IN THE KITCHEN WITH ...

The Bite of Dreams:
FONDA ROSALINDA’S

BY MARY E. MILLER
PHOTOS BY ASHLEY WARLICK

“Cooking is magic,” owner Rosalinda Sala says. “It can change a person’s mood. I see it happen all the time.” Her 27-year-old daughter, Rosalinda Lopez, smiles knowingly. She goes by Nani, a name that can mean cute small thing, or beautiful, or splendor, depending on the language. Nani is her mother’s sous chef in the morning, does most of the shopping (much of it at the farmer’s markets and local suppliers), runs the kitchen and floor in the evenings after her mother has ridden home on her motorcycle to tend the seven dogs and watch Chilean cooking shows. “My mother is a romantic. But having a restaurant is work,” she says, “really hard, hard work.”

Customers rave about Rosalinda’s fresh and varied fare that incorporates ingredients and influences far beyond Mexico’s reach, like the sea bass with an option of 10 different sauces, the lamb shanks, carne asada or the chicken and rice soup that arrives at the beginning of each meal. Everything is made only after it has been ordered, which is why a meal at their hands is a leisurely experience, and also why Rosalinda’s has developed a loyal customer base during its eight-year run tucked into a tiny strip mall on Pleasantburg Drive across from Bob Jones University.

But the magic and reality of the restaurant, and of the women’s lives, is this: day after day, dish after dish, one set of a Rosalinda’s dreams are realized and nourished, as another set simmers, hoping not to burn.

Every dish has key ingredients that carry it from inspiration through execution and into memory, as does Rosalinda Sala’s story. Always there was the yearning for adventure and the love of cooking, salt and pepper to the mother’s state of being. In Mexico in the 1950s and 60s, she grew up poor among wealthy friends in Villahermosa, the capital of the state of Tabasco. Her father worked for the government, and he wanted his daughter to become a teacher. She dreamed of adventure and romance, which she tasted first as a dancer at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

After school, she moved in with an aunt and uncle. Not long after, romance found her and she was married. But adventure waited many years. The first husband, father to her son, Juan Carlos and to Nani, was a coffee man. When he finally made big money, she says, he gave Rosalinda her heart’s desire— an American Express loaded with $250,000 and six months’ off to travel the world. Nani was a baby, her brother a young boy. Rosalinda set off for New York with a friend, then hit Europe. After two weeks, she was on her own. She ate her way through France, Belgium, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy. Everywhere she made friends and learned to cook more dishes. She stayed until the money ran out.

Decades later, she still dines on the memories. A pile of photos capture Rosalinda on a camel in the Sahara, on a bridge in Venice, at a restaurant in Amsterdam, in front of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. That trip is the key ingredient to Fonda Rosalinda’s menu, and its meanders can be traced like map lines through the dishes she creates.

“I grew up eating a lot of foods other kids didn’t eat,” Nani explains. Her mother cooked liver and tomatoes, pizza with chocolate, pasta carbonara, artichokes. Her favorite was a Spanish tortilla of potatoes, prosciutto and diced onions. Nani has traveled to adulthood fed by her mother’s love, expressed on a plate. Of the thousands of meals she has eaten, exotic or provincial, a veritable spoonful have not been cooked by Rosalinda.

“Very few,” Nani laughs

Her parents divorced a few years after the legendary trip. Rosalinda began a career as a clothing boutique owner and stylist in Mexico City. Then she remarried a Swedish man in the textile business, and when Nani was 10, the family moved to Greer, South Carolina.

Soon after they moved to the Upstate, an opportunity presented itself for Rosalinda to run a restaurant at the flea market at White Horse Road in Greenville. She did it for four years, until she could open her own business.

Nani began helping her mother cook desserts at home. At 16 she was allowed to enter the restaurant kitchen. Her brother, Juan Carlos, worked there until six years ago, when he went back to Mexico to open his own restaurant.

“I learned everything in that kitchen,” Nani says. To love cooking and eating, to dream of adventure. She has been to Sweden and Mexico. She describes the trips through the meals. Her appetite has been whetted.

“I want to travel everywhere,” she says. Together at the table, with pictures scattered, she and her mother recite places that wait for them: Japan, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Africa.

Apron strings can be so tight. She and her mother live together in a house that is a five-minute drive from the restaurant. On weekends they cook for the Hispanic community. Few breaks from work, or each other.

Four years ago, while she was in her last year studying business at USC Upstate, Nani says, her mother became ill. She recuperated for an extended time in Mexico. With three classes to go, Nani dropped out and kept the restaurant running.

She intends to finish her degree, perhaps next spring, but no matter what traveling adventures may come, she is certain of her future in this small kitchen where beauty and splendor reside.

“For me, this is about culture and family values,” she says. “It’s like the artisans of the old days, when a father handed down his skills to his son. I want to take all she has taught me and keep this restaurant going.”

RECIPE

TORTILLA ROSALINDA