Owners of Tres Mijas food truck to open Bay St. eatery

By Zander Frost, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tres Mijas, the popular Mexican food truck owned by Mike and Jenna Fernandez of Glens Falls, is opening a brick and mortar location, downtown at 21 Bay Street in the Rogers Building.

It was home most recently of Laurella’s Restaurant and before that Seafood on the Bay.

Mike said they’ll start as take-out only, until they can get their liquor license. Then they’ll open in full.

“We’d just like to create a fun atmosphere that people would like to come and hang out, have drinks,” Mike said.

The name Tres Mijas comes from Mike and Jenna’s three daughters — tres, meaning three, and slang combining mi & hijas for “my daughters.”

Mike said his father Joe is Mexican. Mike grew up in California until his family moved to Vermont when he was 11.

“There was just no Mexican food that we could find,” he said. So he says his mom, Brenda, learned everything about Mexican cooking that she could from his grandmother, her mother-in-law.

“My mom was a phenomenal cook, just to start with. That’s what her dad did,” Mike said. “So basically because of my mom, we were able to learn this stuff.”

Ultimately, the family opened a take-out restaurant in Shelburne, Vermont that operated for a few years.

Mike said he went to college at the University of Vermont and later moved back to California. Eventually he met Jenna, née Naylor, while on a trip with a mutual friend in the Outer Banks.

Jenna is from Glens Falls, GF High Class of 2005, and she teaches at the Glens Falls Middle School.

They moved back here in 2013.

Mike describes their food as “original, authentic, because not much has changed from those recipes for over 100 years that my grandparents, my parents made the food that way….

“The only thing that’s changed is really just the availability of ingredients

Mike said he’s long worked in the service industry. He said he was a bartender in Saratoga Springs “at the old Bullpen — Caroline Street Pub — and at the Horseshoe.”

He said eyed doing a food truck for years. Pre-pandemic, he said, they started making a business plan, and got price quotes for a truck/trailer.

But during Covid, “the food truck craze had already hit,” Mike said, and prices “doubled. So I searched high and low,” on the Internet for another option.

He found it in Houston, Texas, where a shop made food trucks. “My dad found their website. They just had some small ad only in Spanish, and he was like, I think you should just call these guys.”

Mike said, “They were a group of Mexican guys, they didn’t speak a lot of English. I had my dad talk to them, and they were really nervous about building a trailer for somebody from far away. They were really skeptical if I was going to show up for it.

“So I flew out there and met them, I checked out their shop, and they were awesome, and building really nice trailers. I told them, I promise I’ll be back. I’ll pay you half the money now.

“And they built the trailer. They asked me for three months — they called me back two months later and told me to come pick it up.

“So I drove to Houston, and I drove it back,” Mike said. He said the trailer is “phenomenal. I think we put 30,000 miles on this trailer, almost.”

Was it scary to launch the truck biz?

“It was,” Mike said. “I already had a family, and I own a home in Glens Falls. So there’s a fair amount of responsibility on my plate already.

“It was really a juggle of working two jobs, doing this and part-time work, landscaping and such with a friend, to make it work the first year.”

He said it started to take off after about six months, and the “stress level went down.”

In the beginning, Mike said, “We did a lot of public vending on the street, just to get our name out there.”

But at the end of their first year, they started booking “corporate things that we didn’t see coming” — like the Target and Ace Warehouses in Wilton. At Target, he says, “we fed 1,600 employees there.”

“Now we bounce around the Capital Region, we do all the nursing homes, a lot of schools, teacher appreciation events.”
Mike said they’ve got a “streamlined” system — with a lot of family involved.

“My dad helps me out quite a bit, and my wife really helps me out in terms of responding to the emails and the marketing and such.”

In terms of opening a brick and mortar space, Mike said, “it had to make sense.”

“I was perfectly happy doing the food truck, and I considered possibly opening a second food truck,” he said.

But he said this opportunity on the corner of Maple and Bay made sense. The size was right as was the location.

“I wanted to be in Glens Falls, but there are spots in Glens Falls I feel like are tough for business,” he said.

“But given the timing with what’s happening on South Street and just the direction Glens Falls has been headed since I moved here, I felt like that particular location was a great spot.”

Their most popular menu items?

“It changes every year. Last year it was burritos and burrito bowls,” Mike said. “This year, taquitos are really taking off. Enchiladas are wildly popular.”

“Like a chili relleno, we have a few different dishes that that we serve in a traditional way that you just don’t really see anywhere around here,” he said.

Mike emphasizes that Mexican cuisine is widely diverse. His family is from Zacatecas.

“Mexico is such a massive country, that just because you’ve had Mexican food somewhere — that could be a completely different region of Mexico and completely different,” he said.

“The fact that there are other Mexican places in town — two people have asked me — and I firmly believe we could coexist because our food is different.”

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