Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that a classic, notoriously dingy Mexican dive, known mostly for potent margaritas and food-related regrets, would not be long-lived after it was scrubbed of all its diveyness and reborn with basically the same food. But it looks like La Rondalla has given up the ghost for the second time in a decade after a very brief reprieve.
The Facebook group Preserving LGBT Historic Sites appears to have broken the news on Sunday, after a handwritten sign went up on the door thanking patrons and saying "we are closing." The restaurant, in earlier decades, was a known gathering spot for LGBT Latinos, as the posting explains, between the 1960's and 1980's. "Into the early 1980s, the restaurant regularly featured performances by Alberta Nevaerez (1940-2002), a transgender mariachi and ranchera singer who went by the stage names Teresita la Campesina ("Teresita the Farmgirl") and Teresita de la Rondalla."
Mission Local picked up the story and spoke to the family that's owned the business for over 60 years. "We are figuring out what to do with the space for the time being," says Luna Barrios, whose grandparents Carlos and Esperanza Barrios first opened the restaurant at Valencia and 20th in 1951. Ultimately the family would purchase the entire building in the 1990's, and continued to run the restaurant, famously bedecked with Christmas lights year round, until it was shuttered by the health department in 2007. That led to a seven-year hiatus and much annual speculation in the local press about if and when the place would ever reopen. After many aborted starts and vague announcements, it finally reopened after a $500,000 renovation that left the place a far more sterile version of its original self.
And while food was never the star of the show, the kitchen at La Rondalla faced a setback, as Mission Local reminds us, when its returning longtime chef Mario Hernandez suddenly died of apparently natural causes just a month after the restaurant opened, in May 2014.
Still, in two years time, it sounds like things didn't improve much on that front, with multiple Yelp reviewers noting "medicore" food and burritos that arrived poorly wrapped, and/or with bones inside.
Luna Barrios didn't give any specific reason for the closure, but they clearly have been under some financial strain Mission Local reported last year that they were in hot water with the city over the sub-par conditions of the 28 residential units they own upstairs from the restaurant, and they were facing a lawsuit because of it.
Father Carlos Barrios, who took over from his own parents in the 80's, still leaves the door open for the place to be resurrected yet again, telling the Chronicle that he's leaving it up to his daughters.
The restaurant has its fans and devotees, though even Caleb once endorsed the tacos and mango margaritas and they will be sad to hear of its passing.
Chances are, though, the space at this prominent corner in the Mission won't stay dead for long.
