Four months ago, Eduardo Hidalgo opened up a Dominican restaurant, the DR Café, in Greenbelt’s Beltway Plaza mall. Today, he is looking forward to expanding his first business venture.
Hidalgo is in the process of remodeling the café, so the interior is sparse, with a television tuned to a Spanish-language station in one corner and a tall Coke cooler in the other. The restaurant has nine tables, four inside the store and five outside, roped off from the mall’s main walkway.
Hidalgo’s restaurant is so new that it does not even have a website. Most of his advertising comes from word of mouth or from the fliers he passes out in apartment buildings behind the mall. The DR Café sees about 30 or 40 customers per day, with Friday and Saturday being the busiest and Sunday the slowest.
Vinessa Canady has eaten at the DR Café twice, and said that she was first attracted to the restaurant because it offered something that the fast food chains in the mall could not.
“The best food is homemade, no imitations, no nothing,” said Canady, who said that she would “strongly recommend” the DR Café.
Other mall frequenters are not interested in the Dominican food the café has to offer, and prefer more mainstream options.
“Maybe it’s a food of last resort,” said Tony Latiney, who went on to say that he would rather eat at the mall’s fast food establishments.
“They don’t know us, but when they taste the food, they come back,” said Hidalgo.
Right now, Hidalgo’s only employees are his wife, who is the cook and inspired Hidalgo to open the DR Café, and his son, who takes orders and seats guests. He hopes to hire more employees in the coming months, and maybe open a second location after his business grows.
Hidalgo called the food he serves “house food,” and said that his costumers appreciate his restaurant’s authenticity. His most popular dishes are fried fish with coconut sauce, and mofongo, a tradition Dominican dish made with plantains and stuffed with shrimp.