T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — Midnight Garden Owner Luisa Ortega, right, and her daughter Alexa, left, have launched a new pop-up kitchen blending Mexican and Korean flavors inside the event venue located at 1501 S. 17th Ave. in Marshalltown.

Throughout her professional career and various business ventures in Marshalltown, a love of food has always been a constant for Luisa Ortega, who started a restaurant called Ortega’s in the Marshalltown Mall around the turn of the century before later shifting her focus to her first event venue, Midnight Ballroom in the Meadow Lane Mall, and then her second, Midnight Garden, which opened in 2022.

“I came from very humble beginnings, and my parents struggled a lot. And my mom always had a dream of owning her own business, and she loved the food business and she likes to cook, right? Always making tamales to sell and that kind of thing, and she always worked in restaurants too,” she said. “When I first got to Marshalltown (at age 15) and we were looking for a job, my mom and I walked all of Main Street applying at every place that we could because we needed money. And we came across Ernesto’s Mexican Restaurant.”

Ortega and her mom spent time working at that establishment and said food has always been “the glue” for their family as they often host large gatherings, and she has since passed that love for the culinary arts onto her daughters. While she ultimately made the decision to close Ortega’s as stores like Menard’s moved out of the mall, she has resurrected that dream through her new pop-up kitchen at Midnight Garden, located at 1501 S. 17th Ave., with a unique mix of Mexican and Asian flavors, an extension of the successful catering business she has built through her two event venues.

“Obviously, we all know that every business has its slow season. With the Ballroom or the Garden, wintertime, after Christmas parties are over and the companies have had their Christmas parties and gatherings, winter is the worst. January is the slowest month. It’s the coldest month. It’s the poorest month. We just got past Christmas, and it’s just a hard month in general,” she said. “I’m a little worried about the economy… But you do see prices of things increasing. You know, you order black pepper from the food supplier and you’re like ‘Oh, that doubled.’ Little things like that that you see increasing, the cost of things when you go out, so it makes you a little worried about what is the future gonna hold? And it makes me feel like ‘I can’t sit down and relax.’ I have to do something, at least to try.”

Luisa and her 19-year-old daughter Alexa, a graduate of Marshalltown High School and Marshalltown Community College, are partnering on the venture, which will be open Wednesday through Sunday — 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. While the Mexican influence on the menu is prominent with offerings like traditional tacos, burritos and soups, they’ve also incorporated Korean flavors like Bulgogi beef and pork belly tacos and kimchi fried rice.

“I think we always liked to find places to eat, like Asian food or just good food in general, and I feel like it’s difficult to find quality places sometimes. So I think that’s why we wanted to bring that in, and their flavors are good, too. And they like spicy, and we like spicy too,” Alexa said. “And Marshalltown’s missing that aspect. We do have some other places in town, but I think we wanted to bring a different vibe.”

The kitchen has been open since Jan. 15, and Luisa and Alexa see it as a reflection of their love for a wide variety of global flavors with plans to add more options in the future.

“We’re in the process of already trying other stuff as well to add just to the Korean part of it because you know our Mexican food is already pretty solid, but the other stuff, we do want to explore more,” Alexa said.

The set-up of the new restaurant allows customers to walk up and order at the counter or through scanning a QR code as opposed to sitting down and being served by a waiter or waitress.

“They can order. They can sit down. They can sit on the couches. It’s more of a hangout place. Bring your computer. If you want to bring a board game, if you want to sit down and just chit chat and hang out, that’s fine. If you want to order food, there’s the code. We bring the food out to you. If you want a drink, you go to the bar,” Luisa said. “We really weren’t wanting to have that whole labor of waiter and waitress, but just having people come and hang out and try the food. We have a lot of different concepts of things that we want to try. At least I do, and (Alexa’s) got a lot of talent too. So she really has pulled off a lot of those menu ideas, and I think we’ll just keep adding. So we kind of wanted to start off slow and get people acclimated and then just keep adding things.”

At the Ortega house, the family is always making a wide variety of food from Mexican to lasagna to Asian to hot pots, and they plan to bring that same mindset to the new restaurant. To view the full menu, visit eat.midnightevents.live.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.