WICHITA — There’s good news and bad news on North Broadway, depending on your perspective.
If you like Mexican food, you’re in luck. Alfredo Cruz Nino is opening El Maya in the former Dyne Quik space at 1202 N. Broadway.
Richard Jack closed the restaurant in its last incarnation – Lil Joe’s Dyne Quik — in January.
Nino plans to serve traditional Mexican fare plus other dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Sundays will have an abbreviated schedule.
So what’s the bad news?
History buffs may not appreciate that the letters on the old Dyne Quik sign not only are down but also destroyed.
“Yeah, they all broke when we took them off,” says Esteban Tavaros, who will work at the restaurant.
Dyne Quik is one of the city’s few remaining Valentine restaurants – metal, mobile diners that Wichita’s Valentine Manufacturing built between 1938 and 1971.
It’s not clear how old the letters on the sign were, but Tavaros says there wasn’t much hope of saving them.
“They were really, really, really old.”