After a full day at the factory, Rosario Diaz would sometimes get a late-night knock on the window of her garden apartment on St. Paul’s East Side. Another customer, wanting some pupusas.

Now, the restaurant she founded off the traditional Salvadoran dish will be one of Dayton’s Bluff’s largest. Mañana Restaurant — garnering a decade-long following for its authentic Salvadoran cuisine — will open in an East Seventh Street space with nearly three times the seating of its current spot, a half-block away.

UPDATE: Bigger Mañana Restaurant is now open, and pupusas are still the star

“It surprises me that God blesses me so much. It surprises me what God does with me. The truth is I’ve never sold anything else or done anything else,” said the 60-year-old restaurateur.

Diaz’s saga started in California’s San Fernando Valley, where she immigrated at age 26 after her husband was killed in the Salvadoran Civil War.

After 12-hour shifts in a golf club factory, Diaz would look forward to her half-day on Saturday, when she could cook up some tamales. The night before, she’d send her son to a local swap meet to pick up 300 cobs of corn. Then she’d call her friends and tell them she was cooking.

A move to New Jersey, another factory: This time making dentist drills.

And on Saturday and Sunday, pupusas — a traditional Salvadoran tortilla, thick with fillings like pork and corn — for construction workers in the neighborhood.

“That’s when all the fun started,” said her son, Balmore Diaz-Paiz. “People just started coming into the house, and in the end, the yard was just filled with trucks, surrounding it.”

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Finally, in 1998, Diaz got on a Greyhound bus with a single bag, a small television and a “150 tamale” steel pot. Bound for the Twin Cities.

She’d visited St. Paul for a friend’s quinceanera, and the Cities seemed nice. In the summer.

“It was nicer than New Jersey. Lakewood (N.J.) used to be very ugly,” Diaz said.

She found a job at a tomato packaging plant in Minneapolis. Again, it was long hours, and Diaz always volunteered for overtime. And it snowed.

It was a little less fun than it had been that summer. But she noticed there were plenty of people from El Salvador hanging around her complex at the corner of Barclay Street and Magnolia Avenue.

“You guys know anybody who sells pupusas?” she asked a pair of men one night.

No, nobody did.

Related: With business booming, East Seventh Street’s Latino district rivals the West Side

“Well, I’m going to make some and sell them to you,” she told them. And she did.

Soon enough, people were knocking on the window of her garden apartment, sometimes at 10 p.m., wanting some pupusas.

One day, her property manager approached.

“I know you’re selling pupusas,” the woman said, making Diaz’s heart jump. “Tell them to come into the lobby, rather than hang out outside.”

After a couple of years, Diaz said she “got smart,” made some business cards and bought a house on Geranium Avenue.

“Now people would eat in my dining room,” Diaz said. Someone made her a bench, which she put in her back yard for extra seating.

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It was time to quit the tomato factory. Soon after, in 2005 — with $50,000 saved — she opened Mañana Restaurant, at 828 E. Seventh Street.

Twice a year, Diaz travels back to El Salvador — and returns with three 60-pound suitcases, filled with spices she can’t find here. Still, though she’s in the kitchen almost every morning, it’s her two sons who do most of the bustling these days.

“When I used to come and visit them, I would see that they’d work from 5 a.m. to midnight,” said Balmore Diaz-Paiz, who moved from Arizona to help with the business. The other son, Luis Diaz-Paiz — who came to St. Paul with his mother — is a fixture at the register. Related Articles Marchers shut down I-94 through St. Paul to protest Breonna Taylor decision

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By mid-June, the restaurant will move a half-block west on East Seventh Street, to a building the family bought from Cleo Kelly and has been renovating for months. Their seating will jump from 33 to 81, including an outdoor patio and bar.

“She stayed at home cooking, and had a vision of a small little restaurant where she’d be happy,” Balmore Diaz-Paiz said. “And now we have this.”