Three Generations The Cervantes Family
Story and Photos by Lois Ellen Frank
Over 35 years ago, Roberta Finely, formerly Roberta Cervantes, started a New Mexico restaurant serving locally sourced New Mexico chiles with her family’s recipes in Albuquerque. Today the restaurant is still located at their San Pedro and Gibson address, where they have been for 33 years now. Roberta used her Spanish roots to create some of her signature dishes, except on St. Patrick’s Day. On this day, she employed her Irish heritage (Roberta’s roots are Spanish and Irish) to serve corned beef and cabbage at her restaurant, which proved to be a great success. Roberta still celebrates this Irish holiday, once a year on St. Patrick’s Day at her restaurant with signature Irish dishes, and serves her famous New Mexico dishes during the rest of the year. Her chile sauces and salsas were so popular at her restaurant—people literally came from all over the world to eat at her restaurant—that customers were always asking to buy the chile sauces and salsas to take home. After years of customers asking for her delicious authentic New Mexican chile sauces and salsas, her son Richard Gonzales and his
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wife Arian decided to launch a line of specialty food products featuring Roberta’s recipes bringing together tradition, culture, and culinary art in their line of salsas and chiles. This “Classic New Mexico Cuisine” food product line, as it is called at Cervantes Food Products by Arian Gonzales, is growing and evolving every day. Richard’s background is in engineering and Arian’s background is in marketing and sales. In the beginning Richard worked two jobs, one with the Federal Government, and one with Cervantes Food Products until about three years ago. The two now work full time at Cervantes. Today, their daughter, Marisol Gonzales, has also joined them. She graduated with a master’s degree in biochemistry from New Mexico Tech and now works with her parents as the food scientist, is in charge of food safety, and is the quality manager for the Cervantes product line. Starting a business may sound easy but this family has dedicated their lives to making local, traditional foods featuring red and green New Mexico chiles available throughout New Mexico. Their longterm goal is to put their product on the shelves of stores and su-
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