Time forgot Baha Burger, the tiny cantaloupe-colored drive-in
where Monterey and Seventh streets meet
– but its customers never have.
Gilroy – Time forgot Baha Burger, the tiny cantaloupe-colored drive-in where Monterey and Seventh streets meet – but its customers never have.
“I’ve lived in Texas. I’ve lived in Chicago. And always I remembered Baha Burger,” said Rafael Quezada, a machine operator taking his lunch break on a dog’s-breath summer day. “I’d always ask people, ‘Is Baha still there?’ ”
And it is. Nearly 40 years after Al Tamayo bought the pint-sized shop from an Iranian student who couldn’t shill burgers in Spanish, the greasy spoon remains, an icon of old Gilroy in the city’s rapidly changing downtown. Tamayo, now thin-haired and stooped, still presides over the family business, alongside wife Esther and daughter Marina Tamayo Barrientez.
It’s no franchise: Handwritten signs list specials such as linguica, cheeseburgers, shrimp and menudo, $1 pickles and 25-cent boxes of “corazones dulces” – Necco candy hearts. Egg timers gauge the rarity of beef patties browning on the grill, while Barrientez punches sums into a calculator by hand, behind a sliding plastic window. She waves off the charge for an extra jalapeño; she knows most of her customers by name.
“It hasn’t changed in 30 years,” said David Crocker, an auto mechanic who grew up alongside the fast-food joint. “And that’s what I like.”
Barrientez literally grew up at Baha Burger, assembling brown-bagged meals alongside her five siblings – though her dainty figure doesn’t seem to compute with a lifetime downing onion rings. She rattles off her memories rapidly as she scurries around the cramped kitchen, fishing a basket of fries out of oil.
“My folks didn’t believe in babysitting,” she said. “But it wasn’t a chore. It’s not hard labor. My dad makes it fun.”
Al Tamayo stumbled upon the shop while working as a janitor in Gilroy schools, he said. He’d owned restaurants in Texas and Arizona – both of them mistakes, he clucks – before he heard rumors of big money picking prunes and garlic in Gilroy.
In 1960, he headed west. The rumors were false.
“We got stuck here,” he said simply. “When we get to town, we don’t know nobody. We got no house, no nothing.”
The drive-in belonged to an Iranian student named Bahadin Godi – Tamayo isn’t sure of the spelling – whose visa was running out, Tamayo said. In 1968, when immigration came knocking, the student offered Tamayo the shop, Tamayo pooled his money to buy it, and named it “Baha” after its first owner, he explained.
Three years later, the Gilroy joint gained regional acclaim when a Wheeler Manor senior, Baha Burger regular Jean Bedell, submitted his burger in a San Jose Mercury News contest.
“Of all the fast food, I told her, we have no chance to win,” Tamayo recalled. ” ‘But you make a good cheeseburger,’ ” she said. ” ‘How much it cost?’ we ask. ‘Nothing! It’s a contest.’ ”
“So I say sure,” Tamayo concluded. “Then we find out we win! We very happy … Maybe this hamburger come from heaven.”
The yellowed article that dubbed his burger the best available for less than 50 cents still hangs, wrapped in plastic, behind the counter. Readers from Los Angeles and Nevada made a point of stopping in Gilroy to sample the burger, he said – confirming what locals already knew.
“It’s the best place,” said Cruz Rodriguez, a lifelong Gilroy resident, over the grunts of video-game boxers slugging it out in the astroturf-lined patio. Her daughter, 7-year-old Asia Cordova, ogled the Super Mario pinball machine. “Before my father died, I used to bring him here. We’d walk all the way from Murray Avenue. We loved it.”
“They’ve got the same clientele,” said Crocker. “But it’s still tough, staying in business. I don’t like to see all the change downtown – and we worry they’re next.”
A new downtown arts center is slated to open across the street from Baha Burger, part of sweeping plans that have revamped the quaint city center. But the fresh sidewalks and repaved streets line rows of empty storefronts, speckled with only occasional passers-by. Rodriguez gazes down Monterey Street, surprised at how few people she sees; Crocker is unimpressed. Barrientez shrugs.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “But it doesn’t affect us. We do well whether they beautify or not.”
Barrientez spreads a toasted bun with mustard, and scatters it with onions.
“To me, a hamburger is not a hamburger,” she said. “A fry is not a fry. I eat everywhere else – it’s not the same. It’s about you. We like you.”
“It’s real food,” agreed Rodriguez, brushing back her cloud of dark hair. “McDonald’s is OK once in a while. But no – it’s not the same.”
