Casa Del Tamal operator puts focus on family, tamales; US official visits Mexican restaurant

SALT LAKE CITY — For Cristina Olvera, the matriarch of two La Casa Del Tamal restaurant locations in Salt Lake County, it's all about family and tamales.

For around 20 years, the immigrant from Mexico hustled around the Salt Lake City area, delivering homemade tamales and building a loyal customer base, even as she maintained day jobs to ensure a steady income. Along the way, her five kids have played a central role.

"She ... had each of her kids helping her along the process, whether it be shredding the chicken or cutting the jalapeños with the tomatoes or whatnot, working late around the holidays to make sure that all the tamales got out," said Andres Sanchez, her son-in-law.

In 2019, she started selling her goods out of a food court inside the Azteca Swapmeet in West Valley City, where vendors of all sorts converge to sell their goods, when her daughter Frida — now Sanchez's wife — got an idea. She sensed potential based on the popularity of her mom's tamales and the high marks customers gave them, launching a marketing campaign.

"She started doing more advertising on social media, and then she got some of the local foodies to come out and try the food. From there it kind of blew up," Sanchez said. Positive reviews resulted in long lines at the swap meet location, ultimately leading Olvera, supported by her kids, to open the first Casa del Tamal location in West Valley City in late 2019.

She opened a second location last year in the Post District in Salt Lake City with the help of a loan backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration, or SBA, and also runs a catering operation. This week, as if to pay homage to the efforts of Olvera and her family, an SBA official, Lisa Shimkat, traveled from Washington, D.C., to Utah to visit the Salt Lake City locale.

Shimkat, the SBA associate administrator of field operations, also spoke at the Zero Gravity Summit in Salt Lake City during her stop here on Thursday and visited JD Machine in Ogden, another recipient of an SBA-backed loan.

"There's so many things that they're doing to make sure that they're meeting the needs of the public, but at the same time, still delivering a quality product. My team from the Utah area came here and they said, 'You got to stop. This is a fantastic place,'" she said.

Shimkat also singled out the "family business aspect" of La Casa Del Tamal and a desire to get input, firsthand, from small business operators who tap SBA assistance. Sanchez serves as president and chief executive officer of the LCDT Restaurant Group, the parent company of the varied Casa Del Tamal operations, and Olvera's five kids also hold key positions in the company.

"I came out here because I wanted to make sure that we hear from people in the field. We can't just make decisions in D.C. or think we know what small businesses need. We need to make sure that we're talking to them, finding out what their pain points are and also what's working," Shimkat said.

Shimkat toured the Salt Lake City Casa Del Tamal location with Olvera, Sanchez and two of Olvera's daughters, Emily and Salma Guerrero, who manage human resources and operations, respectively, for the operation.

"I think we all wear a bunch of different hats, which is super inevitable with a small business," Emily Olvera told Shimkat. That said, she singled out Sanchez's moves to get each family member to focus on a certain area of the business as key to the operation's success.

'A specialty of hers'

Through the growth and expansion, Olvera keeps her focus on food, perhaps the key element of the operation's success.

Sanchez, serving as restaurant spokesman, said his mother-in-law came to the United States from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, where she's from, in 1998. With her, she brought the culinary skills she had developed in Mexico, particularly her ability to make good tamales.

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"It was a specialty of hers. Her uncle in Mexico owned a restaurant and she worked for them," Sanchez said.

As for her tamales, the signature product of La Casa Del Tamal, he cited Olvera's special technique that keeps them from getting dry. Mexican tamales, increasingly available from street vendors as well, feature meat enveloped in an oblong mass of corn dough, all of it wrapped in a corn husk.

"A lot of tamales, they'll come out dry sometimes, especially when you do it with meats like chicken," he said. "But she has a really good way of making sure that it stays moist. That way you can get the good flavor profiles from each tamale."

Tamales aren't the only focus at the restaurant. The birria, a slow-cooked beef that's used in tacos and other Mexican plates, is also popular at La Casa Del Tamal as well as enchiladas.

Customers "come in with one thing on mind, whether it's a birria or tamales, and then they end up trying different items from the menu and just work their way down," Sanchez said.

He said business is great at the new Salt Lake City location at 346 W. 600 South, especially with ongoing and anticipated development in the area. "A lot of growth in this area. We knew that this was going to be a great spot to be in," Sanchez said.