, doled out butter with corn tortillas, instead of flour, before a meal. Texas Monthly distinguished writer Mimi Swartz was born in San Antonio and raised on a steady diet of La Fonda on Main. “You’d get these little packs of butter and you would take the little piece of paper off the top and then just rub the pat on the warm tortilla,” she says. “It was so delicious.” By the time she was in college, in the seventies, she remembers, the tortillas had been replaced by chips and salsa.
A large flour tortilla at Hijos del Máiz covering the taco editor’s head.Photograph by José R. Ralat
John A. Cuellar, whose father and uncles opened the legendary El Chico in 1940, says that from the Dallas restaurant’s founding, soft corn tortillas with butter were presented to the table shortly after the menus were dropped off and the drink orders taken. The tradition continued into the seventies, according to Cuellar’s cousin Carmen Cuellar Summers, who retired from Consolidated Restaurant Operations, El Chico’s parent company, in 2020 after 48 years. “As far back as I can remember, there were corn tortillas and butter,” she says. “Then eventually you got chips and hot sauce.” The cousins can’t say for certain when the shift occurred, but they know that chips and salsa dominated in the seventies.
Cuellar likes to reminisce about the El Chico located in the Inwood Village shopping center, near Southern Methodist University. He says that in the sixties, SMU’s dining halls did not serve dinner on Sunday nights, so the restaurant was a popular option. “Because students are so cheap, they would sit down and get soft tortillas, butter sauce, jalapeño relish, and an iced tea. And that would be their dinner Sunday night,” Cuellar says with a laugh.
My wife, Jessica, remembers a slower transition from tortillas to chips at Mercado Juarez in Arlington in the eighties. “Tortillas were served first. Then the chips came to the table. The tortillas disappeared when I was in high school,” she says. San Antonio resident Eloy Bravo recalls four-packs of saltines being brought to tables at Ray’s Drive Inn in the sixties and flour tortillas being served until the eighties at Don Pedro Mexican Restaurant in San Antonio’s predominantly Mexican American South Side.
David DeLeon, owner of catering company Fire Table, in Mansfield, worked at La Casa in Grapevine as a teenager in the eighties. The tortillas, he remembers, were bagged commodity flour versions that were steamed to order and offered free to customers. While working at national chain On the Border in his early twenties, he recalls, servers brought either chips and salsa or flour tortillas with butter to tables as customers were seated. But the flour tortillas only went out if a fresh, hot batch was available. When other customers saw the cooks making the tortillas, they’d request a basket. “The flour tortillas were always the first to be finished,” DeLeon says.
Rolando Garza III, owner of Rio Grande Valley food truck Smash Bros, recalls flour tortillas and butter being served at restaurants in Brownsville. Tortillas slathered with butter and then rolled were edible pacifiers for children. They gave the adults a respite while their food was being prepared. “But it was also a flex to show that ‘Hey, yeah, we are making our own tortillas,’ ” Garza says. This was because restaurants had to compete with home cooking, he adds. “It has to be good, because if it can’t be [like] Grandma’s, no one’s going.”
Restaurant tortillas and butter evoke memories of halcyon days for many Texans. For them, something as simple as a handmade tortilla is an indelible mark of childhood. Memories can be fuzzy, though. Timelines can wiggle and jump a decade here or there, even for those born into the restaurant industry, such as the Cuellars. But the warmth remains. And tortillas and butter aren’t completely gone.
Cuquita’s restaurants in Dallas–Fort Worth welcome customers with fresh corn tortillas and butter. “You’re a guest in our home,” says Cuquita’s co-owner Elizabeth Villafranca. “There’s just something about going back to being a child in many, many families where you got home and you had a tortilla with butter, and it just is sort of like a comfort food.”
The La Calle Doce location in Dallas’s Lakewood neighborhood continues the custom as well. Currently, a flour tortilla comes out with a tiny plastic cup of butter covered with foil. That’s a recent development. Catherine Cuellar, the daughter of John Cuellar, recalls the familiar setup: “When I was a child, there was a pat of butter on a square of waxed cardboard covered by another square of wax paper. You could hold the cardboard by the edges to melt the butter on the fresh tortilla.”
However the tradition survives, it needs to survive. Too often, restaurants depend on turning tables over quickly, as if customers are another commodity. That’s the opposite of what diners are typically looking for when they go out to eat. They want to linger and have a taste of home and nostalgia with their meals. And if it’s as simple as a tortilla with butter, why not give it to them?
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