Observant foodies like Redondo Beach resident Jackie Cuevas, took notice of the Day of the Dead-themed restaurants that began popping up all over the area.

She spotted the first one a few months ago after moving into her new neighborhood. She was drawn in by the bright, graffiti-style artwork painted on the dark walls. She also took note of the Latin, reggaeton and rap music being played, the creatively presented cocktails and the sizzling plates of food that passed by at the busy Kalaveras restaurant. Pressed for time, she wasn’t able to break for a bite, but it definitely caught her attention.

A couple of weeks later, while on her lunch break, she came across a similar-style restaurant on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

“It was another Kalaveras and this time I decided to give it a shot, and wow, I’m all about it now and I’m always looking out for them,” she said as she sat inside the West Los Angeles location. Kalaveras is a rapidly growing restaurant chain whose young trio of owners are looking to redefine modern Mexican dining in neighborhoods around Southern California as they build a family-backed restaurant empire.

“This is the future of Mexican restaurants,” said 31-year-old Isaias Ocampo Brito, who along with his cousins, 32-year-old Angel Bahena and 29-year-old Daniel Brito, are behind the expanding chain. “It’s a restaurant that every city needs. It’s popping with bright colors, music and not just traditional Mexican food, but with more of a twist.”

The first Kalaveras location opened in Bellflower in 2016. Currently, the cousins own and operate 13 Kalaveras restaurants, including eateries in Montebello, Redondo Beach, Whittier, San Pedro, Chino Hills, West Los Angleles, Puente Hills, Pasadena, Riverside, Silver Lake and the newly opened locations in Rancho Cucamonga and Santa Monica.

But, the young restaurateurs are far from being done with the expansion.

Within the next year, the cousins plan on doubling their local footprint with 13 more restaurants opening in Burbank, Covina, Monrovia, North Hollywood, Corona, Marina Del Rey, Simi Valley, Temecula, Long Beach, Montclair, Orange, Newport Beach and Fullerton.

“It’s wonderful,” Bahena said. “It’s amazing. I think it’s beautiful to see an empire build up and who better to do it with than your family.”

Cuisine and cocktails

Like Cuevas, Redondo Beach resident Jesse Bobbett gave Kalaveras a shot after seeing the inviting decor and energy of the place.

“It feels like Mexico City when you’re here,” said Bobbett, a regular at the Redondo Beach location. “It’s the environment, it’s vibrant, it’s colorful, it’s festive.”

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But the cousins know that while those things might get people through the door, it’s the food and drinks that will turn them into loyal customers. So they created a chef-driven menu with dishes that aren’t found at typical mom and pop Mexican restaurants.

A good example of that is the Pasta a La Diabla, which mixes grilled shrimp and penne pasta with a house made Salsa Diabla served with cotija cheese. There are also dishes that blend Latin cuisines like the carnitas, which is made of traditional carnitas drenched in a green sauce, but served with plantains, that are more traditionally found in Central American cuisine.

“You have Latinos from everywhere here, it’s not all Mexican,” Ocampo Brito said. “So our food will have ingredients that they use in El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala.”

Meanwhile the drink menu includes dozens of mezcals, tequilas and cocktails, alcoholic slushies and margaritas.

A family business

Ocampo Brito, who came to the United States from Mexico at the age of 16, created the concept for Kalaveras after working for his uncles, who have owned various restaurants for decades.

“I started as a dishwasher at Spires, which was owned by my uncles and I moved up to busboy, cook, server … all the positions in the restaurant,” he said.

After really learning the business, he decided to share his ideas with his uncles.

“I wanted to do something different,” he said. He wanted to create a place that not only served good modern Mexican food, but he wanted to do it within a hip and stylish environment with high end mixed drinks that would attract millennials.

“Acapulco, El Torito, these places are dated,” he said. “I wanted to create a place where I wanted to go drink, where I wanted to hang out with my friends. A celebration, destination place.”

The family invested in the new restaurant and his cousins, who also grew up in the restaurant business working for their fathers, loved the idea and helped refine the concept.

“This here is about an ambiance, it’s about an experience, it’s about identity,” Bahena said.

“What makes us unique is that we’re a family,” Brito added. “We can work together and expand the brand and keep it within the family.”

Growing Kalaveras

According to restaurant experts like Alonso Castañeda, vice president of brand strategy and development at Savory Restaurant Fund, the family seems to me making all the right moves to grow their empire by putting as much effort into its style as they do the cuisine.

“Growing from one to all those locations in six years, that is very talented, that is huge growth,” said Castañeda, whose company partners with new restaurant owners to expand their concepts into multiple locations.

“The consumer right now is looking for eatertainment when they go out, and based on the description, it sounds like they fit that profile,” he added.

Owning and operating multiple locations was always the goal. By 2019, they had a total of five restaurants and plans for more until the industry was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“We pretty much shut down during the pandemic because we were an experience, a destination place,” Ocampo Brito said. “That was really bad for us. We’re such a big family, so we had a couple of family members stay at each location and do take out.”

Despite struggling through the very dark days of the pandemic, there was a silver lining for the burgeoning chain.

“Once we opened back up it just blew up,” Ocampo Brito said. “Night clubs and mass events were still closed, so restaurants were the only destination. And if you wanted to have fun, you had to go to a restaurant like ours. So, we were doing double our numbers from before.”

The plan to move forward with the expansion was back on and now each cousin owns a handful of the restaurants in an arrangement that’s become sort of a family-only franchise.

“We all invested together in the first few locations and then we started each opening our own locations,” Bahena explained. “And it’s beautiful that we’re all around the same age and we’re all ambitious and we have our sights set on the moon.”

For more information and a complete list of Kalaveras restaurant locations, go to kalaveras.com.