End of An Era—Las Cuatro Milpas Is For Sale
For 92 years, Las Cuatro Milpas bucked the odds. Petra and Natividad Estudillo opened the restaurant on Logan Avenue in 1933, serving simple plates of comfort food like rice, beans, tacos, burritos, and the best tortillas in town. It’s hardly changed a bit since then—it’s still cash-only, the lard-laden beans are last meal-worthy delicious, and there’s always a daily line of hungry patrons snaking around the block.
But soon, the tortilla press will close for the last time and the Estudillo family will hand over the keys to someone else. As of this week, the property is officially for sale.
Real estate broker Voltaire Lepe says he’s been working with the family to help them explore their exit options for “quite some time.” When San Diego Magazine spoke to Sofia Estudillo (Petra and Natividad’s granddaughter) last year, she estimated the restaurant was near the end of its lifespan. The next generation of descendants have other careers, and her and her sister Margarita, who owns the restaurant, are getting too old to keep running it. Lepe says they’ve been ready to retire, “but they just didn’t know how to go about it.”
Las Cuatro Milpas has been a San Diego institution for nearly a century, appearing on the Netflix series Taco Chronicles and topping pretty much every list for Best Mexican food they’ve ever been nominated for. There have been a lot of expectations to live up to.
“I think if there wasn’t those pressures, they would have retired a long time ago,” Lepe says. “They’ve been working there for their entire lives… They’re just like, ‘We’re done. We had a good run.’” Putting the property up for sale one day after The San Diego Union-Tribune reported the restaurant’s debt of $60,000 in back taxes raised some eyebrows at the timing. But Lepe dismissed the correlation, claiming tax debts and liens like these are typical for small businesses, and the amount of money expected for the sale of the property far exceeds the debt.
“I don’t even know the number off the top of my head, but it’s nothing compared to the value of their real estate and the value of their business,” he says.
The current listing is for the building only, and at $1,995,000, includes two commercial units, eight residential properties, three garages, and one storage unit comprising nearly 12,000-square-feet in total. While Las Cuatro Milpas is not currently listed as for sale, he says that if the right offer came around, the Estudillos would consider selling the name, recipes, equipment—something Sofia originally said they would not do.
(So there is a chance that someone—ahem, cough—could buy Las Cuatro Milpas and keep the legend alive. Just saying.)
But, Lepe explains, taking the steps towards closing the door on an icon of this magnitude was a heavy decision for the family. And even after one day on the market, Lepe says he’s been inundated with interest. (Due to the overwhelming interest in both the property and the business, he’s collecting all bids to bring to the family on August 6.)
It’s a bittersweet development—on one hand, ending a run while you’re still on top is a pretty baller move. But closing the book on a cherished and longstanding pillar of the community will always leave a sense of loss. Lepe says in his talks with the family, they feel both sorrow and relief at the thought of rest after so many of their lives have been spent in service.
“I think it’s a thing to be celebrated,” he says. “I think a lot of people in the neighborhood are happy for them.”
San Diego Magazine reached out to the Estudillo family on Friday morning and has not yet received a reply. We will update this article as new information becomes available.
The post End of An Era—Las Cuatro Milpas Is For Sale appeared first on San Diego Magazine.
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