52Your Hosts

Silverio Trujillo spent years at the stoves of a Tex-Mex chain before he and his wife Delia opened a little place of their own in 1978, and in 1981 they bought the old Black Angus steakhouse on Waco's traffic circle and gave the city Trujillo's Comedor y Cantina. His daughters say he never met a stranger — he learned your name, remembered your order, worked the room like it was his living room, because it was. He passed in 2008; Delia and the daughters kept the stoves lit, and the restaurant is still feeding Waco from the same spot on the circle.

On the yellow-green flank of the building, Waco muralist Cade Kegerreis — born here, Baylor art degree, walls all over town — painted the family car this restaurant deserved: a vintage VW Beetle in the green, white and red of the Mexican flag, a saguaro sprouting on the door panel, and, right where a delivery company would print its phone number, a hand-lettered introduction: SILVERIO & DELIA TRUJILLO, YOUR HOSTS. All these years after Silverio left the room, the wall still introduces him first.