SALT LAKE CITY — Eighteen years ago, when he opened his tire shop on a wing and a prayer in an old converted house on the industrial side of the valley, Victor Galindo worked on the cars outside because, well, there was no inside.
One day while Galindo was changing brakes, he looked behind him and there was a man about three feet away, getting comfortable. It was the car’s owner; he’d pulled up a chair so he could watch.
“People had nothing else to do,” remembers Victor.
So he and his wife, Elvia, came up with something else for them to do: Eat.
At first they offered complimentary chips and soda, then Elvia started making tamales at home and bringing them to the tire store to sell on weekends.
The tamales flew out the door like they were giving them away.
Long story short and short story long, that’s the origin story of Victor’s Restaurant, a subsidiary of the original Victor’s Tires at 1406 S. 700 West, just west of I-15.
In the years since, “the tamales at the tire store” has become an off-the-beaten-path, no-frills stash for Mexican food aficionados; one of those everybody-knows-about-it, nobody-knows-about-it kind of places — so local that sometimes even the locals don’t realize it’s there.
As Jeremy Pugh wrote in his book, “100 Things to do in Salt Lake City Before You Die” (which is how I heard about the tamales), “You order at the tire service counter and wait for your order in a hastily added-on addition with a few tables, salsa bar and soda fountain.”
But those who know, know, and they keep coming back, to the point that Victor isn’t sure whether the tires or the tamales are more profitable.
“Percentage-wise,” he grins, “it’s probably the restaurant.”
Tamales, made fresh daily, and adhering strictly to Elvia’s well-guarded recipe, remain the top draw. But all sorts of other authentic Mexican dishes, cooked by authentic Mexican cooks, attract a crowd too.
The food, Victor notes, isn’t American-Mexican, it’s Mexican-Mexican.
He says customers who hail from Mexico, “who know the different tastes from different regions in Mexico,” try to guess where the tire shop’s tamale recipe comes from: North? South? Central? But they’re stumped, because “it’s Elvia’s own recipe. She made it up. It’s not from a book, it’s from her mind.”
Victor and Elvia grew up in different parts of Mexico. He came to America when he was 16, joining his mother in California. She came when she was 17, joining her brother in Utah.
Eventually, Victor also wound up in Utah, when the recycling business he worked for “stranded me here.” Good thing, too. First, he met Elvia at the Guadalupe Catholic Church. Second, he got out of recycling and got onto the path to becoming an entrepreneur extraordinaire.
It didn’t happen all at once. Victor worked for five years at what was then the Delta Center (now Vivint Arena) as a dishwasher and later as a cook — valuable training, as it turned out, for opening a restaurant later on. Even more valuable was working on his English to the point that he could converse with anyone about just about anything. When the dishwashers and wait staff needed help translating, Victor got the call.
He was all of 25 years old in 1998 when he piled all his savings, which wasn’t much, into the tire shop and started working on cars outside, rain or shine.
No one would have been surprised, least of all the guy who pulled up the chair to watch him do his brakes, if he hadn’t lasted a month.
Yet, at 43, not only is the original tire shop on 700 West, with its spacious showroom, its indoor bays and its adjoining restaurant, barely recognizable, but it has spawned a chain of eight Victor’s Tires stores along the Wasatch Front, stretching from Ogden to Tooele to Lehi. Victor Galindo is Utah’s tire emperor.
And he’s not through yet. His plan is to not only open more tire stores, but to place them in big enough spaces so each can include a restaurant.
“That’s the goal, to have restaurants at all our next stores,” he says. “I look at the success of the first one and think, 'why not?' The funny part is, we never really thought about it when we first did it; we just wanted something for people to do instead of standing around watching us work.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com