If only I had known that Fiesta Loma Linda was closing for good after 62 years.

The news that the classic Tex-Mex joint adjacent to my East End neighborhood had turned off its glorious neon signage for the last time made my heart hurt. I wouldn’t even get to have a sentimental Last Supper.

I was curiously fond of the place: the ancient cracked vinyl covering its listing booth seats; the gentle queso served with a plate of chopped onion and pickled jalapeño; the old-fashioned puffy tacos, crisped fried masa balloons bearing a sheaf of ground beef picadillo, shredded lettuce and tomato.

It wasn’t that the food was so great. Indeed, the quality wibbled and wobbled over the 30-odd years I had been a sporadic patron. The last time I went, I grieved over the way the Very Old School chile relleno, a pre-poblano bell pepper, seemed to have been parboiled, then filled and just sort of heated up, so that nothing about it quite hung together. Even the de rigueur raisins and pecans couldn’t help.

That visit took place on Sept. 25, 2017. I know because afterward, at 8:56 p.m., I snapped a smartphone shot of the neon “Tex-Mex” sign that ran along the edge of the roof.

Maybe I had a premonition that the end was nigh. There had been only a couple of other customers in the dining room while just four miles away, on Navigation, Ninfa’s and El Tiempo were packed, as usual.

Texas Mexican food has changed since the midcentury heyday of Loma Linda. If I were a historian, I would label that ancient era B.F., as in “Before Fajitas.” One by one, the stalwarts of that period seem to be slipping away.

R.I.P. Leo’s, where ZZ Top hung out and I learned to love green enchiladas, back before cilantro was even a thing in Houston.

R.I.P. Felix, too, where generations of Houstonians gobbled an oily, roux-based sludge of queso dip that was mightily (and perversely) beloved, then became the trendy modern Japanese restaurant Uchi.

Old favorites that tried to expand have been nipped back. Last year the vintage 1941 Molina’s, where the cheese enchiladas with chile con carne remain classics of their kind, gave up its third location on a high-profile block of Washington. A new version of El Patio in Midtown similarly came to grief, although the Westheimer location with its fabled Club No Minors remains.

GRAY MATTERS: The history of Houston food

Why do such closures seem to cast a funeral pall on the city? It’s because classic Tex-Mex spots born in the B.F. era are nothing less than sacred tribal sites, places of deep ritual, burial mounds for our collective memories. Tex-Mex is the cuisine that most unites us, that we crave most vividly when we travel away, that we need to ingest on a regular basis to achieve a state of well-being.

Benighted outsiders may scoff at the melted yellow cheese and tan sea of refried beans that characterizes your basic Tex-Mex combination plate. But the heart wants what it wants. We find reassurance and comfort in the old school Tex-Mex totems, in a particular suite of flavors and textures that our collective palate craves. The brittle crack of a fried corn tortilla. The crunch of chopped iceberg and tomato. The earthiness of dried red chile powder. The meaty, unassuming rubble of ground-beef picadillo, with its savor of onion. The milky, salty ooze of chile con queso.

This is nursery food for Texans, with a crucial difference: the invigorating capsaicin charge of salsa to administer at will. Unlike the dishes from Mexico’s interior that have made such headway here since the 1980s, Tex-Mex was never hot, until you made it so.

In the best nursery-food tradition, I have always maintained there are few earthly ills that a plate of cheese enchiladas can’t cure — or at least ameliorate. It’s no accident that the Friday after 9/11, after a grim week hunched in front of our respective televisions, a friend and I decided the only thing that would help was a visit to Spanish Village, which has dispensed its iconic cheese and onion enchiladas on a corner of Almeda since 1953.

It did help. Today Spanish Village is still there, lit by its traditional Christmas lights on the enclosed front porch, a testament to how personal Houstonians’ taste for Tex-Mex gets. I’ve had friends make fun of my love for the place (not everybody “gets it,” I argue witheringly); while I pooh-pooh their loyalty to old-school spots such as Lopez or Tony’s. Our hearts want what they want.

That is why my heart nearly stopped as I approached the Spanish Village side door on a recent evening. “Sunday Mother’s Day Brunch,” read a flyer taped to the glass, with a three-course menu advertised. Well, every Spanish Village regular knows they never open on Sundays, or Mondays either. And a coursed-out brunch? Heresy. When the familiar laminated menu arrived with a third page urging me to “Try something new!," I felt something like fear rumble through the core of my being.

It turns out that the 65-year-old restaurant, owned by successive generations of the Larry Pico and John Medina families, has recently changed hands. The new owner, Abhi Sreerama, is a bright and bushy-tailed young man who seems bent on preserving the venerable core menu — while updating around the margins. Growing up in Houston, he absorbed the tribal Tex-Mex imperative like the rest of us, fell in love with Spanish Village and grew determined to carry on its traditions.

Proprietor Johnny Medina will stay on in a management role, batching his marvelously idiosyncratic frozen margaritas and greeting the faithful — pleased that the day-to-day stress of running the restaurant has eased. The chalupas a la bales, piled with a garden of lettuce, tomato and guac, will roll on as usual. But there will be chayote soup and vegetarian/gluten-free options, plus desserts by Sreerama’s girlfriend, Ishita Chakravarty, a talented pastry chef who makes a mean tres leches.

GRAY MATTERS: Why I ate prison food even after I got out

Even at Spanish Village, time moves on. So does Tex-Mex cuisine. As much as we may want to freeze the classics — and the classic restaurants — in time, food never stands still. Nor does the marketplace. The Tex-Mex genre has absorbed everything from fajitas to bacon-wrapped grilled shrimp to fried avocados and “green sauce” over the decades I’ve been pursuing it.

But even though classic Tex-Mex restaurants may close, the classic dishes will still be around. Maybe even — dare I say it? — in an improved form. My latest Tex-Mex obsession is the El Henry combination plate at Ninfa’s on Navigation. Ironically, that’s where the Fajita Era was born back in 1973, when Ninfa Laurenzo served her first taco al carbon, the grilled skirt steak wrapped in a handmade flour tortilla.

Now Honduran-born chef Alex Padilla, whose mother worked at Ninfa’s when he was a boy, has added an interior Mexican slant to the menu, using techniques he learned working alongside Nancy Oakes at her famed San Francisco restaurant, Boulevard. Yet almost forgotten on the very 2018 menu is a combination plate right out of the mid-20th century.

Only better. The all-important cheese enchilada basks in a guajillo chile gravy that vibrates with the rounded warmth of sun and earth. A fat tamal, with its sweet, musky masa tones and trove of shreddy pork adobo, is pure, elemental pleasure. And the crispy beef taco Texans cannot do without is jaw-droppingly good: a foot-long crescent with a bubbled corn tortilla shell that shatters when bitten, stuffed with a stout picadillo and plenty of the shredded cheese, lettuce and tomato that the genre requires.

Add some red salsa. Then rejoice in the fact that though some of our sacred sites may disappear, our rituals live on.

Alison Cook is the Chronicle's James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic. Follow her on Twitter, and keep up with Houston's latest dining and drinking news and reviews by subscribing to our free Flavor newsletter.

Get the Gray Matters newsletter, too. It has a particular suite of flavors and textures that our collective palate craves.