Ninfa's
Mexican restaurant in Houston, Texas
The Original Ninfa's on Navigation is a popular Mexican restaurant located at 2704 Navigation Boulevard in Houston, Texas. The restaurant serves both Tex-Mex and Mexican cuisine. The Original Ninfa's was started by Ninfa Rodríguez Laurenzo, a Mexican-American woman, in a tortilla factory. Ninfa Laurenzo became a full-time restaurateur and the tortilla factory closed. Mama Ninfa is widely credited with popularizing the fajita among Houstonians.
Dai Huynh of the Houston Chronicle said that the Ninfa's locations opened after the first two restaurants "failed to attract the following of earlier restaurants." Tom Laurenzo said that the Laurenzo family never became very wealthy while it controlled the Ninfa's restaurants. He said "Everything was put back into the business." When the Laurenzo family controlled the restaurant chain, it was managed by Ninfa's Inc., which became a subsidiary of the Laurenzo-controlled holding company RioStar Corp.
History
1970s
In 1973, Ninfa Laurenzo, a widow with five children, established Ninfa's, then a taco stand, as a side business due to financial troubles with her original core business, a tortilla factory. Laurenzo's factory was losing money, and she needed to update her equipment in order to comply with new regulations. When Laurenzo decided to establish a restaurant, she applied for loans at several banks.
“Ninfa's” enters the record as mexican restaurant in Houston, Texas. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ninfa's, Mexican and restaurant can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7038598. Authority coordinates are 29.757, -95.343. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ninfa's” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.