By George Webber | Sonoma Stories
Long-time successful restaurants are significant parts of the living fabric of a town. It matters to have friends out in the world; a place to go where the food and drinks are great, and people smile when you walk in.
Sonoma is fortunate to have such a place: Maya Restaurant, which for the last 22 years has been providing goodwill and extraordinary margaritas from the south-east corner of the Plaza. Every restaurant needs a theme, a type of cuisine, and an interesting design.
“As legend is told,” shares Hezir Arjona, “Maya founders PJ and Craig Clark went to Merida in the Yucatan in 1998, and fell in love with the colors, the food, and the ambiance, and they came back to Sonoma with the idea of opening up something specific to that region. It just so happens my family is from the Yucatan, so my dad, Angel, and his friend Francisco were called up to be part of the kitchen. From the beginning the food was very different; we had a scallop chile relleno with corn, roasted peppers, and coconut sauce, topped with toasted pumpkin seeds. We wanted to make it interesting, to educate people, and back then there was an audience for it.”
Maya’s management team journeyed down to the Mexican town of Tequila, and spent a week learning from the best tequila producers. Hezir continues, “We made such friends with the tequila makers that we were invited back a year later. We opened up that trip to all our employees.” The monumental bar in Maya is called the Temple of Tequila; standing on it today are 80 different tequilas and 80 mescals.
Maya is a serious economic endeavor; it is now owned by the Angel Arjona family, and the Francisco Santana family. Before Covid there were 32 full- and part-time employees, which shrank to just five during the worst part of the pandemic. These five served take-out food and legendary to-go margaritas. Now, there are 20 full- and part-time employees, but keeping staff is difficult.
The hours are hard, and sometimes there are rude customers. “When you say hello to a table you know instantly whether it will be a difficult table or not,” Hezir says. “But sometimes people change. They may be tired, or hangry, once we get a little food in them they change.” These are challenging times for the restaurant industry. The cost of goods has increased by a third at least in the last six months.
Looking back at growing up in a restaurant family, Hezir recalls, “My mom would let me stay up late on Friday nights, and I have very vivid memories of my dad, smelling like garlic and coming home late, and being very excited and crawling into his arms. Back then my dad worked at Piatti’s, on the Plaza, and every once in a while my mom would bring me and my little brother in a stroller to the Plaza, and we would wave through the window into the kitchen at Piatti’s to my dad.”
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