PHARR — You have to wonder, stepping into Irma’s Sweet Shoppe, how on earth anyone packed so much character into 5,000 square feet.
You don’t have much longer to wonder — the shop is closing its doors on Sept. 1, and the combination of spunk, charisma and labor that turned the bakery/diner/antique store into a Rio Grande Valley staple over the past 40 years is headed elsewhere.
The end is obviously nigh for the shop when you step through the front door. There’s a buyer lined up who doesn’t have any use for the nicknacks and trinkets that helped give the eatery its distinctive flair, and a garish sign outside announces an auction for later this month.
Inside it’s apparent that the auctioneer has done their best to carve up all of that stuff into something manageable.
A battalion of antique salt and pepper shakers are lined up in rows on one table. A much-talked about Elvis suit proudly stands on display prominently in front. Crystal and crockery and cookie cutters have all been arrayed in some semblance of order, ready for the auctioneer’s block.
Some of it defies categorization. On one rack there’s an unopened bottle of grapefruit wine from a Queen Citriana festival of many years ago. A desk name plate for Dario Martinez, Commissioner Place #2, peeks down at you from a top shelf in a corner.
Closing the business is a gradual affair. Lunch is on permanent hiatus, and though the bakers are still baking and breakfasts are still being served, most of the tables are gone or occupied.
It’s bittersweet. You can feel the life seeping out of the joint.
Had you walked through the delightful clutter on a morning last week, to the back of the storefront, you would have found owner Irma Elizondo at a large round table. There you find the old Irma’s Sweet Shoppe, how it’s really supposed to be.
Joined by regulars who’ve been coming in for years, Irma holds court at that table. She’s the undisputed queen, presiding over banter and anecdotes and gossip.
The first item on the agenda? The Monitor was conspicuously absent from her doorstep that morning.
“It’s like clockwork,” she said. Every Tuesday, I don’t get the paper. So I call over there and finally somebody says — I record them — ‘We will be right over with the paper.’ At 2:30 in the afternoon? Who in the hell wants to read the paper at 2:30 in the afternoon?”
That’s what you get with Irma. She says the secret of her success is love. She’s right — it’s the sort of honest, potentially abrasive, no holds barred affection that you’d get sitting at an aunt’s kitchen table after church on a Sunday.
Irma looks more like that aunt would, too, than how you’d picture a commercial baker. Trim and energetic, Irma is decked out in jewelry, emanating class and personality.
A trio of regulars straggle in for coffee as the morning progresses. The paper tardily arrives and they skim through the headlines. They might be better off, for news about Pharr, to ask Irma. She seems to know all of it.
The talk turns to Irma’s hot tub, which has been on the fritz. One of the regulars offers an opinion. He seems less eager when Irma suggests he just come on down and fix it himself.
The regulars don’t so much order tacos as Irma decides it’s time they have some. She’s a whirlwind in the kitchen, simmering up potatoes and heating the beans, spatula clicking rhythmically on the flat-top. Irma delights in poking fun at her regulars’ preferences.
One likes two and a half tortillas with his taco. Another likes salsa, but only a little bit of it.
“The one with the papas con huevos doesn’t like a lot of salsa,” she says, delicately placing a plastic spoon on a plate. “So I give him salsa in a teaspoon! Go to any other restaurant and ask for salsa in a teaspoon, and they’d throw him out.”
Years ago, on a busy day, some Winter Texan complained his eggs were overdone.
Irma cussed to herself and rolled her eyes. Then she cracked two eggs, put them in a bowl raw, stepped up to the man’s table and plunked them down in front of him.
“He was a friend for the rest of his life,” she said.
The trio of diners from this week fish out some bills from their pockets. Regulars pay too, Irma says, and they tip appropriately. If not, she’ll tell them so.
Irma is, aside from her personality, best known for her cookies and bars, often packed up into a gift basket. Baskets are popular during the holidays and when students head back to campus for the fall. One time, Irma remembers, she had to make about 5,000 red targets for a Target opening.
Over the years Irma and her bakers spent long mornings pounding out dough, carving up hundreds of square feet of baked goods and neatly tying a bow around the finished products, in yards and yards of ribbon.
It can be a tear-inducing grind.
“Sometimes you feel like there’s not enough time to do everything,” she said. “So I learned a long time ago to not look at the quantity. I work as fast as I can, but it’s just one tray at a time.”
In the back of the bakery Thursday, Juanita Perez was laboring over danishes and cinnamon rolls. In half an hour they’d be twice the size of a saucer and taste every bit as good as they smelled.
At the moment, they were just an awful lot of work for Juanita. Irma hired her on as a dishwasher years ago, fired her, and then rehired her as a baker, where she thrived.
“Now she’s one of the best bakers I’ve ever known,” Irma says.
Juanita was one of a handful of bakers who learned their trade at Irma’s place and worked with her for years. Some of them learned English — and some how to read — baking in Irma’s kitchen.
The baking empire Irma forged is a far cry from the lot on East Park Street that she staked her claim to decades ago, after deciding a career at K-Mart was a pain in the neck and the prospect of selling insurance was too stifling.
She started out with little more than what her mother had taught her about baking and practice with the treats she baked for her kids, tinkering and trying out recipes till she mastered tres leches cake and refined her bars to taste like something you couldn’t get anywhere else.
That work brought in customers from Brownsville to Rio Grande City, and demand has not slowed.
“Yesterday this lady comes and says ‘You made my wedding cake. You made my daughter’s wedding cake. Who’s gonna make my granddaughter’s cookie?’” Irma says. “Then I get teary-eyed, and so do they. So many people.”
The people is what it was all about, for Irma.
She glows when she tells stories about getting to use her shop for a program when she worked with special needs students. Her face lights up when she talks about a nonagenarian who drives in to eat and, perhaps, should be relying on public transportation at this stage in his life.
Irma gets a little wistful talking about Felipe “Pipe” Eizondo, her husband, who died in 2010. He was the shop’s resident “bulls****er,” she says, and her co-conspirator in hunting down all those antiques she’s parting ways with.
“It’s been so much fun,” she says. “So many things have happened. My goodness, so many. More good than bad.”
Getting to spend more time with her hot tub doesn’t make it any easier for Irma to part ways with her people. The for sale sign out front went up and down several times before she finally pulled the trigger and got a real estate agent.
“It’s just time,” Irma says.
A couple of miles down the road from Irma’s there’s a McDonalds, which was doing a much brisker breakfast trade Thursday morning. The joint has automated kiosks to take peoples’ orders. A woman was engaged mopping and shining the windows, which were already pretty well sparkling.
The most obvious decoration was a large unlabeled map papered over one wall, inexplicably depicting the street layout of Des Plaines, Ill.
It was, to say the least, markedly different than Irma’s, and it’s hard to imagine a line cook stepping out to plop down a bowl of raw eggs in front of a grumpy customer.
What will become of Irma’s regulars? To the diners and regulars and yearly-cookie buyers Irma spent most of her life catering to? One of Thursday’s regulars shrugs at the question.
“Find another place, I guess,” he says.
Wherever it is, it won’t be anything quite like Irma’s Sweet Shoppe.
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