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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Modest fortune
  • Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:22:52 -0700


Modest fortune
http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/fe_food/article/0,2564,ALBQ_19844_3611175,00.htm
l
Ben Michael thanks God everyday for the little thrills life gives him,
especially the Old Town restaurant that bears his name

By Carrie Seidman Tribune Reporter March 11, 2005

His mother always knew she would name him Ben, after his father.

But lying in an Albuquerque hospital bed, a book of baby names on her lap,
she searched for a middle name that would capture something of what she
hoped for her third child.

"All of a sudden, I thought of Michael, the Archangel," says Irene
Barreras, speaking from the living room of her spotless Old Town home, a
chicken hissing in a pot in the nearby kitchen.

"Ben Michael."

She liked the idea of that chief angel, leading heaven's battle to defeat
Satan. Her son would be a commanding presence, aligned with the forces of
God and good.

So he was christened Ben Michael and ever after, that's who he was. Never
Little Ben or Benny or Junior or Mike or Mikey. Even when the other kids
were taunting and teasing him, even when they laughed at his skinny legs
and long eyelashes and his habit of peeking out shyly from behind his
mother's skirts, no one ever called him anything but "Ben Michael."

"You know how some people are Mary and some people are Ann but others can
only be MaryAnn?" his mother says now, 48 years later. "Ben Michael has
always been Ben Michael. It wouldn't seem right any other way."

So that is the name emblazoned two feet high on the sign of the
architectural oddity located just north of Mountain Road and Rio Grande
Boulevard Northwest.

"Ben Michael's Cafe," it says, in large white letters on a black
background.

There is no archangel with a sword on the storefront, and Ben Michael
Barreras is as likely to feed a degenerate as a deacon in the restaurant he
began building - mostly with his own two hands - more than 11 years ago.

BEN MICHAEL'S CAFE
2404 Pueblo Bonito Court N.W. Hours: 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m.5:30-9 p.m. Tuesday
through Thursday; 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m.5:30-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday; closed
Sunday and Monday.

Dinner for two: $30.

224-2817

Many people told him he couldn't, or shouldn't - friends from his old South
Broadway neighborhood, members of his extended family who urged him to
stick to his career as a pharmacist, and the city of Albuquerque, which
kept his permit tied up for more than three years over zoning issues.

So even now that the restaurant is in its eighth year, it still gives
Barreras a little thrill every day when he sees the name on that sign.

He counts the years and his blessings with crude wooden crosses he has
lined up on a mantle more than half-way up a 25-foot tall interior wall.

"I put one up every year on Palm Sunday," says Barreras, a handsome man
with a ponytail and a gentle presence. "I just thank God I'm here another
year."

The wall is made of 8,000 adobe bricks, which he made from mud in the
arroyo behind the 1940s house that makes up the other half of the
restaurant. He pulls out a worn scrapbook of pictures that detail the
building of his dream: the aspens he cut with an axe in the Jemez Mountains
for the latillas; the beams he carved by hand; the Spanish cedar doors and
the floor bricks he laid one by one on sand.

The day he opened the doors, with just $100 left in his pocket, Irene
Barreras - "Mama" to her children - was on hand to help him cook. Other
than a few tableside dishes he had learned as a waiter, he really didn't
know how.

"What did I know? I was a bachelor," says Barreras, who still maintains his
pharmacist's license. "But I wanted to cook fresh for people instead of
serving them Lipitor."

At the beginning, what he cooked was whatever Mama dictated.

"People would come in and say, 'Where's the menu?' " he says, "and Mama
would say, 'I'm the menu.' Then she would rush back in the kitchen and give
me advice."

"M'ito, put a little bit of this on it," she would say. Or, "M'ito, this is
how you do it." And, gradually, Barreras learned the seeds had to be taken
out of the chili, the carne adovada needed to be cooked for a long time,
and he could be faster on the job than anyone else.

As his service improved, so did business, but never so much that he had to
hire full-time employees. Instead, family members and friends comprise the
modest staff.

Sometimes - like on the day when only two itinerant musicians come in for
lunch - Barreras admits to looking wistfully toward the hopping bar at a
swank place across the street.

"It's so difficult to compete against them, you really can't," he says.
"You're not going to make 10 (thousand) on a Friday night. So, OK. Here,
it's about not just the in and out, but the after."

He's not embarrassed that the coffee cups don't match, that the back room
has formica tables, plastic chairs and vinyl tablecloths, or that he
doesn't accept credit cards. If someone doesn't have the cash, they can
stick the money through the door later - if they thought the meal was
worthy.

"That's old New Mexico, that's how Albuquerque used to be," muses Barreras,
who, as a young boy, watched his father extend 30-days credit to customers
at his South Broadway grocery store. "That's how America used to be."

Barreras is a throwback to those simpler days, and when you learn a little
more about him, you don't wonder why.

