El Fenix on Colorado 1948

If your junior high club had its year-end banquet at El Fenix on Colorado, you might be from Oak Cliff.

The restaurant at 120 E. Colorado Blvd. was the second El Fenix location, opening 30 years after the original on McKinney Avenue.

When the restaurant’s “fiesta room” opened in 1952 it quickly answered a need for party space.

The Lion’s Club hosted their annual fundraising party there that year. And just about every other professional and extra-curricular club in Dallas met there through the 1950s and ’60s. There were wedding showers and rehearsal dinners galore.

Legendary Oak Cliff singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard had his very first gig there while still a student at Adamson High School.

El Fenix founder Miguel Martinez Sr., known as Mike, had an inspirational immigration story. He started driving mules in his hometown in Nuevo Leon, Mexico at age 7. After moving to Dallas in 1911, he washed dishes at a Downtown hotel for

14 years, even after he started El Fenix in 1918. His eight children took over the restaurant business in the 1940s, and Martinez paid for a plaza, roads, electricity and wells in his hometown, now part of Villaldama.

The Martinez family sold El Fenix to Firebird Restaurant Group for a reported $30 million in 2008. Since then, the company has expanded to include at least 22 locations in North Texas.

The location on Colorado is on the Oak Cliff streetcar line and across the street from Methodist Dallas Medical Center, which recently demolished the Vet Stop building, a former diner on Colorado at Beckley Avenue.