Sara’s Cuisine restaurant brings Jorge Santos full circle

“I can’t believe I was there and now I’m here,” Jorge Santos said as he looked around the kitchen of Sara’s Cuisine, the new restaurant opening Saturday, Dec. 11, at the old KarDale’s location at 142 N. Interocean Ave.

Santos’ first job was washing dishes at KarDale’s when he was 15 years old. Now he has come full circle as he embarks on a new restaurant venture with his wife, Sarai Trejo, at the same location.

Santos, a graduate of HHS and of Northwest Kansas Technical College in Goodland, Kansas, has spent time working in the oil field industry in many states, but he returned to Holyoke in 2015 and got his own truck to get into the trucking business.

He and Trejo married in 2016, and Santos said that she has always wanted to open a restaurant someday.

“And here we are,” he said. “I guess Holyoke doesn’t want me to leave,” he laughed.

Santos initially bought a food truck in late 2019 but didn’t get the chance to open it for business due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the opportunity came to buy the brick and mortar restaurant, he sold the food truck and did so.

“I wanted to try something different. I wanted to make it a new adventure for us,” Santos said. “We’re excited and nervous at the same time.” He went on to say that he looks forward to providing different food choices for people.

Santos said the word “cuisine” means a style or method of cooking, and Sara’s Cuisine will showcase his wife’s own unique style in the way she makes dishes. The menu will offer Mexican and American food — both styles of food that the husband and wife team are familiar with.

The menu will have “a little bit of everything,” said Santos. This includes American and Mexican burgers, buffalo burgers, American and Mexican breakfasts, rib-eye and T-bone steaks, porkchops, baskets, sandwiches, tacos, burritos, tortas and children’s items, including breakfast.

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