Written By Josh Stuyvesant

She’s camera shy. That’s about as shy as Arellana Cordero gets. Though her father, Frank Barela, started Cocina Azul in 2009, Arellana has boldly made it what it is today. Her strengths? Day- to-day operations, marketing, organizing, policies and procedures. She emits audacity and cool composure. Arellana and her family have been called ‘serial entrepreneurs’; they’ve had insurance agencies, moving companies, cabinet shops, restaurants and car washes to name a few.

“It’s in vogue now to be an entrepreneur. There’s the ‘mompreneur’ and the ‘serial entrepreneur’ and all these really fashionable and trendy words. It’s funny because my father has always been that guy, the entrepreneur. It’s just his innate nature to try these things. This restaurant does very well; he doesn’t need more, but he’s always trying to open up another location” she says, “And…he knows I will come in, because he’s my dad.”

Arellana may not be shy, but she very much likes operating behind the scenes, which plays in well with the strengths of her family. She says, “my strengths have always been the operations side, his strengths are those of the big visionary: here’s the next step, how are we going to sell ourselves, etc.”

“You’re the fixer!” I stated too loudly.

“I am the fixer,” she stated proudly.

When she worked at Cocina Azul full time—before she moved on to Southwest Capital Bank where she holds one of those mysterious job titles—she reigned over the kitchen and the office at Cocina Azul. With this in mind, I quickly determined that it’s not just because he’s her dad that Arellana goes in to help his businesses, but because she quietly relishes the challenges, precariousness, and rewards that come with the work. She doesn’t require public recognition. She prefers sweating away in the engine room, feeding coal to the boiler, making sure that everything runs seamlessly.

The perfect partnership Arellana and her father have struck has allowed them to assimilate and flourish. Their workflow should be the envy of any company. But that’s not to say they’ve gone un- scathed. Last year, after a last-minute deal-breaker regarding their impending purchase of a restaurant space on Rio Grande and Central (there were dilapidating gas tanks under the property, which used to be a gas station), they decided to move into Nick Manole’s old spaces on Central and 4th. The decision may have been slightly rushed, their concept in need of a little reformatting, but they were under way. I imagine it’s a rare instance that the left and right brain Cordero/Barela duo made a bad call. This was only a halfway bad call, really—Down- town Albuquerque is ripe for a quick-service burrito joint; but the bruised-up visage of Downtown, along with the 4th Street construction and the displace- ment of the homeless community, were a deterrence to many burrito-eaters. The final blow came with the impossibility of installing a hood in their kitchen. The building was too old and too tall, and the pro- cess would prove to be too expensive. Cocina Azul’s little Downtown burrito spot shut down.

“That’s the thing with being an entrepreneur. That [Downtown] experience, whatever the end result was, is not really what matters; it’s what we learned from the experience. You can’t take that knowledge away from me. I still got it. I can choose to use it again; I could not. You just have to keep going.”

Her stamina, her incredible rate of success, and her boldness to start again after a big disruption are characteristics that should be cloned and given to the rest of us in Albuquerque.

See, Arellana isn’t only a fixer in regards to making her father’s endeavors operationally sound, she’s a fixer with respect to the community. She estimates Cocina Azul gave away $15,000 in food and gift cards last year, just because people who needed it for their non-profit banquet or their fundraiser giveaway simply came in and asked for it. I think businesses get into this mode that says if you don’t have buckets of money to dump out of a helicopter, you’re not in any place to “give back.” Arellana affirms, “What people don’t realize is that in being a small business, all those little gift cards and free food are just as impactful as those big donations. There’s a ton of need out there. If you’re not giving back to this community, we’re never going to get anywhere.”

The most important impression Arellana left on me was the idea of balance; the balance between the big ideas of her father and her careful execution of those ideas. Balance between digging in and giving back. Balance between fixing something and letting it go out and get a little beat up. There are many lessons to be learned from Arellana, we might lead by her example to “fix up” our city to be a better Burque.