The thing Rob Vasquez remembers most about his childhood is the walk to his grandma’s house after church on Sundays. Just a few blocks up the street in Coopertown, the door was always open and the smell of tortillas and chili always met him before he even reached the porch. Inside, Nana Lupe would be dancing — hips swaying in rhythm to the Mexican music playing in the background — flipping tortillas with her bare hands and with a big smile as the house filled with family. “That was our thing,” Rob says. “Eggs, beans, chili, potatoes, tortillas. It wasn’t fancy. It just filled you up and brought everyone together.”
Rob says that’s where he learned to cook — standing at her elbow, watching, remembering. Now, he has opened his own restaurant in downtown Winslow, Shorty’s Olde Town Grill at 108 E. Second St. The restaurant, like his food truck Shorty’s Tacos, is named after his grandfather. But the real story, the one that turned a railroad worker into a restaurant owner, starts in his own kitchen during the strange stillness of the COVID pandemic.
He was off work for a few months, furloughed from the railroad. He and his wife Mica were spending much more time at home with their kids. That time, he says, felt like a gift — a rare pause that let him be home with his kids, cooking, experimenting. He started making birria, something he grew up eating but not quite the way his family made it. In his dad’s family, birria was a stew. It was served in a bowl, rich and slow-cooked, and eaten with tortillas torn by hand. But while the world was social distancing, Rob had been watching food videos from street vendors and trucks out of California and Arizona. They were crisping it on the griddle, folding it into tacos, and serving it with a little cup of consommé for dipping. It wasn’t traditional but it looked good. So, he gave it a shot. It was a big hit with his extended family and after making it a couple of times, one night, while Mica was at work, he posted a picture on Facebook and said he had some to sell.
He figured a few people might come by. Instead, he sold out in less than an hour. “She came home from work and there were strangers walking through the house,” he says, laughing. “They were dropping cash on the kitchen table, and I was just handing out tacos. She was like, ‘What the hell are you doing?'” Mica laughingly recalls how upset she was coming home after a long shift to a home filled with chaos and taco grease but that began the series of events that lead them to their dream jobs.
That first time felt like a fluke. Rob figured it might just be a few curious friends from Facebook. But the next morning, messages were already coming in. People were asking when he’d be doing it again. So he did — the next weekend, then about every other weekend after that. Word started to spread beyond his friends list. People he didn’t recognize were showing up with dollar bills in hand, saying they’d heard about the tacos from a cousin or a coworker. He realized this wasn’t just a one-off. It was turning into something real.
Rob borrowed an old, rusted Blackstone griddle from his aunty, cleaned it up and set up in the driveway. He and his wife put up a pop-up tent, ran extension cords through the house, and laid out folding tables. His 10-year-old daughter was taught to count back change to customers. His children helped plate the food. Customers sat in lawn chairs or stood in clusters on the sidewalk eagerly waiting for the foam box with their name on it.
When it got too windy, they moved everything under the patio. When that got too crowded, they spilled into the yard. Rob began to fall in love with serving people food. At this time, he started thinking about an exit plan for the railroad and felt safe knowing he had that job and could work there until he could open his own restaurant.
This continued for a few months, then came October 2021. Rob lost his job with the railroad. Two weeks later, his father passed away.
“It felt like the floor dropped out,” he says. “First the job, then my dad. I didn’t know what we were going to do.” The fear was real. The railroad job came with good pay and solid benefits — the kind of job you hold onto when you’ve got kids to raise. One of Rob and Mica’s sons has a severe disability, and they travel regularly to the University of California, Los Angeles Hospital to meet with his doctors. That kind of specialized treatment requires time, flexibility, and above all, insurance. Losing that job meant more than just a paycheck — it put everything on the line.
For a couple of weeks, time stood still but after a while he knew it was time to invest in themselves and buy a food truck. He found one from a dealer in Phoenix and took the next big step to doing what he loves. But these were difficult times and he thought about selling the truck even before they fired it up. He thought about finding something stable, even if it meant giving up the dream. But then a friend stepped in. Jack Jue, owner of Mojo’s Café, told him he had something special and coached him through some of the ins and outs of the business.
From there they hit the ground running, they chased every event they could. Street fairs, weddings, weekend markets anything that would have them. But it still wasn’t easy. The big festivals, the ones with real money and foot traffic, felt just out of reach. He didn’t have the connections or the track record. So Rob tried to find another way in.
He signed up to bartend at the Waste Management Open, not because he needed a bartending gig but because he needed to be around the right people. The organizers. The vendors. The decision-makers.
“I didn’t care if I was slinging beer or hauling trash,” Rob says. “I just wanted to be in the room.”
Eventually he met people who organize the largest events in Phoenix and kept pitching his taco truck to them. However, for a while they only kept offering him bartending jobs. All the while, Mica kept her day job, started a night job and was also working long hours on her father’s ranch. Rob knew that eventually it would be time to get serious, sell the truck and work a job to better support his family.
“Our house was almost foreclosed on several times,” Mica recalled about this time. And then, all at once, those offers became ones for his food truck to be present at some of the largest events in Phoenix and he knew it wasn’t time to give up yet. Since then, the truck has made a name for itself, especially locally, becoming a local favorite seldom not seen at any event in Winslow and the surrounding communities.
The path to his dream was never smooth. Even after the truck was much more established, new setbacks kept coming. Earlier this year, Rob was deep in the slow season, the time when events dry up, income shrinks and every expense starts to feel heavier. That’s when he totaled his truck. Not the food truck, the actual vehicle he used to tow it. Without it, he couldn’t take the trailer anywhere.
He could’ve taken the insurance money and bought another truck. Instead, he made a different kind of bet. He and Mica decided to put it toward something permanent a new restaurant. That’s how Shorty’s Olde Town Grill was born. He used that money as a seed to begin the new restaurant and moved into a building he has driven past hundreds of times. Rob says now that he’s in his brick and mortar place he feels “like I’m finally where I am supposed to be, like this is where God meant for me to be.” Also after moving in learned his grandpa Shorty, used to work in that same kitchen back in the day when it was a donut shop.
Now, in the kitchen of the restaurant he worked hard to achieve, Rob keeps the music going; just like Nana Lupe did. He cooks her recipes the way she did, not from a book but from memory, from instinct, from love. “I always keep music going in the kitchen,” he says. “Like she did. It makes me feel like I’m back in her house on a Sunday.” The kitchen’s bigger now. The ingredients come from suppliers instead of the grocery store but the music, the family and the love behind the food haven’t changed a bit.
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