Fifty Over 50: Diana Bratton, Owner, Taco Mama in Hot Springs

Mother of Tacos: From gourmet-to-go to Mexican cuisine, Hot Springs chef brings concepts to creation

Perhaps it is no surprise Diana Bratton was born on Cinco de Mayo. The owner of Taco Mama in Hot Springs grew up on Mexican cuisine in southern Texas and shares a birthday with her mother, who may have been the first person who ever cooked a taco for Bratton.

“My mother was an excellent cook,” Bratton said. “On Sundays, we ate more American-style food because she liked to cook recipes out of Southern Living magazine, and so that was the day we would have an American-style meal, but we always had a big Mexican breakfast on Sundays, when we could all sit down together.”

Of course, Bratton has not always been known for her Mexican-style fare. Before opening Taco Mama in 2009, she was already a household name in Hot Springs for serving up gourmet-to-go as the owner of Cafe 1217.

With such an apparent passion and talent for cooking, not to mention the fact that she has been doing it her whole life, it may come as a surprise that a culinary career was not originally on the menu. Batton studied international business for five years before she made the switch to culinary school.

“I was very close to getting my degree, and when I just decided I’m going to do what I want to do, I told my mom, I was like, ‘I’m going to cooking school,’ … and there was a long pause on the end of the phone,” she said, “because my dad never wanted me to work at a restaurant.”

She was the youngest girl in the family, she said, and in her father’s eyes, restaurants were a rough, male-dominated industry. By the time she made that phone call, however, he was deceased, and Bratton said his death made her look at life differently.

“She paused for a moment on the phone,” Bratton said. “She said, ‘I’m going to support you in your decision, but I just want you to finish college.’ She said, ‘I want you to finish.’”

Bratton never did get her degree in international business, but she dove straight into culinary school — a decision that meant she had to quit her job making microfilm.

“I had a steady job. I was going to college. I had insurance,” she said. “Everything was cozy and secure, and when [the dean] told me I was going to have to work full-time [in the restaurant industry] at some point, it was just part of it, that was kind of scary, but I got through it.”

As it turned out, culinary school was only half of Bratton’s education. The rest came at City Café in Dallas, where she worked for seven years under the tutelage of owner Marjorie Schma.

“I loved that family. We just connected. I learned a lot from them,” Bratton said. “The owner was female. Her daughter was a chef, female. Her son was a pastry chef, so their whole family worked at the restaurant, City Café, at the time.”

There, Bratton learned the tools of the trade that would serve her so well in Arkansas — how to manage a kitchen, food costs, scheduling, recipe development and so on.

“The owner, they were from Carmel, Calif., and she used to entertain a lot, so she was, in my eyes, the Martha Stewart of Dallas,” she said. “She just had a flair. She was a great baker, great cook. They were just very, very creative — very creative.”

When Bratton moved to Arkansas, she worked at Diamante Country Club in Hot Springs Village for a year and a half, but it was far from her dream job. Although Diamante emphasized good cuisine more than the other country clubs in town, she said, it was mainly focused on golfing and providing other retirement activities, and Bratton had little room to express herself as a chef.

“I knew shortly after starting working at Diamante that I had to do something,” she said. “There wasn’t much in Hot Springs at the time as far as gourmet food or specialty foods, so I started to buy dishes. They didn’t match. I just would buy pots and pans and stuff that I thought, in my mind, I would need to open a restaurant. I didn’t even have a location at the time.”

Potential locations were few and far between, she said, but then she spotted an opportunity at Peter’s Paint Co., now Peter’s Flooring, which then had one suite attached to it. She contacted the owner and asked if she could have the space.

“He actually went — unbeknownst to me — but he actually went to Dallas to City Café to see where I had worked and get a reference from them,” she said. “He added on to his building, and that’s when I started the cafe.”

She envisioned a small cafe that had limited seating and served gourmet food on the go, one where she could be chef and perhaps hire a cashier. It was more than the locals could bear.

“When I started my journey and trying to open up my own restaurant, I basically was told no, that’s not going to go over in Hot Springs, never seen anything like it, that’s too big city, blah, blah, blah, so that drove me even harder to make it happen,” she said. “Basically, whatever I didn’t have, I put on a credit card, so that’s how I started. I charged up about $35,000 on multiple cards to get going, and we were busy right out of the gate.”

She said the secret sauce that made Cafe 1217 a success was a menu of unique offerings made with fresh, local ingredients — a concept that had not yet arrived in Hot Springs when Bratton opened the cafe in 1997. Neither was there a farmers market in every city at that time. In Dallas, Bratton had her pick of seasonal produce at an expansive farmers market, but in Hot Springs, there was no such luxury.

“I had a tomato guy. I had a dairy guy. I used to get my cream for my soup from the dairy guy here in town. They’ve since closed,” she said. “I tried to support the small businesses, for sure, right out of the gate.”

As the owner of a small business herself, she said she felt that it was important to support people like the tomato grower, the dairy farmer and the baker who produced some of the cafe’s bread when Bratton was not able to keep up with demand. The cafe was slammed immediately.

