Eric Flores is the player you want on your team.
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Although he's only five-foot 10-inches tall (177cm), he was an outside hitter in the game he has always loved - volleyball.
"I was a very short outside hitter," he says. "But I could jump. I was five-foot-10, but I could play with the big boys. I've got very long arms and I can jump."
Flores grew up in Watsonville, California, in southern Santa Cruz county on the central California coast, a rich agricultural district with a year-round temperate climate (great for strawberries, apples, lettuce, mushrooms, broccoli and more). It was a cultural melting pot, with a large Latino workforce.
He was born in the US, the son of a single mum, Stella Flores, who was born in the Philippines and moved to the US as a child. He spent a lot of time with his neighbours, a Mexican American family, who influenced his love of Mexican food.
"Some of my earliest memories were going out on bike rides, the dad was an avid cyclist," Flores recalls of his youth. "The thing for us was to go out and spend time together, as a family if you will, and then we'd ride to our nearest taqueria and order some tacos, or a nice plate of chili verde with some tortillas. That was the thing to do, really, have a nice Mexican meal after a bike ride."
Family and food. Sticks to you like good cooking.
Fast forward about four decades and you will find Eric Flores most days at Antojitos, the California-style taqueria he owns with his wife Kristy and sister-in-law Bernadette on Steel Street in Newcastle West. The family restaurant with its laid-back vibe and nod to genuine Mexican cuisine is a tribute to all three of them for persistence and hard work.
It's hard to imagine how they got here, considering the humble beginnings of Antojitos.
Eric Flores never trained as a chef. He learned to cook for himself early, with his mum still at work when he got home from school. His mum did know how to cook (Filipino staples like chicken adobe and pancit are part of his food DNA), but Eric absorbed much of his appreciation from the strong Latino influence in his neighbourhood (all of California, for that matter).
He met Kristy, an Australian, in California where she was a basketball coach (and he was a volleyball coach). They moved to Australia in 2009, and on to Newcastle in 2014. It was here, in Newcastle, that Flores decided to feed his need to create Mexican food.
Eric, with help from Bernadette, established a food stall at the 3 Peas Sunday market at Teralba. They sold three things: breakfast tacos, burritos and mulitas. "That was it," Flores says. "Just really, really simple. The focus at that time was to do really fresh, really simple, great Mexican street food."
It was not an overnight success.
After spending all day Saturday doing preparation, and hitting the market early (it opened at 7am), and then cleaning up at the end of the day, they might have only sold 30 orders.
Everything was made from scratch. Flores describes the breakfast taco: "a bit of scrambled egg, chorizo, our own salsa - naranja - which will still use today, our own avocado sauce - aguacate - making it there at the markets, with the same recipe we use today, and coriander, pico de gallo and that's basically it."
The breakfast tacos were two for $10. They had a veggie version of it, too, with spinach and potato.
"We were pressing our own tortillas, making our own salsas, using simple cooking equipment [which street food is really, right, you don't have a huge commercial kitchen in street food]," he says. "You have a very simple set-up and you just do a minimal amount, but you do it really, really well. And that was our focus."
No way did Flores fathom where that experience would eventually take him.
It's not hard to imagine Flores as a great sports coach. He is unflappable. He's definitely one for playing the long game. When he started the 3 Peas market stall, he was working in commercial real estate in Newcastle, but he was dabbling in community projects with Newcastle Now.
His real estate work found him working with landlords and commercial tenants, including restaurants. He was picking up vital knowledge all the time, even though he'd never run a restaurant.
And his own field intelligence from the Teralba markets signalled to him that he was on the right track.
"We felt that the people who were having our food were really happy, they really enjoyed it," he says. "We knew we had a good product. But it was Mexican food in the morning, which is a, em, probably a bit of a novelty. To try to convince people to eat tacos for breakfast is not the easiest thing to do.
"But when we look back on it, you just think, that's what really makes a difference, to be different, if you're doing something that everyone is doing, if we were trying to sell bacon and egg rolls, or trying to sell eggs on toast, we're not going to create waves. But we knew it was about being persistent, really confident and really persistent in what you're doing."
What he also took away from that experience was that he had a customer.
"[Marketing expert] Seth Godin talks about tribes, I really believe in that a lot," Flores says. "We're not here to please everyone. We're just trying to create a unique product that we really believe in. And the ones you do capture, they tend to come back day after day."
In late 2015 Flores put it all on the line, opening Antojitos in a former butcher shop on Young Street, Carrington. It had room for 10 customers.
"I just happened to be driving by and noticed a for lease sign in the window of this building," he says. "I thought, 'OK let's give this a go'. I spoke to owner, he liked the idea."
His wife Kristy was totally supportive.
"It was a big thing. I had to leave my job and take a risk and start this business. The idea was to take what we were doing at the market stall and plonk it inside a little butcher shop in Carrington, all of our cooking equipment."
It certainly was a dream.
"I think we spent $10,000 just to get going," he says. "I did everything myself. We only signed a one-year lease. When I think back on it, going to start a business and grow a business all in one year. It was kind of crazy."
Word of mouth spread about this great Mexican taqueria. They stopped serving breakfast, and starting opening in the evenings. Customers came in droves. It didn't seem to matter that sometimes it took an hour and half to get your order, they still came.
"We were running out of room, we had to landscape the backyard, which was never used," Flores says. "We were spilling out onto the street, grabbing milk crates, foldable tables, anywhere people could sit. We were starting making our own rules, trying to accommodate more people.
"The bottle shop next store loved us. We were BYO and people were coming for our food. They would walk next door and grab a couple of six-packs - or cartons - and it turned into a real social atmosphere, and we had live music, stuff going on."
In April 2018, Antojitos completed the move to Steel Street in Newcastle West, converting a huge warehouse into cool taqueria that seats 100. Now, some days they knock over 500 orders, still making every thing fresh, including the corn chips. It is doing triple the turnover it had in Carrington.
Flores hasn't lost any of his enthusiasm for the task, and he's solid on who he is and what he's about.
"I guess what its really about. I can say I'm Filipino. But I was born in California, so I'm an American. I was raised in a city with a strong Mexican population, so really what is my culture. Am I Filipino? Am I American? Am I Mexican? I'm probably all of the above, I guess. I guess that's why I really embrace Mexican food. There's just so many things I appreciate about it ... the food is about survival. But at the same time, it's more than that. It's about doing the best with what you have. I talk about this all the time. It's make the best of what you have. And be proud of what you have to offer."
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