We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful PAULINA CHAIDEZ. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with PAULINA below.

Alright, PAULINA thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

When we first got to our Otay Mesa location 12 years ago, our father Cesar Chaidez, stand right out side the location and stated that the location was going to be our restaurant, my Brother Cesar and me looked at each other and asked dad why he was saying that, he replied that the address had a number 35 which was his lucky number due to the fact that the number 3 was his 3 children and the 5 was the family of five that we are, that same day the landlord gave us the keys to the location.

Two and a half years later we found our downtown location and as soon as he arrived to the location, he looked at the address and told us this location would be ours, as soon as he said that Cesar and me looked at the front door where the address was posted and in fact the location had a 35 on the address so we decided to carry our father legacy with us naming Cocina 35 our restaurants

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Cocina 35 is a family operated business that started 32 years ago in Culiacan Sinaloa Mexico, in 1999 due to the violence that our country was facing our parents Cesar and Maria decided to leave their restaurants and companies behind and find safety in the United States, so after 12 years of working in different restaurants, Construction and Landscaping we open our first location in Otay Mesa called La Loteria Comedor Casual, located in an industrial area, serving a built your own plate system with Bistec ranchero, chiles rellenos, pescado culichi, cochinita pibil, rice, bean , salad.

Wanting to grow our business we decided to open a second location in Downtown San Diego, in the office area such our first location, which we thought it was going to be a fenomenal success, unfortunately the business was not thriving like we thought and we came out with the idea of selling breakfast, nobody was doing that in the area, we brought Chilaquiles to the menu, the most traditional breakfast in Mexico and day by day people started recognizing us for the best Chilaquiles in town.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The pandemic brought us strenght, we had 60 employees that were working at both locations, the state mandate put everybody out of the job, with the help of our team, we decided to manage a virtual kitchen to deliver our food to our customers, that was what kept us a float, now all of our kitchens have a special area to prep food to go, and we now carry 9 brands of to go food to cater our customers.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

2015 just 5 months after opening our Downtown location, and about to close doors because that business was not going to make it, my sister in law asked my brother to make some Chilaquiles with Carnitas on top, something that we have never seen before, so when he made them he made two plates, one for them to share and the second one he left at our display menu, every single guest that walked in to the restaurant that day order the chilaquiles ( we did not even had a price for them yet so for the day we just put a price on them) the same day, we run out of salsa, chips and carnitas. Thats where we decided to bring a chilaquiles menu that no body had seen.

Contact Info:

• Website: Cocina35.com
• Instagram: Cocina35 / Cocina35.brunch
• Facebook: Cocina 35
• Yelp: Cocina 35/ cocina 35 brunch

Image Credits
no credits/ Cocina 35