Resurrected Dallas Tex-Mex restaurant will close once again

Tex-Mex restaurant Casa Rosa is closing after its second run in Dallas.

The restaurant opened in 1981 at Lovers Lane and Inwood Road, a project from Gilbert Cuellar Jr., whose family founded El Chico. Casa Rosa closed in the mid-2000s, just a memory for some 20 years, until Cuellar announced he’d bring back the pink-hued restaurant in 2022.

Casa Rosa reopened a few miles from the original, near Lemmon Avenue and Inwood Road in Dallas, a few days before Cinco de Mayo in 2022. It sold fajitas and margaritas there for almost exactly two years. Cuellar has chosen Cinco de Mayo in 2024 as Casa Rosa’s last day open.

He said rent costs and lower-than-expected sales in 2023 hurt the restaurant.

Sales were better in 2024, he said — “up 40% to 45% this year over last year.”

“It’s encouraging, and it shows that people like what they see. It just wasn’t enough time to make it stick.”

Cuellar said he asked the landlord for lower rent and didn’t get it.

So far, Cuellar doesn’t have immediate plans to relocate Casa Rosa. But, it could happen. His family has been in the restaurant business for nearly 100 years, since 1928, and Cuellar says he’s not done in the business yet.

Casa Rosa was named after the Spanish-style pink home Cuellar’s father built in Dallas decades ago. The new restaurant resembled the old one, for nostalgia’s sake, and both had pink walls.

Customers “come in and go, ‘Oh wow, it looks just the same as it used to,’” Cuellar said.

He enjoyed being one of the early restaurants to sell fajitas in North Texas, and he said Casa Rosa’s fajita platters have changed very little over the years. “It’s nice to know something has that kind of ability to survive,” he said.

He’ll miss the customers more than anything else, he said.

The restaurant will keep up its popular Wednesday enchilada dinner special until it closes. As regulars know, a plate of cheese, beef or chicken enchiladas costs just $6.95 on Wednesdays, all day.

Casa Rosa is at 5622 Lemmon Ave., Dallas. It will close after dinner on May 5, 2024.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on X (formerly Twitter) at @sblaskovich.