Customer Focus: Tres Margaritas

by Peter Higgins, Marketing Coordinator & Web Manager

The Tres Margaritas restaurant chain is a shining example of the immigrant dream come true. For the nine Morales kids, the realization of this dream has provided financial success and the opportunity to return home and help those who stayed behind.

As children, the nine Morales siblings, six girls and three boys, slept on mats on the floor of a two bedroom house on their small ranch in Cuatla, Mexico. After school, they worked in the fields. Today, each of them owns at least one restaurant.

Nicolas Morales crossed the border into the United States when he was just 17. Eventually, he ended up in Seattle, Washington with his brother, Manual. The two brothers saved all they could, knowing that they wanted to open their own restaurant. They decided they had better adapt to their new country if they wanted to make it. So Nicolas learned to cook.

They invested all of their savings in their first restaurant, Las Margaritas, a six-table place in Seattle. For six months they couldn’t even pay the rent and had to ask friends to loan them money. Their fortunes changed when a food critic from Seattle Times paid them a visit and published a review that called Las Margaritas the best Mexican restaurant in the state. The next day, Morales said, they sold out of food in an hour and had to close at 7 pm.

Over the coming years, Nicolas and Manuel built Las Margaritas to a 15-restaurant empire across Washington state. They then decided to sell their restaurants to employees and move to Colorado to start a new restaurant chain with their brother Gustavo. This chain became Tres Margaritas.


Manuel, Nicolas, Gustavo, and their sisters now have 13 restaurants across Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri (some as partnerships with their employees under the new name “MARGARITAS”).

After living in the United States for 27 years and developing two Mexican restaurant chains, Nicolas Morales is now the mayor of his hometown Cuatla, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His agenda as mayor is ambitious: He wants to change the very conditions — a lack of jobs, education, and opportunity — that led him to flee his home country when he was 17.

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Denver Print Company is proud to have been working with Tres Margaritas for about four years. The work that we have done for them includes web design and development, flyers, and menu inserts. Most recently, we re-designed and printed new menus for all of their Colorado and Nebraska locations.