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Crunchy pork sandwiches, hand-crafted lomo saltado and a viral cheese-wrapped burrito. Those are just some of the many unique dishes on the menu at downtown Pleasanton’s newest restaurant, Bravazo.
Located at 428 Main St., the Peruvian restaurant opened its doors last week to a wave of support from the community.
“It means the whole world to me,” Bravazo owner and chef Luis Blanco told the Weekly. “Being in a position (where) I can cook that food for people that I don’t know … is very, very rewarding.”
Blanco’s journey started at the age of 10 when he first developed a love for cooking by imitating his mom in Peru.
“Food is my passion that comes from my mother,” Blanco said. “Since I was little, I was in the kitchen.”
But his dream of opening a restaurant actually started about 40 years ago. Blanco said he was always known within his family and friend groups as a gifted cook.
“The simplest things like a ham and cheese sandwich or a salad, he’d make it taste like Michelin rated,” Mauricio Blanco said about his dad’s cooking growing up.
For years, his family would tell him to open up a restaurant. But from when he first immigrated to the U.S. until roughly two years ago, Blanco had been working within the car dealership and finance world — and he was deeply invested in it.
When he was forced to leave that industry in 2023, Blanco said he decided to revisit his passion for cooking.
It started with him making a hot sauce that he would sell to friends and local markets in the Tri-Valley, where his family had been living for the past couple of decades. Eventually, he was able to secure a pop-up spot at Passion Pastry, a cafe located off Bernal Avenue.
There he served sandwiches, empanadas and other lunch and breakfast foods for most of 2024. But it wasn’t until a San Francisco influencer made a video about their burrito, which is wrapped in a crispy cheese skirt, that he began seeing more and more people show up to buy his food the following day.
“We were selling 20 burritos a day, max … that day we sold 78 burritos and people were waiting for us,” he said.
Blanco eventually decided to look into opening his own brick-and-mortar and after months of searching, he was able to secure their current location earlier this year.
Prior to Bravazo opening, the space had been home to the Downtown Cafe restaurant, which opened right before the pandemic in 2020 and had closed permanently back in June of this year.
“We are blessed to say that our restaurant was more than that, it was family — family with coworkers and with the customers and community,” the former downtown restaurant stated in a June 11 Instagram post. “We say goodbye to this chapter of our life, where we learned to grow, and learn how to manage a business like this.”
While Blanco is still looking for ways to improve — noting that last Friday they ran out of their popular pork sandwiches — he said seeing the community’s response to the restaurant has been extremely rewarding.
His son also told the Weekly it has been surreal to see his parents’ goal of bringing high-quality Peruvian cuisine to the East Bay come to life.
“The big thing is … increasing the exposure to how amazing Peruvian culture and food is,” Mauricio Blanco said. “We wanted it to be a place (where) you can walk in and you feel at home.”
For Mauricio Blanco, who helps with administrative work for the restaurant, seeing the space filled with guests during the soft opening weekend and the Sept. 3 grand opening was also emotional because he knew how much his parents, particularly his dad, have sacrificed to get to this point.
“My dad, he’s one of the hardest working people,” Mauricio Blanco said. “He gave me and my brother everything … working long hours. Now he’s living his dream and doing what he really loves. There’s a different glow to him so it’s really beautiful to see.”
He also said this is just the beginning and that he is excited to see the community’s response to all of the unique specials his dad has cooking up for the future.
“We’re so excited to welcome Bravazo to downtown Pleasanton,” Gabrielle Welk, executive director for the Pleasanton Downtown Association, told the Weekly.
“We truly value when Main Street welcomes new additions that are family-owned and operated, because they bring not only great products and services but also a personal touch and sense of community that makes downtown Pleasanton so special,” Welk said, adding:
“New restaurants like Bravazo not only give us amazing places to eat, but they also help bring more people downtown to shop, dine and explore. We couldn’t be happier to have them join the Pleasanton family and can’t wait to see them thrive here.”
