“I’m a little nervous but not scared,” said Iolan Gerardo Gonzalez, who just opened Vaquero’s Mexican restaurant on the Yates Center square.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony was Monday, with quite a few community members in attendance.
Gonzalez first moved to Iola five years ago, and has been working at El Jimador restaurant since that time.
Over the past year, he’s also become a partner at Los Portillos restaurant in Iola.
Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Gonzalez lived there for 18 years, though he is originally from Guanajuato, Mexico.
His friends and work-partners convinced him at first to stay temporarily in Iola, and experiment with living in a rural area.
After only a short time visiting and being part of the Allen County community, he said to himself: “I may move; it’s really relaxed here.”
“I like the quiet,” he added, and said he had grown tired of the “big city” where everything “moves too fast.”
Eventually he found himself content in Iola and said “Okay, I’ll stay.”
Now Gonzalez is working hard to do something incredibly challenging: open a restaurant in the midst of a global pandemic.
“I’m not thinking it’s good,” he said, but felt as though it wasn’t possible to continue waiting, especially when it’s difficult to say when life might return to “normal.”
“I know it’s really hard right now,” Gonzalez said. “Every business is bad.”
“But I can do it.”
“The economy’s coming back.”
It’s a bright bit of optimism in a world often forced to look through dimly-colored glasses.
“I understand everybody’s scared right now, … most people are scared.”
