Cinco de Virus? Here’s how to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with local restaurants
The music and margaritas, the tacos and tequila, all the pieces of Cinco de Mayo will be there on Tuesday. But it’s true that celebrating Cinco de Mayo during a pandemic won’t be quite the same.
Still, North Carolina restaurants are making takeout arrangements for Cinco de Mayo fans to safely celebrate at home with takeout and a Corona — the good kind, of course.
This year’s Cinco de Mayo festivities will largely be at-home affairs, plastic jugs of margaritas instead of pitchers, taco fixings packed in to-go containers.
“It’s definitely going to be a different Cinco de Mayo,” said Gonza Salamanca, owner of Gonza Tacos y Tequila, which reopened last Friday for the first time since the shutdown.
Although this holiday is not celebrated widely in its country of origin and is sometimes confused with Mexican Independence Day (it’s not), this primarily American holiday is a fun time to support local businesses.
Best day of the year
In typical years, Cinco de Mayo was a night Mexican restaurants could count on to set the tone for the rest of the year, Salamanca said. This year is surrounded by uncertainty.
“Cinco de Mayo, that’s your best day of the year, every year,” Salamanca said. “It’s easily the best, three to four times any other day. Cinco de Mayo, then graduation and Mother’s Day. After that you can be on autopilot for the rest of the year. It’s huge.”
Gonza has only reopened one of the company’s five restaurants, the original Lead Mine Road location in North Raleigh. Last Friday, in its first service in six weeks, Salamanca said the restaurant sold out of food in 15 minutes, doing 250 orders.
“They killed us with kindness,” Salamanca said. “It was chaos.”
For Cinco de Mayo, Salamanca said Gonza will do a stripped-down menu of tacos, quesadillas, queso and guacamole. He considered a band playing in the parking lot as customers picked up orders but changed his mind — better safe than sorry.
“This is hard, but there’s a virus going on,” Salamanca said. “We have to be responsible.”
Charlie Ibarra, who owns Jose & Sons and The Cortez, said he’s created a music playlist for people to check out while eating Cinco de Mayo takeout.
“The experience is the music and the whole vibe,” Ibarra said.
Jose & Sons has turned servers into delivery drivers and plans to drop off order within five miles of its downtown Raleigh restaurant.
Cinco de Mayo postponed
The owner of Coco Bongo, a Mexican restaurant right across from N.C. State’s campus on Hillsborough Street, says Raleighites can rest easy: He’s planning a Cinco de Mayo celebration later this year.
“Out of nowhere the pandemic happened and everything we had planned for tomorrow was left up in the air,” said owner Héctor Salazar, speaking in Spanish to a News & Observer reporter at his restaurant Monday afternoon.
Coco Bongo serves the usual fare plus Tex-Mex favorites and normally has its busiest day of the year on the May 5, when they do tequila shot specials and offer t-shirts and sombreros.
“Americans apparently have always liked to celebrate [Cinco de Mayo], even though really no Mexicans I know do so,” said Salazar. “When normality returns, we’ll be able to celebrate the right way.”
For now, they’ll have their 99-cent Taco Tuesday special along with a variety of to-go margarita mixes for $4.50 each. Thirsty customers can drink margaritas while they wait for their takeout orders or even have them on the patio if they request a table outside, he said.
The pandemic isn’t dampening the spirits of Triangle residents enjoying the day from home, like Farrah Hermes, a University of North Carolina graduate student who lives in Raleigh.
Come Tuesday afternoon, she says she’ll be outside with her boyfriend enjoying the spring with Mexican beers, homemade margaritas with 1800 tequila and shrimp tacos.
”It’s lucky that it falls on a Taco Tuesday and fits the mood,” Hermes said. “We’ll invite the neighbors out for a corona, at least it’s nice out.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 3:18 PM.
