Every few weeks, Victoria Chaires gets the quesadilla call from Jeff Roy of Roy Meat Service. He buys 5 gallons of queso filling at a time (half red chili, half green chili) along with pies and peach squares. When their informal arrangement started a few years ago, Chaires included the homemade baked goods as a sweetener. Now they fill out the regular order that brings a long-lost Nashville staple back to the East Side.
“Cooking has really saved my life,” Chaires tells the Scene on a sunny Friday outside Roy Meat Service. Her two chihuahuas, Buster and Tito, sit close by. “I was on disability, not doing much. My health was going downhill. It gave me something to do, and the more I cooked, the more people wanted them. I have people knocking on my apartment door asking for quesadillas.”
When a post about Es Fernandos — the Mexican restaurant started decades ago by Chaires’ father Vincente — blew up in the popular East Nashville Facebook group, the two connected in the comments section. They quickly struck up an agreement. Victoria brings the queso vats, and Roy’s cooks fold them into gooey pockets of cheese, onions and peppers on the grill, sometimes adding beef or chicken. Chaires buys her ingredients retail and cooks from memory — no measuring — for two days. Roy taps into a nostalgia market familiar to many of the longtime residents who patronize the lunch spot. Chaires continues her father’s legacy as maker of East Nashville’s preferred quesadilla.
“I wanted to buy the recipe,” Roy tells the Scene during the lunch rush. “She wouldn’t sell it. It’s been about three years now. It’s the original Es Fernandos — not a copy. It helps us, it helps her, and it’s been a blessing.”
Bringing back Es Fernandos caters well to the RMS crowd, many of whom grew up in or around the neighborhood before home prices skyrocketed. Roy’s deep community support grew only stronger when a neighbor sued over the meat smell emanating from his kitchen; for some patrons, it became the perfect symbol of old-versus-new.
Vincente Chaires came to East Nashville with his wife and young family via Fort Campbell and, before that, New Mexico. He opened El Taco, a Tex-Mex franchise, at the corner of Gallatin Pike and Haysboro Avenue on Jan. 16, 1970, after 21 years in the military. Unable to compete with the Chaires cuisine, the area’s two other Mexican restaurants closed within the year, says Victoria. A convenient drive-thru and a loyal customer base — helped by students and faculty at nearby Stratford High School — kept the family in business through the 1970s. Tired of paying franchise royalties, Vincente turned El Taco into Es Fernandos in 1983. Twenty years later, Vincente sold the business to his son Ernie Chaires for $40,000. Ernie soon shuttered the fast-food outpost to focus on his other business endeavor, Rosepepper Cantina.
Vincente died in 2013, and Ernie — sick with lymphoma — followed six months later. Victoria says health problems tied to contaminated water in New Mexico have followed the Chaires family across generations. Today her niece runs Rosepepper. Five other Chaires siblings are scattered across Middle Tennessee and North Carolina. Pappy’s, a roadside market 25 miles away on Bethel Road in Greenbrier, is the only other purveyor of the quesadillas. Roy arranged for the distribution, consciously keeping any quesadilla competition outside his service area.
“I hope it does stay alive after I’m gone,” Chaires says. “When my health gets worse, when I can’t do it anymore, I’ll teach Jeff. Only on my deathbed.”
