Destiny Sargeant says she celebrated her 55th birthday at El Sombrero and then her 60th, so going to the downtown restaurant for a final meal with some friends on its final day after 45 years at the location was an opportune thing to do.
“This is a really wonderful place, and has had a family feel for years and years,” she said while waiting for a server to take the group’s order at a table in the back on the ground floor of the two-story restaurant. The owners have said they plan to open a food truck with some of the restaurant’s menu later this month in Juneau, and just debuted a new sit-down restaurant with the same name in South Dakota.
Sargeant said her kids played football with the kids of the extended family that owned and worked at El Sombrero, which still has much of the same menu and settings as when she moved to Juneau about 30 years ago. What did change during those three decades was three generations of family ownership.
Sara Contreras, a server at El Sombrero, takes orders from (from left) Lucy Nelson, Leora Houtary and Destiny Sargeant on Saturday, the restaurant’s last day at the downtown location it has occupied for 45 years. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The restaurant was opened in 1979 by Juan and Estella Moser — who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S. in 1959 — and then taken over in 1993 by two of their 10 children, Fritz Moser and his sister Elizabeth Reynolds. A decade ago a grandson of the founders, Ryan Fagerstrom, took over the restaurant he co-owns with his wife Mallorie.
“You knew the family as they all grew up,” said Lucy Nelson, a lifelong Juneau resident also at the restaurant Saturday for a final meal. “You walked in and you got a hug from Liz. It was always a super-friendly atmosphere.”
Fagerstrom, in a phone interview Saturday from the new El Sombrero in Spearfish, South Dakota, said the closure of the sit-down restaurant in Juneau is due in part to moving back to the town where he attended and played football for Black Hills State University — and met his wife.
“We had always kind of liked the idea of small-town South Dakota so it just made sense,” he said.
Meanwhile, keeping the downtown Juneau restaurant open as well wasn’t practical since the building they were leasing was being put up for sale, which “didn’t make sense for us,” Fagerstrom said. Another purchaser has since acquired the building.
The couple has operated an El Sombrero food truck in Spearfish for the past year — the same one now on its way to Juneau, where the plan is to open it at a Mendenhall Valley location on a date yet to be specified, he said. Catering options will also remain available.
“It’ll be a little bit of a modified menu, but it will keep kind of the favorite items on there,” he said. “So the enchilada sauce and the salsa is not going anywhere.”
An El Sombrero food truck, owned by the same couple that owns a restaurant by the same name in Juneau, is seen in Spearfish, South Dakota, in August. The food truck is scheduled to arrive and open in Juneau this month, with the sit-down restaurant closing after 45 years. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Fagerstrom / El Sombrero)
Fagerstrom said he had hoped for a final send-off celebration for El Sombrero’s downtown Juneau location, but a busy schedule prevented it. However, simply announcing the closure on social media and via other means has resulted in a fitting sendoff from the community.
“Since announcing it the town has been amazing in supporting us,” he said. “So we really appreciate everybody. And it’s not something, a decision that we took lightly. It was something we really mulled over for a while and just felt like this was the best move for us.”
Fagerstrom said he’s been working at the restaurant in some way or other since he was a teenager.
“I mean all of us grew up working there,” he said. “You know it’s like all my cousins, my brothers and sister, we all worked there since I was probably 14 or 15, and it was my summer job every summer.”
But he was working as a bartender in Nashville after college when Reynolds was ready to retire from running El Sombrero, and Fagerstrom said since other family members weren’t interested in taking over he did so — beginning as a co-owner with Fritz Moser for four years before the elder partner stepped aside.
“It kind of fell into my lap and I felt like I couldn’t turn it down,” Fagerstrom said.
Fagerstrom said his approach during the years he’s owned the restaurant has largely been to uphold family traditions for a restaurant whose character remained much the same during its lifespan.
“I remember growing up kind of watching Fritz and Liz support every sports team and every local activity,” he said. “They would always come and they would always be happy to help people out. And so that was kind of one of the cool things that I liked about it. Growing up in Juneau you have to do all this fundraising and all this stuff, and so to have one place where you can go that’s a for-sure sponsorship was something I always thought was pretty cool.”
“I feel like the biggest thing for me, it was just continuing the legacy there was. I might get a little emotional, even, talking about it, but you know that was something that was pretty central to our family and just keeping it as it was. Keep a good reputation and make the rest of the family proud.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
