Chi-Chi’s once filled dining rooms with fajitas and frozen margaritas. Will diners still buy what it’s selling?
When I was in college at California State University, Northridge, Monday nights meant sorority meetings that sometimes stretched late into the evening. Afterward, we’d usually end up at Denny’s for midnight mozzarella sticks, boneless Buffalo wings dipped in ranch, and water with lemon. If we finished official Gamma business before 10 p.m., we might switch it up with a visit to Acapulco, a Pasadena-based Mexican-ish chain that was beloved to us broke college students more for its $1 Margarita Mondays specials than for its sizzling sirloin steak fajita platters. It wasn’t the Mexican food many of us grew up with in Southern California—hearty guisados and pozoles, slow-cooked beans from the olla—but rather a ritual for affordable comfort, maybe a little pop-up karaoke session set up next to the bar, where we could belt out our most obnoxious renditions of ’80s throwbacks (Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” has always been a favorite of mine).
And those rituals weren’t unique. Similar scenes were playing out under neon signs and faux-cantina decor across the country. For decades, Chi-Chi’s offered its own version of “Mexican” dining: chimichangas as big as your head to go with giant goblet-size margaritas and family celebrations staged in suburban strip malls. Founded in 1975 in the Twin Cities suburb of Richfield, Minnesota, by restaurateur Marno McDermott and former Green Bay Packers wide receiver Max McGee, the chain helped fuel America’s casual-dining Mexican food boom. It grew to more than 200 locations across 19 states at its peak in the 1990s before shuttering its remaining US outlets in 2004, a year after a hepatitis A outbreak tied to contaminated green onions in salsa at a Chi-Chi’s restaurant outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, led to four deaths and hundreds of sick diners.
In its earlier days in places like Flint, Michigan, at the start of the 1980s, fans gravitated toward those chimichangas, Chi-Chi’s’ fried ice cream and its silly birthday songs. Monica Alvarez, who worked at the Chi-Chi’s location on Miller Road in the early 1980s, recalls packed dining rooms, endless baskets of airy, crispy tortilla chips, and lines out the door. “It was nonstop—we’d clear one table, and another party was already waiting to sit,” she recalls. Families would push multiple tables together to make space for birthday celebrations, the local autoworkers crowded into happy hour after working the production line, and the shareable Mexican pizzas topped with cumin-dusted ground beef were the stuff of legend for Alvarez and her coworkers. “There was always a wait, always this energy. People just wanted to be there.”
Part of the appeal at Mexican American chains like Chi-Chi’s, Acapulco (founded in 1960), and California-based El Torito (1954) was simple: they promised value, family-friendly settings, and menus that delivered the same heaping platters, often comprised of a choose-your-own-adventure combo with entrees like enchiladas encased in molten Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese, usually served with a glistening scoop of refried beans and rice dubbed as “Spanish,” no matter where you were in the country. They offered comfort in their consistency—places where you knew what to expect, and you got what you expected.
But the energy Alvarez remembers so vividly didn’t last. By the 1990s, the buzz that once made Chi-Chi’s a magnet for large gatherings had begun to fade as tastes shifted. Across the United States, taquerías and mom-and-pop Mexican restaurants gained traction, offering food that felt closer to home for Mexican Americans and newly arrived immigrant families and more enticing for diners searching for “authenticity.”
“Once you have this influx of Mexican migration across the United States, you really start to see [taquerías] blow up, and so the sit-down places, by the ’90s, they’re slowly starting to fade away,” says Gustavo Arellano, journalist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
In 1993, fast-casual spots like Chipotle helped to widen the scope, with the mainstream introduction Mission-style–inspired burritos out of of San Francisco, capturing younger crowds with a different promise: speed, customization, and an aura of freshness—all wrapped in a 12-inch flour tortilla. By the time Chi-Chi’s closed its US restaurants for good, its formula for outsize portions and endless chips and salsa had been replaced.
Now, after more than two decades, Chi-Chi’s is staging a comeback. Its first U.S. restaurant opened on October 6 at 1602 West End Boulevard in suburban St. Louis Park, led by Michael McDermott, son of the chain’s co-founder. McDermott previously founded Rojo’s Mexican Grill, another Midwest chain, and has converted the former St. Louis Park Rojo’s into the new Chi-Chi’s, with plans to do the same at the last remaining Rojo’s site in Maple Grove.
McDermott did not respond to requests for an interview, but a press release reveals a menu that mixes some of the chain’s original favorites, like the original golden crisped chimichanga along with newcomers, like quesabirria with consommé for dipping.
