There is ample seating in the dining room at the entrance,

as well as in the rear dining room which is spacious enough to hold 100 people. The chandeliers are lovely, the room nice and new and there was space for a band should you want to rent the place for a special event.

While we were there, the restaurant started filling up with clientele.

Yes, those are chiles rellenos next to carne guisada. The food is delicious and can you believe chiles rellenos on a buffet? The price for the buffet is comparable to the price of ONE plate at the Mexican restaurant across the street. Needless to say, the restaurant across the street has lost a regular customer.

The owner enjoying all this success is Evelyn Salazar who is a Brownsville native. The restaurant has been in existence for 17 years but expanded recently causing an upsurge in business.

Look for this sign on Central Boulevard near the intersection of Central and Boca Chica in Brownsville…

Everybody else is… and telling their friends about it too.

Elva’s hours are 7 am to 10 pm Mon- Sat and Sunday 1 -5 p.m. The address is 1775 Central Blvd. Buffet items change regularly so check with them before you go if you want chiles rellenos. They do grilled barbecue and other meats one day and seafood another. They even have a breakfast buffet on the weekends with an omelette station. This was an absolutely wonderful discovery. Their phone number is 956-504-3371

I can’t sleep. This disaster has made for nightmares and sleepless nights. Sad to say, women LOVE to be told that everything is going to be alright. Maybe men do too. As children, we trusted our parents, teachers and doctors when they told us “everything’s going to be alright.” It soothed us and calmed our fears, so it was a wonderful night when I heard, “everything’s going to be alright,” from my hero husband. I said, “You promise?” and he said the words I longed to hear, “I promise.” Well, now that BP’s top kill attempt has failed and their top hat move is doubtful at best, he is seeing that I am not irrational with my fears and when I reminded him that he said everything was going to be alright, he said, “Did I say that?”

I have read and heard all the horrible predictions of what is going to happen but I have a friend in Louisiana who BEFORE this disaster was already in the direst of financial straits. Now I wonder what people are going to be like when they step into “his” world of hell. There are hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods are going to be crippled by this disaster. It is not just the fishermen and oil riggers who have lost their income but the many people on shore whose lives are based on  the gulf. Already the white beaches of Mississippi are bare; this adversely affects the whole area. The tourists who would have gone to the beach would have stayed in hotels and eaten in area restaurants, visited alligator farms, museums and other attractions. The owners and staff at those places are going to lose their jobs if business is bad enough. Where will they get the rent and grocery money they need to stay alive?

I heard that America was going to be a nation torn in two. I think it might be between the haves and the have-nots as more and more people plunge into despair. Paul McArtney’s bus was attacked in Mexico recently. His security team thought it was fans. It wasn’t. It was just the poor attacking those who have more. If the area I live in along the gulf becomes devastated by the oil spill, which is just a matter of time, OR if a major hurricane comes spinning around to destroy the beautiful lives we have established here, we will move to another body of water nearby. It is called Falcon Lake, recently in the news because of armed Mexican bandits accosting American fisherman in the waters. From the frying pan into the fire? It seems that the chances for a good life nearby are being reduced dramatically. I don’t know if another Katrina may hit us this year. I live with that fear. People tell me coyly, “You live in a bad place to have a hurricane phobia,” HARHARDYHARHAR. I would love to say, “Yeah, but a fear of avalanches wouldn’t do me well on the Gulf Coast, now, would it shipdit?” So I keep my mouth shut and pray a hurricane doesn’t hit us.

A hurricane would, or rather, is going to delay BP’s attempts at a relief well. My recent question to my husband was, “Can the oil be set afire by lightning from a hurricane? Can the gases escaping from the sea floor be set afire and the fire travel all the way down from the surface of the ocean?” He said no because at oil refineries there is a fire that burns off those excess gases. You’ve seen them. It looks like a torch in the sky when you pass them. Well, I reminded him, there is no fire in the gulf burning off those gases emanating from under the sea floor. IF you were holding a spilling gas container and the gas caught on fire, the fire would travel up to your hand. I know, I’ve seen it. The stream doesn’t even have to be continuous for the fire to travel. Could that happen in the gulf? Could gases burn underwater and if so, how deep would the fire travel? I have all kinds of questions in my mind. Can the sea floor collapse from the weight of the spilling oil? What if the gulf turns into one huge pot of oil? Why did our lives have to get ruined by this? My husband tells me not to worry about such things because we are such peons in the chain of things, there is nothing we can do but I reminded him money does not matter in this case. Even BP who made BILLIONS last year is a peon in the chain for nothing they do matters either now. They, with all their money, and I, with very little, stand equal on this – helpless.