His family on both sides has been in Albuquerque since the 1600s and in the
grocery or bakery business nearly as long. He grew up in a house adjoining
his father's store, Ben's Market, with an older brother, Marcus, and older
sister, Jessie. He likes to remember those days of his boyhood - taking a
boat out on Lincoln Pond with Jessie, selling the candy apples his mama
made around the neighborhood, riding bikes "back when you could cross the
tracks."

He doesn't like to dwell on the teasing, the taunts and the trials.

"He was always the skinny runt," says his father, Ben Barreras. "He was
always picked on over everything. The last of the litter."

Actually, not quite the last. Nine years after Ben Michael's birth, his
brother Joseph joined the family and stole even his position as the baby.

"We paid more attention to Joseph," his father admits, sounding a little
guilty. "We did for him what we should have done for Ben Michael."

Being at the bottom of the pecking order left scars for a long time,
Barreras admits.

"I had an insecurity in my soul, I was always trying to please people," he
admits. "I never thought I was good enough."

Losing his spot on the baseball team his senior year of high school didn't
help. Nor did flunking out of college on his first try. Or the teachers who
told him he wasn't smart enough to become the architect he wanted to be.

But somewhere inside the skinny-legged, bashful boy was that avenging
angel. "I'll show them," he would think to himself. "I'll show them they're
wrong."

"And when Ben Michael makes up his mind to do something, he does it," Ben
Barreras says. "He does not give up."

Irene Barreras can't remember exactly when it was her son came out of his
shell. She knows it was sometime after Ben Michael graduated from St. Pius
High School, but before his abbreviated marriage at 25 to the daughter of
another longtime Albuquerque family.

"All of a sudden, the shy, little kid bloomed," says Irene, a deeply
religious woman. "That was an act of God. He realized what he could do."

Over the course of the next decade, Barreras did a lot. He returned to
college, got a pharmacist's license like his older brother, bought the
property that would become his restaurant, and designed and built his own
adobe home with mud excavated from the nearby Albuquerque Museum site.

The house is down a dirt road just off Rio Grande Boulevard that surrounds
an enclave of homes mostly belonging to Barreras family members. Ben
Michael lives next to Marcus who lives next to Jessie who lives next to an
aunt and an uncle who live across the way from Ben Sr. and Irene.

There are animals in a few of the yards, but his own yard has been dug up
for a garden that supplies tomatoes, herbs, garlic and fruit for the
restaurant and family members. He sees his parents at least once a day,
carefully removing muddy boots before entering their back door without
knocking.

"You home, Pop?" he calls out as he enters. "How you doin'?"

His life is simple, he says, sometimes solitary and always reverent.
Tuesday through Saturday, lunch through dinner, he is at the restaurant,
customers or not.

As for the other days, "Sundays are God's and Mondays are mine," says
Barreras, who likes to go fishing on his day off.

Even his smallest accomplishment is one more strike back at the nay-sayers
that plagued his early years. When he recently purchased a new bed - the
first he'd ever bought for himself - "I felt like a king."

"For some people that would be nothing," Barreras adds. "For me, I was all
happy."

Yet he doesn't flaunt whatever success he's had and he shares everything he
owns; he's the first to offer a convict on work-release temporary
employment or slip a niece going to the circus an extra $10.

"No es faceto," Irene Barreras says. "Do you know what that means? He's not
a smart aleck. He does not 'flair' himself."

There are only a few things Ben Michael Barreras can think of that would
make his life more complete. He'd like to marry again so he could hold
hands with his wife in adjoining recliners, like his parents sometimes do,
after 53 years of marriage.

Old demons die hard.

"But I'm scared of someone not being able to stand by me and believe in me
and accept me for who I am," he says, a flash of insecurity resurfacing.

More than anything else, he would like to be reunited with Marisa, his
11-year-old daughter from an unmarried union, whom he gave up custody of
eight years ago. He clings to the homemade cards she makes for him, sends
her money and waits for the day when he can have his "baby girl" in his
life again.

His father says he used to respond to affronts with temper and outbursts he
later regretted. Barreras admits "I'm not perfect; I have anger in me." But
he's since decided there's a better way to deal with it.

"You have a choice each day to decide what you'll do," Barreras says.
"You're given the opportunity to love or to hate.

"I found out love works pretty good."

Walking the five-minute stroll to the restaurant from his home, Barreras
passes by an ancient and towering tree that rustles with each passing
breeze.

"See that oak?" he says. "Sometimes you can hear God speaking to you."

He cocks his head to listen.

"He's telling me it's a good day."

A good day, he says, is one on which he enjoys a morning swim at the
University of New Mexico pool, checks in with his family and then goes to
the restaurant, where he plays a few blues bars on the upright piano and
makes fresh, simple food for his customers.

Sometimes when they first meet him, people ask what they should call him:
Is Michael his last name? Does he go by Ben alone? What does he prefer?

"Ben, Ben Michael, it doesn't matter," Barreras says, feeling certain now
of who he is no matter what he's called.

"You can call me anything you like," he laughs. "Just don't call me late
for dinner."





  • [Livingontheland] Modest fortune, Tradingpost, 03/15/2005

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