Ethnic restaurants struggle to attract customers

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Eateries aim to draw in locals as well as far-flung foodies to sample their cuisine

by Amber Parcher | Staff Writer

It's 2 in the afternoon on a Thursday, and Maria Peredo is cleaning up from the lunch crowd that rushed in and out of her small Wheaton restaurant, Kantutas, on Ennalls Avenue.

She and her mother and niece lift, rinse and wipe the four tables that are covered in replicas of original Bolivian weaves, scurrying past the green-tiled walls outlined in yellow and orange in preparation for the dinner rush that will inevitably hit. And the weekends?

"There's a line out the door," she says in Spanish.

Kantutas is a true hole-in-the wall, dishing up the kind of cuisine that metro-area foodies dream of stumbling across. Peredo, a former house cleaner and Bolivian immigrant, started the restaurant several years ago with her family. She and her mother do the cooking themselves, and a whiteboard sign outside the one-room restaurant details in black marker the delicacies of the day. Inside, a machine humming in the background churns out mogonchinchi, an indigenous drink resembling soda water, and a loud radio pitches the afternoon talk show on the local Spanish station.

But 90 percent of the "foodies" that frequent Kantutas are Peredo's countrymen, yearning for flavors of home, she said.

Neither Peredo's place nor any other Hispanic restaurant in Wheaton has yet attracted a diverse, sustainable clientele, according to local eatery owners. And as talk solidifies among county planners to market Wheaton as an international food venue for the rest of the world, many ethnic restaurant owners say Wheaton has a long way to go for that title: They can barely bring in a mix of customers from the nearby neighborhoods.

"Everyone who comes in here already knows what a ‘pupusa' is," said Yessenia Remedes, a worker at Irene's Pupusas on University Boulevard, in Spanish. The restaurant inside a railcar specializes in the El Salvadorian dish, and it's become a local chain almost entirely through Hispanic customers.

Some of Wheaton's Latino diners don't even have the support of their own.

"The Hispanic restaurants have a problem, because no Americans come," said Javier Herrera, a chef at El Pulgarcito Del Callao, a Peruvian seafood restaurant on Elkin Street.

Waving his hand over the empty dining room, Herrera rattled off in Spanish the fundamental differences in the ways Latinos and the rest of the world eat. Many Wheaton restaurants have chosen to cater to the Latino way of food—loud music, a prominent bar and futbol— not football—blaring on TV.

The result has severely limited many restaurants' customer base.

Linda Amendt, a Wheaton resident and activist, said it took her a while to get used to being the only person in the restaurant who was not of the same heritage as everyone else.

"The first couple times, ... I felt uneasy if there were no other local Caucasians there," she said.

And the language barrier is a huge obstacle to developing a strong-enough relationship with the restaurant to feel comfortable inside it, she said.

"It made you uncomfortable if they had a hard time speaking English to you, your customer," Amendt said.

Learning English isn't always easy, but some figure there's got to be something that is.

"We don't know how to approach them, how to get close to them, how to make them come in," said Julio Cruz, the owner of Sergio's Place, a Peruvian and El Salvadorian fusion restaurant on Fern Street.

Cruz said he's considering passing out fliers personally among the rows of homes on Kemp Mill Road just behind his restaurant.

"I wish we could get people who live around Wheaton," Cruz said.

There are 117 restaurants listed in Wheaton's downtown area. Thirty-one are Hispanic, 20 are Asian, three are kosher, seven are Italian and four are pubs or sports bars, according to www.wheatonmd.org, the urban district's official Web site.