HE SERVED THE FIRST FAJITAS IN NORTH TEXAS, BUT THAT'S NOT WHY HE'S REMEMBERED

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

 

He served the first fajitas in North Texas. But that’s not why he’s remembered | Opinion

By Bud Kennedy

Updated November 25, 2025 1:59 PM

 

How did we ever forget Raul Jimenez?

 

How was Fort Worth’s millionaire Thanksgiving host dismissed in his 1998 obituary as “owner of a now-defunct restaurant”?

 

How did we forget the 50,000 Thanksgiving dinners Jimenez gave away here in 20 years? Or the million-plus he and his family have served in his home city of San Antonio?

 

How can forget the first restaurateur in Dallas or Fort Worth to offer grilled steak strips called fajitas?

 

How can we forget Texas’ own little Horatio Alger story, about a little Dallas barrio teenager who went from rags to riches and gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars — before a recession returned him to rags?

 

Granted, Jimenez is more closely identified with San Antonio. That’s where he opened his first chorizo factory in 1954. That grew to a $25 million food empire in north Fort Worth selling Jimenez brand salsa, tamales, tortillas and taco shells in 11 states.

 

The fortune lifted Jimenez, an eighth-grade dropout, to fame as “the Mexican Gourmet” and also to prominence as one of Texas’ most powerful Democrats.

 

As a business conservative, he led Gov. Dolph Briscoe’s 1978 re-election campaign.

 

In 1973, when his home base was still in a tiny north Fort Worth restaurant at 307 W. Central Ave., he told his wife, Mary, to plan for company on Thanksgiving.

 

She asked how many friends.

 

“Just a few,” he said.

 

That year, they served free turkey-and-dressing dinners to 200 senior citizens and children.

 

In a Star-Telegram interview the next year, he said the dinners were “one way that I can show I’m thankful for the good things that have happened to me and my family.”

 

The Tarrant County Commissioners Court named him the community’s “Outstanding Citizen.” Reporters gave him a humanitarian award.

 

In 1974, he founded an adult night school next door to the restaurant, still standing today but long boarded up after a 1992 fire.

 

In 1976, Briscoe said Jimenez’s life “helps to reaffirm our faith in our fellow man.”

 

The late San Antonio columnist Carlos Guerra wrote that Jimenez “taught us, through example, about the might of an individual intent on doing right.”

 

Nearly 20 years after Jimenez’s death, 30,000 guests remember the generous restaurateur each year with four tons of turkey in the San Antonio convention center.

 

We miss the Jimenez dinners in Fort Worth.

 

I don’t know anywhere else for lonely older folks to go for turkey, pumpkin pie, a fiddle band and the chance to make new friends.

 

Jimenez’s son, the late Raul Jr., used to tell about a couple who sat down to chat at one of the Fort Worth dinners, originally in the restaurant and later in the Amon G. Carter Jr. Exhibits Hall.

 

It took them several bites of cornbread dressing and giblet gravy to figure out that they had already been married and divorced 40 years earlier.

 

“We wanted to make sure the senior citizens had someplace to go on Thanksgiving,” Mary Jimenez said in 2006.

 

“So many of our older customers, they didn’t have any family, or their children didn’t come see them,” she said.

 

Some saved their best clothes for the holiday dinner.

 

Mary Jimenez said it was “our way to give thanks for the way the good Lord has blessed us.”

 

“He loved the people in Fort Worth,” said Mary Jimenez. “He didn’t want anybody to be turned away.”

 

At those early dinners, their tiny daughter, Patricia, helped slice the pumpkin pies.

 

Now, Patricia Jimenez chairs the charity event in San Antonio.

 

“I don’t know any other way to spend Thanksgiving,” she said in 2006 as workers emptied Walmart trailers full of donated Butterball turkeys and sorted yams collected from fans at San Antonio Spurs basketball games.

 

“I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I had to spend the day at home.”

 

She has lived most of her life in San Antonio and barely remembers the dinners in Fort Worth.

 

“I believe in my father’s vision,” she said. “To spend Thanksgiving here, with senior citizens who don’t have the family or resources for their own dinner — that brings me closer to my father.”

 

Other local restaurateurs, notably the late Vance Godbey, continued the Jimenez dinners in Fort Worth for a few years after 1991. But they eventually ended, partially because they had become such big, expensive events.

 

In a 1974 profile, Jimenez expressed embarrassment about his wealth.

 

“It’s not important how much [money] I made,” he said.

 

“What is important is that my success has come because I was willing to work for it. I tell other people that if they will work, they can do just about anything they want.”

 

And feed thousands every Thanksgiving.

 

This story was originally published November 21, 2017 at 9:53 AM.