Anita's founder spiced up D.C. area diets

When Albuquerque native Anita Tellez arrived in the Washington area in 1969, she went looking for a taste of home. That meant tacos and fiery but flavorful red and green chilies.

The locals were unhelpful.

"We would ask people where to go for Mexican food, and they would send us to Mario's Pizza," she told an interviewer a few years ago.

She said she found no Mexican restaurants in the area, certainly none that qualified as authentic to her palate. Armed with family recipes rooted in traditional New Mexican cuisine, she and her husband, Felimon, a former appeals officer at the U.S. Post Office headquarters, and their son Tom, opened a small Mexican-style eatery in 1974.

It was in an old doughnut shop in Vienna, and it had a stand-up counter and one bathroom.

One of her first customers was then-Sen. Floyd Haskell (D-Colo.).

"I thought it was my husband joking around," she told the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1998. "He said, 'Can you fix me about 10 gallons of green chili beans?' and I told him, 'Is the Pope Catholic?' thinking it was my husband."

She filled the order, and Haskell was the first of many political clients. "I began to get all the senators," she said. She added that President Bill Clinton and TV weatherman Willard Scott were customers.

Anita Tellez, 78, an Oakton resident who died Sept. 5 of complications from an abdominal infection, capitalized on her cooking skills. After only nine months in business, she had enough money to increase seating in the small shop, which generated $2 million its first year. Eighteen months later, a second Anita's opened in Fairfax County.

Shops in Burke, Herndon and Chantilly soon followed. In 1990, the company opened a flagship operation, a 10,000-square-foot restaurant in Vienna. Today, eight Anita's restaurants are scattered across Northern Virginia, most housed in buildings vacated by defunct fast-food chains.

The restaurants are also national, with locations in Santa Fe and Albuquerque called Little Anita's -- named after one of Mrs. Tellez's granddaughters -- and owned by their oldest son, Larry Gutierrez. Another son, Michael, owns an Anita's in Orange County, Calif.

The Anita's in the Washington area get their chilies from Hatch, a small town in New Mexico that bills itself the "Chili Capital of the World." Dishes include marinated pork in red chili, chili relleno, which is a baked chili pepper, and, of course, tacos.

"Anita's mini-tacos . . . go a long way toward redeeming the reputation of the taco," Washington Post food writer Nancy Lewis said in a 2003 article. "The crisp, thin shell doesn't crumble and spill the contents on the first bite, and every mouthful is a combination of tortilla, meat, lettuce and tomato. It's really good."

The restaurants generated more than $10 million in sales last year, Tom Tellez said.

In the mid-1980s, Mrs. Tellez bought a black Rolls Royce with a tan leather interior, a symbol of her success and journey from meager beginnings as an orphan named Annie. She was born to Viola Taylor and Anthony Ortiz in Albuquerque and adopted when she was 5 by Rose and Leo Guiterrez, who changed her name to Anita.

Leo worked in a coal mine, and Rose was a school cafeteria cook who passed down family recipes from her mother, the original Anita, that Mrs. Tellez used in her restaurants.

She was a waitress in San Francisco and Los Angeles before settling in Northern Virginia with her husband and children in 1969.

But, her family said, she never forgot her roots. Once, while vacationing in Mexico, she removed her shoes and gave them to a poor barefoot woman.

In 2005, she auctioned her Rolls Royce and raised $50,000 for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, a nonprofit organization that raises money for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. One of her grandsons has the disease.

Survivors include her husband of 60 years, of Oakton; six children, Tom Tellez of Fairfax, Larry Gutierrez of Albuquerque, Michael Tellez of Winchester, Calif., William Tellez of Camarillo, Calif., Diana Tellez of Fairfax and Roseanne Tellez of Chicago; 21 grandchildren; 17 great-grandchildren; and three great-great-grandchildren.

According to her son Tom, Mrs. Tellez loved to serve her customers. When a nicely dressed businessman entered her first location in Vienna in the 1970s, he quickly left when he realized there were no tables.

Mrs. Tellez chased him into the parking lot and persuaded him to come back in to try her bean dip. He sat at the counter and after a few bites shouted, "Keep bringing it, Anita."

Now the Washington region has a slew of Mexican-style restaurants, and the cuisine is more recognizable than it was 30 years ago. But Mrs. Tellez took pride in knowing that her original small restaurant helped influence the trend. "I introduced Virginia to the green chili," she said. "They didn't have a clue."