By Erin Wheeler
Carrying on his family’s multigenerational legacy in Colorado’s Mexican dining scene, Michael Lucero opened La Mission Restaurant at Woodmen Hills Plaza in June 2009. Now 15 years later, the restaurant stands as a small business staple in Falcon.
Lucero’s restaurant roots trace back to his grandfather, who opened the family’s first restaurant, Mission Bell Inn, in Colorado Springs when Academy Boulevard was still a dirt road. Lucero grew up learning the trade at several of his family’s restaurants throughout Colorado, from working with his cousins at Mission at the Bell in Trinidad and Nino’s in Alamosa to working for his father at Old Mission in Cañon City and later taking over his mother’s restaurant in Lamar, Mission Villanueva.
“(My dad) gave me a lot of tougher jobs — a lot of cleaning baseboards and all the hard work in the restaurant,” Lucero said. “He tried to shy me away from the restaurant business, but me being rebellious and looking up to him, I stuck with it.”
After managing and operating Mission Villanueva in Lamar for two years, Lucero stepped up to the challenge of starting his first restaurant from scratch when his mother stumbled upon a location vacancy in Falcon and encouraged him to create his own legacy for his family (also, so she could take over her restaurant again).
The opening day was a full-on family affair, with several of Lucero’s relatives helping in the restaurant’s soft launch and Lucero’s mother drumming up business from the Safeway parking lot across the street.
“We opened up right after the recession, and it was a lot of struggles for the first couple of years, a lot of seven days a week. But the community in Falcon has really supported us,” Lucero said. He recalled the small-town, got-your-back foundation of the town that he said he thinks still remains today despite the many ways Falcon has evolved over the past decade and a half.
La Mission began to thrive on its word-of-mouth reputation for pork green chili and its award-winning refried beans.
Many customers’ favorite dishes were recipes passed down from family members in the restaurants Lucero grew up in, including powdered sugar sopapillas from a cousin, horchata from another cousin and his grandfather’s famous green chili — a recipe that is still made using spice packets handed down from him.
Preparing those popular menu items in the kitchen remains a highlight of Lucero’s day-to-day restaurant tasks.
He said, “I love doing all the heavy cooking. So, that’s making big batches of green chili, big batches of beans. That’s my passion. And that passion hasn’t gone away in the last 15 years.”
It’s a passion that Lucero is proud to share with his sons who were just 1 and 3 years old at the time the restaurant opened. Now teenagers (one a senior in high school and the other a junior in high school), Lucero said bringing them up in the trade and working hand-in-hand together is one of his most notable accomplishments in business.
“I love to see them working here, and now their friends work here, too,” Lucero said.
He is unsure at this point if his children will carry on the family tradition and take over the restaurant someday, but one thing is for certain: La Mission is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
“I’m excited for the next 15 years of challenges that might come my way and the growth that Falcon is producing,” Lucero said.
With chain restaurants popping up on seemingly every corner in town, Lucero said it is only motivating him. “Along with growth (in Falcon), there is more competition. And along with more competition, that just makes you better. That makes you strive more and work harder,” he said, adding his favorite catchphrase: “Although he is the owner, most of the time he is also the dishwasher, if that’s what it takes.”
With growth on the horizon, Lucero said, “We’ll try hard to feed our community, and hope our community supports us as much as possible. La Mission isn’t going anywhere.”
