Star City airport soon to feature Mexican cuisine

PRESQUE ISLE – Kathia Valdez is bringing a little bit of her home to northern Maine with the opening of El Gallito Feliz.

Valdez, 36, of Fort Fairfield, plans to open the Mexican eatery at the Northern Maine Regional Airport in Presque Isle within the next month. She said Tuesday that the restaurant’s name – which means The Happy Little Rooster – has connections with her family here in northern Maine and with her family in Mexico.

“I just had a baby, and he wakes up really early and he’s always happy,” Valdez said. “In the Chinese calendar, he was born in the Year of the Rooster. That’s why I named it [the restaurant] that.”

The name also has strong ties with the restaurant Valdez worked at as a young woman. She said her father owned a restaurant in Mexico called El Gallo Giro – the name of a fighting rooster – where she gained the experience to run her own restaurant.

Valdez said that she is working this week to set up shop and to clean up the area where her cafe will be located in the airport. She said she is waiting for final permits to come through from the city so she can open for business and that she expects to open by the end of January or the beginning of February.

Valdez said the original idea for the cafe popped up soon after she, her husband James, and their two daughters moved to northern Maine from Texas two years ago for his job with the U.S. Border Patrol. She said one of the things they noticed right away was the lack of an authentic Mexican restaurant.

Valdez said they weren’t the only ones.

“Mostly people with the Border Patrol, they always wonder when one of us will put something like a Mexican restaurant here,” she said. “There’s lots of talk about that. They want something that has real Mexican food, and I like to cook. All I cook is Mexican food.”

Valdez said she was born in Los Angeles, Calif., but grew up in Mexico, where she learned to cook authentic dishes. She added that because the kitchen area at the airport is not very big, she’ll be offering a small menu. She expects to serve basics, such as flautas (fried tacos), tamales, enchiladas, arroz (Mexican rice), and churros (sweet Spanish pastry).

Valdez is starting off small. The cafe’s sit-down area accommodates four tables and 16 chairs – but she hopes the eatery will grow in popularity because of the “good food” she’ll be serving.

“We have good food and I hope people like it,” she said. “That’s my main priority, that they like the food that I make.”