QUEEN CITY, Texas - A local restaurant offering a range of goods created for people with a range of specific dietary needs opened recently in Queen City.
Delicious Delights Cafe is owned and operated by Regina Gonzales along with her husband, Alex.
She describes the cafe as a "grab-n-go bakery cafe," with a sit-down area as well as carry-out. The menu features scratch-made, gluten-free, sugar-free, low-carb, keto and diabetes-friendly.
"These are features of all our menu items," she said. "So our customers don't have to worry about what's what. All of our items have these features."
Now they are setting up a coffee shop area for the cafe, which will feature "comfy chairs, wifi and locally roasted coffee," Gonzales said.
The coffee shop is just the latest development for the cafe, which has steadily built an enthusiastic audience for its delights, ones that Gonzales learned over a career as a professional chef.
"I was a plant-based personal chef in the Dallas-Fort Worth area," she said. "I have Crohn's Disease and that made it necessary to go to a keto way of life. This way of cooking and eating keeps me symptom-free. That took me into plant-based cooking, and then I discovered gluten-free and over time, built up recipes that we use in the cafe."
Gonzales described learning to cook and bake this way was a challenge.
"It is hard to replicate the taste and feel of the 'real thing,'" she said, "but I have invented these recipes over time and they are what we use at Delicious Delights."
"My customers tell me that all our items look and taste like the 'real thing,'" she said. "That is what they tell us every day."
Delicious Delights Cafe opened at 613 U.S. Highway 59 in the summer of 2019, after operating as a home-based business.
"After we opened our doors, customers already knew who we were and what we did, and they came calling," she said. "We've been doing well, very well."