Guadalajara Cafe opens second location in Lee’s Summit

• Pork Oaxaca, smothered in a roasted onion tomatilla sauce, is the signature dish at the Guadalajara Cafe in Lee’s Summit.

Restaurateur Victor Esqueda – probably best-known for his Ixtapa restaurant in the Northland and his first Guadalajara Cafe at 103rd Street, between State Line and Wornall Road – decided to buck the trend for popular Tex-Mex dining venues in Lee’s Summit and opened, last October, a new version of the Guadalajara Cafe at 410 S.E. 291 Highway. The restaurant is located in a space formerly occupied by Tequila Harry’s and Tequila House in a shopping strip that’s not the easiest to access from 291 Highway.

• Guadalajara Cafe’s tacos rancheros comprise a top-selling platter in Lee’s Summit.

That’s just one of the little annoyances that they – Esqueda; his partner, Gilberto Gutierrez; and his general manager, Marco Diaz (formerly of Nara) – have experienced since transforming a Tex-Mex restaurant space into a cafe with an emphasis on more creative and distinctly less cheesy dishes than the ubiquitous tacos and burritos. (Esqueda detests “Mexican” dishes smothered in melted orange cheese.) The problem, he says, is that the kind of diners who loved the distinctive dishes served at Frida’s Contemporary Mexican Cuisine in Overland Park (Esqueda was one of the original partners in that successful operation) have yet to discover his Lee’s Summit restaurant.

“Like Frida’s,” he says, “we serve traditional Mexican cuisine with a modern twist.”