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Stepping inside of ¡Hey Juan! Burritos for the first time in probably about 20 years, I was instantly transported to my high school days when I, like many Arcata High and HSU students, frequented the tiny restaurant in Northtown Arcata. Back then the place was known for its laid-back, party-friendly atmosphere and its heaping portions of fairly inexpensive food. It was also known for its food being, well, not very good. 

Oh, and the cinnamon. Who could forget that the beans tasted so much like cinnamon? 

But apparently those large, messy portions of cinnamon-seasoned food were enough to keep people coming back, because the business has continued operating since it first opened more than 40 years ago, making it somewhat of an Arcata institution. 

Now, current owners Matthew Pipis and Scott Henderson have been making some big changes over the last few years that they hope will make the community view the famous !Hey Juan! food in a different way. 

“I’d tell somebody I bought Hey Juan’s and the first thing they’d say is ‘Oh, that’s the place with the death paste’ and ‘Don’t the beans taste like cinnamon?’” Scott Henderson, co-owner of ¡Hey Juan!, told the Outpost during a recent interview at the restaurant. “Those are always the two things!”

¡Hey Juan! Burritos, most commonly referred to as Hey Juan’s (like with many names, people seem to like adding an extraneous apostrophe “s” ), was first opened in 1982 by James “Gavin” Embry, who ran the restaurant for 33 years. Embry, who was originally from Panama, was an accomplished mountain climber and world traveler and is said to have started the restaurant using some recipes that he brought back with him from his travels in South America. Embry spent a lot of time at the restaurant and even lived in a small apartment behind the kitchen. 

In 2002 ¡Hey Juan! was taken over by an employee of Embry’s, Stormy Mcmakin, who ran the restaurant for the next 15 years. After Mcmakin came down with a serious illness, she decided that it was time to step away. 

Pipis had been a regular at !Hey Juan! since he first moved to Arcata in 2007 from Roseville to attend Cal Poly Humboldt (then HSU) and was a big fan of the cheap food and cheap beer. Pipis had no previous restaurant experience, he said, but he had dreamed of eventually owning his own restaurant. 

Then in early 2018 Pipis was invited to participate in the BIG Chili Cook-Off in Blue Lake, an annual event put on by Mad River Brewing Co. to benefit Big Brothers and Big Sisters of the North Coast. Pipis said that he had no plans to enter the cook-off, but a friend of his who worked for the City of Blue Lake called him on the night before the event and said they needed another contestant and asked if he could do it. Pipis enthusiastically accepted, before he learned that it meant he would have to cook seven gallons of chili that night! 

So, he contacted Henderson, who did have cooking experience, to help him. Pipis said he really did not know what he was doing and started by actually Googling “how to win a chili cook-off.” After finding some information on the magic formula for a winning chili, he bought the ingredients and the two managed to cook a huge batch of chili and enter the event. Much to their surprise, the formula worked and Pipis and Henderson won the 2018 BIG Chili Cook-off. 

“[We competed] against a bunch of restaurants,” Pipis said, jokingly. “So when we won, we had big heads.”

Hot off the win, Pipis decided that it was time to make his restaurant-owning dream come true and offered to buy !Hey Juan! from Mcmakin. He offered to work shifts at the restaurant so that it could stay open, and asked that, in exchange, Mcmakin teach him how to run the business. Pipis hired a lawyer to help with the transfer process and said that his lawyer even advised him that the restaurant was probably not a good investment. But Pipis really wanted to move forward, and on May 12, 2018 he and Henderson became the official owners.

You might think that taking over an already established restaurant would be relatively easy, but this was not the case, Pipis said. With the transfer of ownership, the restaurant had to undergo a new inspection and the health department handed the owner a long list of violations that needed to be corrected to bring the restaurant up to code. The biggest challenge, Pipis said, was that the restaurant didn’t have enough square footage for a commercial kitchen. But Pipis managed to convince the owner of The Hutch, which is directly next door, to lease the restaurant a section of the store’s space. After knocking a hole through the wall, they were able to install a walk-in cooler to add the necessary square footage. 

After managing to make all of the necessary changes, Pipis and Henderson were ready to reopen !Hey Juan! And, at first, things were going pretty well. Of course, the business hit another roadblock in 2020 when COVID forced everything to close down. Pipis said that he, like many folks, had a pretty hard time dealing with lockdown and was feeling discouraged about the decision to take on the stresses of running a business. But it also gave him some time to rethink the business and when things started opening back up again, Pipis and Henderson decided it was time to make some changes to help the business thrive. 

“We realized we’d been using these same recipes,” Pipis said. “We decided to have a chef, who’s a friend of ours, come in and go through our whole menu and take a look at our food, and we changed some of our processes.”    

Pipis and Henderson tweaked some of the more than 40-year-old recipes and started prepping their food in small batches, cooking their meat, beans and rice daily. They also developed a contract with Cal Poly Humboldt’s dining services and opened a second !Hey Juan! location at The Depot on campus. At first, Henderson said, they had to make the food and staff the location themselves. But last summer they penned a “licensing contract” with the university’s dining services, which basically means that the owners are given money for the use of the ¡Hey Juan! name and recipes, but Humboldt Dining provides its own staff and supplies.

Pipis and Henderson also started a product line of sauces and spice blends, which are already available for purchase at The Depot location and will soon be available at some local grocery stores including the North Coast Co-op and Murphy’s Markets. 

Though they’ve made a lot of changes, Pipis and Henderson still want to keep the original !Hey Juan! spirit alive. The famous Death Paste is still the original recipe, and although their food prices have gone up, they still try to give a hefty portion, with each burrito weighing one and a half pounds. It was also important to them to keep the beer prices low, and they claim to have the cheapest beer in town, with $2 pints of PBR and $3 pints of all their other beers. They also still make the famous mimosas, which are $6 a pint. 

And as for the notorious beans, Henderson said that they do still put in some cinnamon, but it’s about one quarter the amount of the previous recipe and is much more balanced and not overwhelming in cinnamon flavor. And I can attest to this, because I ordered a burrito and could not detect any cinnamon! And I have to say, I did not miss it. 

So if you long for the same !Hey Juan! food that was there when I was a teenager – a huge, messy burrito that immediately fell apart when you tried to eat it and tasted a lot like cinnamon – then you might be disappointed. And Pipis and Henderson said that a few old-timers have not been too happy about the changes, but when they try the new food they usually change their tune. 

“Overall, we get a way better response from the community,” Pipis said. “A restaurant is for serving the community and that’s what we want to do…and now I’m very proud of what we’re serving.”