Jeffrey Flores, left, and Auxi Navarro at Flaps and Racks and Acai Paradise, 3253 E. Valencia Road.
Jeffrey Flores was expecting the sneeze guards for his new restaurant to arrive last Monday, but a recent COVID-19 outbreak at the factory forced a delay.
So when he opens his twin south-side restaurants on Monday, Nov. 22, he will make do with plastic covering.
After months of waiting for equipment to arrive and struggling to hire enough staff for Flaps and Racks and Acai Paradise at 3253 E. Valencia Road, he and his partner/wife Auxi Navarro weren’t about to let a sneeze guard stall them.
“It’s a sigh of relief to finally open, but it is something that is a little bit scary, too,” Flores said late last week, admitting that he still doesn’t have the number of employees he thinks he’ll need. “We don’t have the full manpower and I guess that is the way it is and the way it will be.”
Flores and Navarro, who are in the venture with Flores’s brother Miguel and sister Keila, announced plans for the restaurants in August and had hoped to open by September.
The supply chain hiccups and hiring woes pushed the opening back, from a couple of weeks at first to a couple of months by the time they take their first order of chile vera wings at Flaps and Rack or housemade oatmeal and acai bowls at Acai Paradise on Monday.
Junior Roman, left, and Flaps and Racks manager Miguel Flores talk while the work goes on around them at Flaps and Racks restaurant and its companion, Acai Paradise.
The ventures are across the street from Flores’s Los Betos restaurant, 3216 E. Valencia, Flores’s first Tucson restaurant venture that he and Miguel bought a few years after he moved to Tucson from his native Puerto Rico in 2000.