“We got hammered right out of the gate,” Bratton said. “The first day we opened, I thought I was going to pass out because there was a line of people out the door, and I wasn’t expecting that at all. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Once she got into the groove of running her own business, which took a few years, she started catering, another skill she learned at City Café, which she said catered for the likes of Jerry Jones, Stanley Marcus, Ross Perot and the Bushes. Now she also has a food truck that provides Taco Mama meals at weddings and events.

After Taco Mama opened, her husband, Shane, saw the truck parked outside a hotel, made some inquiries and found out the hotel owner wanted it to be towed. The manager told him he was not sure if it worked, so Bratton put in a low offer. In the end, the truck only needed transmission fluid, so the couple drove it home, cleaned it up and had it painted.

Shane also brought the idea of Taco Mama to life. Next door to Cafe 1217, a hardware store that had been in business since the 1930s was preparing to close down.

“The big package stores were here — Lowe’s, Walmart. People were going to buy their light bulbs and things over there cheaper than they could sell them for, and [the owners] were at an age where they were just wanting to retire, so they were going to sell the building,” she said.

After talking to her husband about it, she purchased the property.

“He said, ‘Well, you’ve got some pretty good roots in Mexican food, so what do you think about doing something there?’” she said. “I was like, ‘In that building? Are you kidding me?’ He said, ‘We’ll fix it up.’”

Opening a restaurant at the height of the Great Recession turned out to be no easy feat, and Bratton said the nature of the restaurant itself may also be part of the reason Taco Mama did not see the same instant success as Cafe 1217.

“It wasn’t easy because people have their go-to Mexican restaurant, you know?” she said. “I won’t say it wasn’t a struggle for a few years, but the food is fresh. It’s different. I feel like it’s different than most restaurants in town. There’s a couple of us that are different, that are not so ‘canned tomatoes blitzed with jalapeños and cilantro, and that’s salsa.’ We take it to a different level.”

Taco Mama ultimately proved to be a success, and, in 2016, Bratton sold Cafe 1217. At the time, she had knee problems that made it difficult to manage both restaurants, she said. However, she has since used stem cell therapy to relieve the pain.

“I’m doing great,” she said. “I’m getting around wonderfully. It’s just changed my attitude. I didn’t realize how much the pain was bringing me down, so I didn’t have to have anything invasive done.”

Bratton opened Taco Mama Side Town in 2020, after spying an opening at Surfas Culinary District in Hot Springs. She said the second location is a boon to her catering work because the Hamp Williams Building, where the restaurant is located, also houses a popular event venue.

“I do a lot of catering at that venue, so it’s nice to have a kitchen at your catering job,” she said. “I can do specialty things and have my kitchen there, and I’m right there. Most venues don’t have a kitchen, so you have to be really creative about how you’re going to not just keep things warm, but create a menu to suit not having a kitchen, so room-temp things or things that will maintain their integrity in a hot box, so having my own kitchen right there, it’s amazing.”

She added that the food truck has become popular for destination weddings in Hot Springs, and she has also taken it to Tiger Tunes at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.

“We’ve done numerous events, but it’s not as easy as people think, like, just load some food up and drive off,” she said. “It’s not that easy. You’ve got to make sure the truck’s in order, like, everything’s working, you’ve got the oil changed. It’s a lot of maintenance.”

Although she said understanding how to manage employees was her most difficult learning curve at Cafe 1217, she now thinks of her staff as the reason for her businesses’ success.

“I just wanted perfection, and I might have been a little harder than I am now, and I have just learned to chill. Let things roll off, fix it, and move on,” she said. “I mean, that was my baby, my first restaurant. I wanted it to be perfect, and I didn’t want to fail.”

Bratton has become a fixture in the Hot Springs community, and she said she would not trade it for the world. She said she likes to give back to causes that are near and dear to her, and she has a soft spot for animals, children and older adults. She has made soup for Jackson House, a local crisis center, and she has hosted taco-eating contests to benefit Paws and Claws Rescue. She also received a community service award from Arkansas PROMISE in Little Rock.

One of her favorite ways to give back was assisting with a summer camp for teenage girls who are interested in culinary occupations. However, she said, the camp, which took place at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, has not been active for a few years.

“I really did love that,” she said. “I hope that comes back around because it’s a good feeling that you’ve helped somebody or maybe inspired somebody to be in the hospitality business.”

The program was especially close to her heart because there were not many women who had careers in the restaurant industry when Bratton joined it, she added. More women have entered the field, she said, but she never let being in the minority hold her back to begin with.

“I’m the person that if somebody says I can’t do something, I’m like, ‘Oh really? OK. I’m going to do it,’” she said.

Bratton has considered franchising Taco Mama, and she has developed a concept for a smaller restaurant she might pursue if she decides to slow down, but she said she does not think she could ever stop working.

She does not want to stop learning either, she said, adding that she has taken classes such as carpentry, glass fusing and silversmithing at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock.

“I just don’t want to stop learning, and I think that’s really important,” she said. “I don’t know it all. I don’t know everything I would love to know about cooking, but I continually try to read up on it and learn about it or take a class. I took welding here in Hot Springs. All of those, even though they’re not food-related, they help with the creativity.”