How Fonda Lupita believed in itself and became NC’s most acclaimed new restaurant
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Inside NC’s hottest kitchen
After a food magazine ranked Sanford’s Fonda Lupita as one of the nation’s best restaurants to open in the last year, that spotlight continues to reverberate throughout North Carolina’s food scene. Learn about the “little restaurant where everything is homemade” that could change the world — and its expansion plans for Raleigh.
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Before there was Fonda Lupita, there was Lupita’s house, a home in Sanford where Lupita Frausto lived with her husband and three daughters. Those in the know knew it was also the place to find menudo on certain mornings, where Lupita Frausto could sell out of 100 pounds of the traditional Mexican stew by 10 o’clock.
That menudo and dozens of other recipes from Frausto have now made Sanford’s Fonda Lupita the hottest restaurant in North Carolina.
The buzz was set off by a best new restaurant list from food-centric online magazine Eater, which named the 850-square-foot Fonda Lupita, with its specialties of stews and gorditas, one of the nation’s best restaurants to open in the last year.
That mention put Sanford on a list of mega food cities like San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles, and Fonda Lupita alongside expensive restaurants in major developments, like Washington, DC’s waterfront and New York’s Lower East Side.
Owner Biridiana Frausto opened Fonda Lupita two years ago at age 26, naming the restaurant for her mother, whose recipes were loved by anyone who tasted them. The menudo and gorditas were taught to her by her own mother, Lupita said, but in Sanford, where nothing quite like them existed, they had a transportive quality back to her hometown of Santiago de Querétaro in Mexico. Biridiana Frausto explains her mother’s way with recipes as simply, “the touch.”
“She’s the only one in her family who has the touch of cooking like that,” Biridiana Frausto said. “We believe my grandmother gave that touch to her. We wanted to bring that to life. Not a lot of places in town offer that home, hearty, welcoming food, or something from back home like the gordita is. That’s pretty much what Fonda Lupita is.”
‘Everything is homemade’
Before the doors open each morning, the flattop is covered with chiles, tomatillos and tomatoes, left to char and soften before being blended into that day’s salsas. A giant bowl of masa becomes a stack of tortillas. The horchata is made each day with rice and cinnamon soaked with milk and then blended. The stews are braised for hours.
A fonda is a small Mexican mom and pop restaurant, Biridiana Frausto said, adding that Fonda Lupita’s biggest advantage is not taking shortcuts.
“It’s a little restaurant where everything is homemade,” she said. “There’s nothing premade or canned, everything is made in house.”
The menu is wiped clean each morning and rewritten with a white grease pen on a chalkboard. Weekdays will be gorditas stuffed with stews, carnitas, chicken or cactus. There will be trendy quesabirria tacos, a whim added by general manager Alondra Frausto, Biridiana’s sister, that can never leave the menu, made with beef barbacoa. Some days there will be torta specials, like chilaquiles, and on the weekend, menudo and pozole are served by the bowl.
The limelight has also brought the spotlight, and Frausto said she sometimes overhears whispers in the dining room and shouts on social media and review sites about high prices. Tacos start at $2.75, but there’s a dollar upcharge for steak. Gorditas start at $4.50 with similar upcharges. She believes the criticism is tied to expectations that Mexican food and restaurant labor should be cheap.
“I overhear, ‘Wow that was expensive,’” Frausto said. “What people don’t understand is I’m giving you ribeye in that steak taco. Unfortunately, people think because this is not an upscale Mexican restaurant, our prices should be cheaper. But I always guarantee fresh ingredients and quality. That price is worth our jobs; we work hard for that.”
Long lines and a sense of pride
In a grim couple of years for restaurants in North Carolina, where the COVID-19 pandemic canceled high profile projects, closed longtime restaurants and pushed food service businesses to the brink, the story of the Sanford gordita shop that many foodies in America knew about became one of North Carolina’s biggest food stories of 2021.
The Eater trophy is a can of tomatoes sitting by the cash register, with the label emblazoned with “Carolinas Restaurant of the Year” on it. But the impact continues to reverberate, showing up in the lunchtime line stretching out the door and the pride spilling out into the streets of Sanford.
Biridiana Frausto was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in Sanford. Today, Lee County is 20% Latino, according to the latest Census figures, making it the third-largest Latino population in the state. Taco shops and tiendas are common. La Cumplidora , a Hispanic grocery store, is one of Sanford’s biggest markets.
Frausto said none of that existed when she was growing up. Her first restaurant job was working in Subway. She said that’s why her mother started selling stews like menudo, a fiery red soup made of guajillo chili and tender pieces of tripe, out of their home.
The fonda that Frausto initially planned is not the one diners turned it into. The stews were meant to be Fonda Lupita’s specialty, with gorditas as a side, Frausto said. Then people started ordering 10 gorditas filled with stew meat. Others would order tacos and then walk out when they were told the restaurant didn’t make them.
“We didn’t start out with tacos; we never intended to be a taco joint or taco anything,” Fausto said. “We had to think about how we eat our tacos. We like seasoned meat, fresh salsa, homemade tortillas and grilled onion. We had to keep it simple because we don’t know anything about tacos.”
What exists now is a compromise of cravings. But with any compromise, there’s a give and take.
Traditional gorditas, rather than the flatbread version Taco Bell unleashed on America decades ago, are thick corn tortillas griddled until they have leopard spotting, then filled. At Fonda Lupita, they’re stuffed with refried beans, stew, cheese and cream. Variations are declined.
