The day before Super Bowl Sunday, the Gallo Blanco Café in the Clarendon Hotel and Spa closed its doors after the restaurant decided to part ways, much to the confusion of customers and employees of the hotel and restaurant.
A new restaurant, Café Tranquilo, quickly replaced the space.
“Everyone was a little shocked,” Dan Morrow, executive chef of Café Tranquilo, said. “I think the suddenness of it and the fact that it happened Super Bowl weekend…was the shocker to everybody because everybody was expecting to make a lot of money with everything going on.”
Doug Robson, owner of Gallo Blanco, explained that departure was a business decision and that it was time to move on.
Robson said that he will be focusing on spending time with his family as well as continuing to work at Otro Café, the sister restaurant to Gallo Blanco, located on Seventh Street and Bethany Home Road.
Managing two restaurants was not the problem, he said.
“I don’t mind doing multiple restaurants,” Robson said. “I’ve always been involved with multiple restaurants. That wasn’t the issue. It was more that we came to the end of that business relationship.”
After several years at the Clarendon, Robson wanted to express his gratitude to his customers.
“I just want to say thank you to the Phoenix community for their support,” he said. “It would have been six years on April 22.”
At 7 a.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, the doors of the former Gallo Blanco Café opened once again with a temporary menu, though under different management.
Ben Bethel, the owner and general manager of the Clarendon Hotel and Spa, launched a restaurant with a menu developed by Chef Dan Maldonado, of Mucho Macho Taco, on Seventh and Missouri avenues. This restaurant soon became Café Tranquilo, which will feature a variety of Mexican food including specialty tacos, Bethel said.
Maldonado’s menu was released Thursday, and Café Tranquilo is still in the process of fine-tuning it. Bethel said the hotel was scrambling to recover from the announcement that the previous operator was going to be leaving the Clarendon.
Bethel received a letter from Gallo Blanco’s attorney, stating that the restaurant would cease operations the day before the Super Bowl without further discussion, much to the surprise of Bethel.
“For us, we felt it was a conscious decision to damage the hotel as much as possible,” Bethel said of the letter. “We had been in discussions for a long period of time. We (Gallo Blanco and the Clarendon) couldn’t come to agreement to some terms and conditions of the operating agreement.”
Bethel said he believes that the transition for the hotel was easy because everything was in place. All that was left was to formulate a temporary menu for the next day.
“We actually only had about eight days to bring in a transitional consultant and develop the menu and find the people and get everything in place, which was a monumental task to say the least.” he said. “But we think in the long run it’s gonna be better than the previous operation for sure.”
For those interested in trying out Café Tranquilo, Chef Morrow recommends the chicken torta — a panko-fried piece of pounded-out chicken breast, topped with avocado, tomato, pickled jalapeños, asadero cheese and mayo.
“We had it open this weekend and there was just as many people on the rooftop as there were in the restaurant and that was nice to see,” Bethel said.
Café Tranquilo plans to extend their operating hours from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. as well as open up their rooftop bar seven days a week from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. starting Friday, Feb. 13.
Contact the reporter at Nikiana.Medansky@asu.edu.
