COVID-19 has been hard on her cafe, so this Wichita restaurateur is trying something new
Raquel Ramirez runs a restaurant in an office building, and that’s a problem during a pandemic, when many people are working from home.
The business just isn’t there at her Roxie’s on the River, the cafe she opened in November 2018 inside the Farm Credit Bank Building at 245 N. Waco.
So Ramirez, a restaurant owner who has reinvented her business several times over the past couple of years, is ready to try something new — again.
She’s just purchased a food truck, and she plans to open it in October. She’ll call it Roxie’s on the Go.
“With COVID happening, I had to do something,” she said about the decision. “Traffic is just not there like it was.”
She’ll keep the cafe but open it only three days a week, she said. For now, she’s opening on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. When she gets the truck up and running, she’ll switch to a Monday-through-Wednesday schedule and take the truck out later in the week and on weekends.
It will serve Ramirez’s signature fried tacos plus street tacos, carne asada fries and enchiladas. On occasional Saturday mornings, she’ll open and serve coffee and the homemade cinnamon rolls that put her on the Wichita food map, she said.
Ramirez bought her truck from the owners of Taco Momma’s, a Mexican food truck that closed in June. She’s in the process of getting it wrapped with her logo.
She’s hoping to find a few regular places to set up and says the truck will also be available for private parties. She’ll update her location on the Roxie’s on the River Facebook page but hopes to take the truck out at least twice a week.
It will be Ramirez’s fourth food business in Wichita in two years. She once operated a cafe called The Lunchbox on the ground floor of the High Touch building, where she became known for her homemade cinnamon rolls.
It closed in the summer of 2018, and she immediately moved into the little building at 11th and Bitting in Riverside, running it as a snack hut called Roxie’s in Riverside. She closed that business last summer and has been running Roxie’s on the River for almost two years.
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