“The style we’re going for is more like the style in my mom’s hometown,” Frausto said. “No lettuce, no tomato, none of that. Even if we have it, I have to say no, that’s not the flavors I want you to try from me.”
‘Get something you’ve never tried before’
Frausto has a history of asking more from diners, specifically for them to trust her.
At Totopos, the Cary restaurant where she met her eventual husband, Salvador Alvarez, he said that as a server, when tables would order a largely Americanized dish like chicken quesadillas, Frausto would ask them to reconsider.
“She’d ask if it was their first time and if they said yes she would say she wasn’t going to let you order a quesadilla for your first meal,” Alvarez said. “She’d say, ‘You should get something you’ve never tried before,’ and she’d recommend chilaquiles with shrimp and they would always love it. Now it’s cool more people know what a gordita is.”
It’s been nearly three months since Fonda Lupita burst on the national food scene, but Frausto said the family has yet to really celebrate. The day of Fonda Lupita’s triumph was mixed with tragedy. Before Eater’s list came out, Frausto’s father, Ricardo Frausto Reyes, took his daughters to Disney World in Florida. After visiting one park, he started feeling ill and then tested positive for COVID-19. He was hospitalized with pneumonia in Florida and when the news broke that his daughters’ restaurant was the talk of the food world, Reyes was unconscious and on a ventilator. He died a week later.
“It was a big roller coaster of emotions,” Biridiana Frausto said. “I was at the hospital with my dad but at the same time, there was something huge going on in North Carolina. So when the article came out, we didn’t know what to do. Do we celebrate it? Do we say something? All I could do was say ‘thank you.’ We have yet to go out to dinner and celebrate.”
But Sanford found ways to toast the restaurant. In December, Biridiana Frausto and the restaurant were made the grand marshal of the Sanford Christmas parade. The restaurant’s team threw out Mexican candy on a float pulled by Reyes’ truck, a large GMC with a lift kit.
“If you think about my dad, anything he did was extra,” Frausto said. “He always wanted his cars in the Christmas parade. He would have loved that.”
Lifting all of Sanford up
On Fonda Lupita’s block, there’s a building with a second-story door that goes nowhere, and another place where a door had once been is bricked over. Across the street there’s a daycare in a former bank. It’s a part of Sanford that wasn’t always Sanford, known as Jonesboro until 1954 when the towns merged. Jonesboro is a collection of blocks that’s been remade, perhaps more than once, Mayor Chet Mann said, but that is seeing a resurgence.
“It’s kind of going back to the future,” said Mann, Sanford’s mayor since 2013. “For my childhood, people always went to Jonesboro for their back-to-school clothes. (Fonda Lupita) really hit a niche with that corner. Folks have always known to go there for something to eat.”
Fonda Lupita moved into the former Landmark restaurant, a biscuit and breakfast diner that served Sanford for decades before moving across town. Down Main Street, there’s Merenda’s Soul Food Kitchen, Brick City Boba and Eyelight Coffee and Comics, all opened in the past two years.
Mann believes Jonesboro’s and Sanford’s best days are ahead of it.
“What’s good for Jonesboro is good for Sanford,” Mann said. “Anything that’s great once can be again. There’s too much traffic on that corner for it to be forgotten.”
Eyelight co-owner Brian Mitchell said the crowds Fonda Lupita is drawing to Sanford are lifting up the rest of the town.
“We used to live in Raleigh and I think people think Sanford is just trailer parks, but people are coming here when they hear about Fonda Lupita,” Mitchell said. “There’s a long line and long wait times and people place their reservations and check out the rest of the town while they wait.”
Frausto and Alvarez said traveling for them means eating. Alvarez proposed to Frausto during a trip to the Yucatan peninsula after driving to a historic restaurant famous for its cochinita pibil. There’s not a second thought to driving 10 hours to New York City for a specific plate of tacos.
Now, he said, he’s amazed his wife’s restaurant has become one of those food sirens calling to other diners.
“Normally people in Sanford, on the weekends they go out to bigger cities like Raleigh and Fayetteville,” Alvarez said. “It’s interesting to see the opposite happen.”
Fonda Lupita ‘will change the world’
As soon as the Eater story came out, Frausto said she was quickly getting offers to bring Fonda Lupita to Raleigh or Durham. That’s when she knew things had changed, she said, not just for her restaurant, but the larger food scene.
“I for sure know (Fonda Lupita) will change the world now,” Frausto said. “I think of us as a little hole in the wall. Who would drive from Durham for a hole in the wall in Sanford? Now that we’ve gotten recognized people are actually going to come and try us and I think that is amazing.”
The restaurant is moving soon, but is staying in Sanford, expanding to a nearby space that’s seven times the size of the current Fonda Lupita. The new location will mean more seating and a larger menu, adding a full bar and typical Mexican restaurant staples like baskets of tortilla chips. Frausto wouldn’t disclose the address of the new location, but said she hopes to open in March, the two-year anniversary of Fonda Lupita.
Frausto said nearly everything has changed in Fonda Lupita’s world since November, but that now she believes more than ever in a small idea growing into something huge.
“I want to say it’s opening doors to more people that are doing this on the low as well,” Frausto said. “When I say on the low, I think of my mother, she was making menudo from home and it opened the door for her to understand that it was a gift and that she needed to put that gift to work. ... My dad always believed we were bad asses. But this proved to me that we were bad asses.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