The comeback efforts came through a StartEngine crowdfunding campaign and a deal with Hormel Foods, which owns the Chi-Chi’s trademark and continues to sell Chi-Chi’s branded grocery items like jarred queso dip and taco seasoning, granting McDermott the rights to use the name for restaurants again. The crowdfunding pitch leans on nostalgia, giving longtime fans a chance to invest in bringing the chain back. No, investors don’t get perks like free chimichangas for life; instead they receive equity in Chi-Chi’s Restaurants, LLC, with potential financial upside if the revival succeeds. More than 2,000 people have already invested over $2.3 million, according a company rep.
But nostalgia has its limits. Arellano has long argued that chains like Chi-Chi’s mattered because they normalized Mexican food for mainstream America, even if in caricature, and primed the way for more authentic iterations of the cuisine down the line. Still, he notes, American dining has moved far beyond Chi-Chi’s frozen margaritas and fried ice cream.
If Chi-Chi’s is banking on drawing in a customer base that remembers the chain in its heyday, Arellano says, many of those fans are already in their 50s and older.
“You’re not talking about anyone 30 and younger, because they weren’t even born or were infants and aren’t able to remember the food. All these people 30 and younger have grown up with Mexican food, whether you’re in the South or the Midwest, and I don’t see them wanting to try this style of food,” he says. “Nothing against [Michael McDermott], but I seriously doubt his food is any good or has any flavor compared to the options that are out there already.”
Now, after more than two decades, Chi-Chi’s is staging a comeback.
It’s not just culinary; it’s cultural. Americans don’t dine out the way they once did, meaning fewer family meals at mid-tier chains like Chi-Chi’s. Instead people are more selective with their dollars, paying attention not only to taste but to the values and stories behind the food they eat. At the same time, the rise of value menus at chains like Applebee’s and IHOP shows that diners are still hunting for deals, even as they save up for fewer outings that are .
The Mexican food scene in the Midwestern region that birthed Chi-Chi’s has also changed dramatically and is now pushing the cuisine forward. That’s what places like Vecino in Detroit offer, where housemade masa anchors Oaxaca and Mexico City–inspired dishes like tetelas made with blue corn and filled with carrot tinga paired with a lively, fruit-forward glass of Casa Jipi rosé from Baja’s wine region of Valle de Guadalupe—just one among the lineup of thoughtfully curated Mexican wines on the menu. In Chicago’s Logan Square, chef Diana Dávila Boldin, a James Beard Award nominee and multiple-time semifinalist since her restaurant Mi Tocaya Antojería opened in 2017, invites diners to experience her riffs on the nostalgia of growing up in a Mexican household, expressed through a melody of regionally inspired bites like pan-crisped beef lengua with peanut butter. And in Door County, Wisconsin, the newly opened La Sirena—a Mexican-inspired project from Carlos Salgado, the acclaimed chef behind the shuttered Orange County destination Taco María—underscores how even rural corners of the Upper Midwest are part of this evolution, offering dishes using locally sourced ingredients like cold climate lamb birria and pescadillas made with smoked white sturgeon.
In the Twin Cities, the wife-and-husband duo Karen and Cristian de León have a growing set of dining concepts that includes the contemporary Xela’s by El Sazón. The two explain that they don’t chase “authenticity,” instead leaning into indigenous ingredients and overlaps between their Guatemalan and Mexican backgrounds to create modern interpretations of Mayan cuisine. Along with Xela’s chef de cuisine Jose Cortes, the team makes masa-based creations like artfully presented tlacoyos filled with chicharrón seasoned with ranchera salsa and tamales stuffed with bison in a broth made with a Guatemalan salsa called chirmol.
For Karen de León, who moved from Mexico City to Minnesota at age 10, Chi-Chi’s was mostly about the atmosphere; she remembers going once or twice as a teenager in Richfield, where her closest location hosted Latin dance nights. “Back then, there weren’t many places to go dancing, and they were one of the first to do it,” she recalled. However imperfectly, those nights at Chi-Chi’s created a space that felt connected to her community’s culture.
The Mexican food scene in the Midwestern region that birthed Chi-Chi’s has also changed dramatically and is now pushing the cuisine forward.
Today, leading her own restaurants, Karen sees clearly the contrast between what Chi-Chi’s once offered and what she and her husband are building now: “People expected big platters and big margaritas,” she said. “There’s more to it, there’s the technique, there’s the chef-driven portion of it, we do everything from scratch. That’s where the value comes in.”
Alvarez still looks back fondly on the long nights serving crowded tables in Michigan, but she doubts that same family-driven fanfare would land today. “Maybe if it was more like bar food, more appetizers you could share,” she said, but, as a diner now, “I just don’t see those big groups anymore.”
Arellano is more blunt: for him, the era of Chi-Chi’s and its West Coast rival El Torito has passed. Nostalgia may bring back memories, but not, he argues, the restaurant itself. “The problem I’ve always had with nostalgia is that it tries to take you back to a place that you could never go back to,” he says. “Too often, it blinds you to what’s good right now and also to how horrible, objectively, it was [in the past].”