Local franchise earns award for top Carl’s Jr. restaurant

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Aug. 4, 2003 | 11:07 a.m.

It is not uncommon in the corporate world to hear rags-to-riches stories, tales of driven individuals working their way from bagging groceries to managing stores or even whole companies. But few have overcome so many obstacles -- poverty, war, language -- to come as far as Lidia Cruz.

Cruz began working for a living at age seven. She washed dishes in a Guatemala City restaurant that served home cooking, a restaurant whose name she's long forgotten.

"That was a long time ago," she said during a recent interview.

Forty-four years later, she has now lived more than a third of her life in the United States. She still works in restaurants and is t, her restaurant recently scored highest in operations among 547 franchisees nationwide and overseas, gaining her the 2003 Donald Karcher Award for Operational Excellence.

Cruz is proud of how far she's come and says she has lived the American dream.

The arc of her achievement began in that restaurant decades ago where she would scrub during the afternoon and from 3 to 7 in the morning while going to elementary school from 7:30 to noon.

The pots, pans and dishes she washed were used for "comida de pobre," or poor people's food.

Still, she said she would think, even at that age, how things at the restaurant could be done better.

"I used to think about how they could get the food done quicker," she said, echoing the way she thinks as a manager today. "I like people a lot and I like being a leader. I always have."

Around the same time, her country became tangled in what would become the longest-running civil war ever in Central America -- a conflict that, by the time it was over in 1996, had claimed about 150,000 lives in 35 years.

As the war dragged on, Cruz dropped out of high school in her second year and worked variously as a seamstress, in a hotel, and selling sodas at San Carlos University.

It was at San Carlos that she witnessed the conflict's carnage firsthand when a riot broke out during a government official's visit. The mob dragged the official to a gas station and burned him alive.

By then she had married and divorced and had a 13-year-old son.

"I thought, one day this (violence) is going to touch me or my son," she said. "I decided to go to the United States."

She crossed the border with a friend in 1980 and settled in Los Angeles. She worked as a babysitter for a Cuban family, who she said didn't allow her free time to study English.

Five years later, she finally enrolled in a three-month course. The same year, she began working at a Carl's Jr. restaurant -- the first of two stints at the chain. She started cleaning tables but was making breakfasts and salads in three months and was promoted to assistant manager in six months.

Cruz said she always wanted to learn English to gain more opportunities. She now uses both languages daily on the job, since her employees in the kitchen speak mostly Spanish, while those who deal with customers speak English.

In 1987, she became a temporary resident -- two steps below citizenship -- under a nationwide amnesty for immigrants without papers. It took her until last month to resolve a legal tangle with the federal government and move up to a permanent resident. The next step is citizenship, which she says she hopes to achieve in the coming months.

Cruz moved to Las Vegas in 1996, where a chance encounter with her former manager led to an offer that brought her back into the chain.

Good memories of her manager contributed to her decision.

"He was patient with me when I knew nothing of English and used to give me sentences on a piece of paper to take home and study," she said.

By 1999, she was general manager of a franchise at Sahara Avenue and Valley View Boulevard, where she said she won store-of-the-month three times in one year. Her ongoing innovations include making a daily list of things to do for each of her employees, shaving minutes off of orders by getting cooks working before the receipts are spit out by the cash register, and taking employees out to eat from time to time.

Over the years, her family has grown to four -- her son who joined her in 1982 in California, and a son and daughter she has had in the United States with a second husband, whom she has also divorced.

She owns a house and a new car and is proud of the life she has offered her children.

Her children eat the kind of food she has served to thousands when they're out and about, she said, but it's a different story when they're at home.

In Cruz' kitchen, dishes are served such as one she describes with pork, cabbage, peas, carrots, and peppers -- or more less the same sort of food served by that restaurant years ago.

"I cook 100 percent Guatemalan," she said.