“Don’t chase paper, chase
your passion! Love what
you do. Do what you love.
Stay humble.”
Lisandro Madrigal knew 2020 would be a
landmark year for Chando’s Enterprises, the Mexican
restaurant group he started in 2010. The first
pages in his calendar were dotted with red-letter
days: the opening of two new Chando’s Tacos
locations, the third in Sacramento and the first
in Citrus Heights, and the long-awaited launch of
the Chando’s Tortillas factory at the former United
Bakery building in West Sacramento.
Madrigal acquired the bakery building in
2016, but his tortilla roots go back further: His
father ran a tortilleria in Tijuana in the 1990s
and hoped to start one in Sacramento before his
death in 2007. It was the tortilla factory plan that
prompted Madrigal to leave his 10-year career
at Apple, where he started in telesales at 20 and
tested his recipes at company potlucks; tacos
were something of a detour.
But when the tortillas from the newly opened
factory reached his six restaurants in March, California
had ordered the majority of businesses to
close to slow the spread of the coronavirus. With
dining rooms shuttered, every taco, burrito and
mulita had to be packaged to go — if customers
came at all.
“The first week was hell,” says Madrigal, 39. He
estimates sales that week dropped by 90 percent
at the Roseville location of Chando’s Tacos, 80 percent
at Arden Way in Sacramento, and 70 percent
at both the West Sacramento and Power Inn Road
in Sacramento locations. The Chando’s Cantinas
in Midtown Sacramento and El Dorado Hills,
table-service restaurants with live music, saw
sales drop to near zero.
After sales bottomed out, “We crammed
ourselves in my office for two days straight
with my kids and family, and we’re like, ‘We
need to survive,’” Madrigal says. Their agenda
was a series of existential questions: How could
they lessen the impact on revenue and keep
employees working?
The first decision he and his wife, Karla Madrigal,
made was to give up their salary to make
payroll. Then they closed the struggling Chando’s
Cantinas, laid off about 30 of the two restaurants’
employees and offered 16 kitchen workers jobs at
Chando’s Tacos — where all 100-plus employees
stayed on board with reduced hours — and brainstormed
new products geared toward the shelterin-place
lifestyle, including the QT-2020 Survival
Kit (short for “quarantine 2020”). The kit contains
all the ingredients necessary to make some of
Chando’s signature dishes, with guidance from a
video tutorial starring Madrigal’s daughters, Xio,
16, and Lali, 12.
Over the following weeks, Madrigal gave
away thousands of dollars worth of kits through
radio and Facebook contests and performed free
Facebook Live concerts with his band, Autenticos
de Sacramento, in his backyard. As he ramped up
this creative marketing, sales followed suit. “We’re
not where we’ve been but where we should be
right now,” he says.
But he is most proud of showing his four
children “that you don’t break under pressure,” he
says. “No matter how tough a situation can be, if
you build a plan, you work your plan and you have
good intentions, you can make things happen.”
BY JENNIFER FERGESEN
July 2020 | comstocksmag.com 47