Florencio (Del) and Maria (Mary) Delgado opened their first restaurant, Las Casuelas, in downtown Palm Springs in 1958. The restaurant was named in honor of the way the family’s matriarch, Maria Fajardo, prepared her family’s special recipes. She immigrated from Mazatlán, Mexico, with her husband and five children and made their home in Arizona prior to the Great Depression that started in 1929.
When her husband died, she supported her family by selling homemade burritos from the back door of her kitchen to the copper miners who worked close by. Her burritos became so famous that she soon opened a café where she cooked her special recipes in earthenware “cazuelas,” the Spanish name for the pots and pans she used.
When her son Florencio (Del) and his wife Mary moved to California, they opened a restaurant in Colton in a business district that ran alongside US 99. In 1957, the eastern part of Interstate 10 was opened, diverting cars from US 99 onto the interstate, which put an end to many of the businesses that had operated along the highway. The Delgado family decided to move to Palm Springs and open a family-style restaurant in a storefront along Palm Canyon Drive.
When they were preparing to open the restaurant they had a large sign made and the sign maker misspelled the name on the sign. He called the restaurant “Las Casuelas” instead of “Las Cazuelas.” At that point in time the couple had invested all of their money in their new business venture and they were unable to get the misspelling fixed. The mistake stuck and today there are five restaurants that carry the name of Las Casuelas located in the Coachella Valley; each separately owned and operated by one of Del and Mary Delgado’s children, their spouses and their grandchildren.
Del and Mary Delgado made sure the restaurant ran smoothly. Mary Delgado greeted her guests and fulfilled any of their special requests. Florencio (Del) Delgado ran the kitchen and he was always seen cleaning off tables and carrying trays of dishes back to the kitchen. Many people assumed he was just a hardworking busboy until they looked down and saw the owner’s alligator loafers. His philosophy of giving the customer plenty to eat and treating them well made Las Casuelas one of the most successful restaurants in the city.
