While most of the neighborhood kids were selling lemonade, Antonio Almazàn was hawking hot dogs.
"There was too much lemonade out there," said the kid who would grow up to be a quality assurance analyst at Lincoln-based Nanonation. "I needed to do something different."
Now 35, that's the way he continues to roll. They zig. He zags.
As an adult, he graduated to tacos — chicken one day, barbacoa the next and maybe ground beef after that — which were a big hit during the pandemic, when he sold them from his driveway as the world shut down.
His entrepreneurial mind and stay-one-step-ahead-of-the-game mentality are kind of the way Almazàn and his family found their way into the churro business.
While everyone else was selling produce, baked goods and crafts at the Haymarket Farmers Market, Almazàn introduced the churro recipe created by his father — also named Antonio — to Lincoln.
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A relative few in the community had already experienced the family churros — which come out of the deep fryer golden brown and slightly crunchy while being soft and chewy on the inside — at church and community fundraisers.
Bringing the churros — fried dough dredged in cinnamon and sugar (the dipping sauces are optional) — to the farmers market changed the game. In their first four hours in the Haymarket, more than 1,200 Papi Churros were sold.
It's been that way ever since. Despite selling seasonally — most times for one day a week — Papi Churros has received a Lincoln Choice nomination for best pop-up kitchen.
Then again, when Dave Portnoy, president of Barstool Sports and the originator of the one-bite pizza review, provides a positive shoutout on X (formerly Twitter) — which he did last September when he was in town for Michigan's 45-7 victory over the Huskers — it doesn't go unnoticed.
And with spring soon to be sprung, the family now has plans to have a food truck ready for the season.
Whether the numbers from the farmers market can be replicated on a daily basis remains to be seen, the younger Antonio says.
"The farmers market is kind of the ideal situation for us because it's an event," he said. "There are people already there wanting to spend money and it's super accessible to anybody. It's grab-and-go food."
The Almazàn family churro recipe has an interesting back story. After migrating to America from Villa Juarez, Mexico, Antonio Almazàn, the elder, found himself missing the kind of churros he grew up eating.
"I was yearning for those flavors," he said. "I was a kid far away from home and I wanted to find it. It took me like a year. I'd add something, take something out. Eventually, I got more or less what I remembered. It was very similar, close to perfection."
That was more than 30 years ago. And while the churros were a family favorite, the elder Antonio was reluctant to sell his churros while he was teaching Spanish at Lincoln Public Schools.
"I just thought it was a conflict of interest," he said. "I didn't want my students thinking they had to buy churros from me."
In the past few years, his son took ownership of the business, something his father fully endorsed. The plan was to sell the churros and the elder Antonio, a recently retired teacher, committed to help in any way possible.
Together, they rise at 3 a.m. on Saturdays to make the dough — with its patriarch paying close attention to quality control to ensure the flavors measure up to what he remembers from his boyhood in Mexico.
"We make the dough in our kitchen, but everything else is made on site," said the younger Antonio.
Lincoln has come a long way from the early days of the elder Antonio's churro discovery. He was urged to sell them one Saturday before a Husker football home game and might have sold 10 all day.
Maybe Lincoln wasn't ready for the churro. Or maybe the Almazàns weren't ready for what it took to sell their product.
"We didn't know what we were doing," said the younger Antonio.
His father said it might have helped to give out samples to people who probably had no idea what a churro was in the early 1990s.
They've come a long way from their salad days. While his son sold tacos from his driveway during the pandemic, each order came with a free churro, courtesy of his father. In time, people started asking if they could buy the churros separately, the elder Antonio said.
The Almazàns had learned. Then again, so have the people of Lincoln. A more diversified Lincoln — shifts in the population, the browning of America, as some have called it — has created a more diverse cultural base in many aspects, food especially.
In the past decade the taco has become every bit as mainstream as a burger. Perhaps, the churro is becoming as commonplace as, say, the chocolate chip cookie.
"I think that's true," the elder Antonio said.
That's not a bad thing, he added.
"That's how we got kolaches and Runza here," he said. "People want the flavors from their countries. They need that."