Dee Morales Is Cooking Again in the Town of Superior
After spending a little more than two years operating Bucktales Cantina & Grill at 1015 Tower Ave. in downtown Superior, last July owners Dee and Mary Ellen Morales shut the doors and put an end to the legacy of Bucktales.
“I was putting a lot of hours in that place, and it was really hard to find people to work,” Dee Morales said about the decision to permanently close Bucktales. “I was at a point in my life that was like, well, I need to take care of my family too, you know. I cannot be spending most of my time in the business without seeing my family. I was just going to take a break, think about what to do next. I was thinking a food truck or maybe going to work for somebody else where I could just put in a 40-hour week.”
Dee and Mary Ellen and their four children were living in Fridley, Minn., where Dee was employed as a cook, but he wanted more for his family. In 2014 they bought Bucktales Bar on Highway 35 in the Town of Superior. The family moved into the spacious upstairs apartment and built a kitchen in the country bar. Once Dee started cooking, he put Bucktales on the map as a place to go for Mexican and American cuisine.
When Shorty’s Pizza & Smoked Meats closed in downtown Superior in 2021, citing a labor shortage, the Morales decided they wanted to move up to the larger and more visible location on Tower Avenue. They also decided to keep much of the Shorty’s menu.
“From the beginning when I opened the other place, it wasn’t really me,” Dee said. “I needed to change, you know?”
The food truck idea really appealed to him, but he also considered moving out of the area.
“I had a lot of thoughts in mind,” he said. “I thought a food truck would be good here in the summer, and then disappear in the winter, go south.”
But that old location in the Town of Superior wasn’t done with the Morales family. It was reopened as Piglet’s Grill and Cantina when the Morales family moved out. In August 2024 the owners decided to close the doors.
“I got a call from the guy who bought my old place. He wanted to know if I was interested to take it back,” Dee said. “We got an arrangement and I was back.”
Since they had announced Bucktales was permanently closed, they had to come up with a new name.
“Some of the cooks and the others in town, they start calling me like that, ‘Hey, Jefe,’ in Spanish,” Dee said.
So that was it – El Jefe (The Boss). El Jefe opened its doors last October.
As she had done for the previous Bucktales, Mary Ellen designed a logo to reflect the new venture. It features Dee in a Western hat giving an “American Pie”-style red-white-and-blue thumbs up.
The American flag thumb represents the American cuisine on El Jefe’s menu.
“I was looking for different ideas, what was trending, and that’s what I came up with, a new menu. I like to do my a little twist on things,” Dee said. “I didn’t want to be classified as a Mexican restaurant, even if I sell Mexican food. I always like to do different things. On my menu I’ve got Philly cheese steaks, smash burgers, gyros. A lot of places they do refried beans and Spanish rice, you know, most of the Mexican places do that. I knew I wanted to change that, so started doing black beans and cilantro rice, just something different. I tried doing my own things.
“I wanted the presentation in my place different,” he said. “! don’t want four pages of food, like a lot of Mexican restaurants they have, you know. I just want simple. I think a lot of people don’t have much time to sit down and go through a big menu.”
Of course, you can order typical Mexican restaurant appetizers such as nachos and chips and salsa, but Dee also embraces Northland traditions by serving nacho tots – tater tots topped with taco meat, queso sauce and pico de gallo – as well as cheese curds with caramel sauce.
The menu offers nine different smashburgers, including the Goober Smash, which is made with peanut butter.
“A lot of people come for the smash burgers,” Dee said. “A lot of people are coming for the tacos. Of course, my biggest sales is always going to be probably the five items from the old menu that used to sell the most – the burrito, the El Gordo and the chimichangas. They are kind of my classics.”
Mexican entrees include a choice of nine different tacos, including flour tortilla Gringo Tacos.
“It’s a mix of both cultures. That was my goal,” Dee said. “I don’t want to be totally Mexican, but I don’t want to be totally American either. I like to eat different things, you know, so I wanted something that’s mixable. I sell a lot of gyros. People around here like gyros. Not everybody likes Mexican food. So if you come with your wife, maybe she wants American food and you want Mexican. I can never go to Red Lobster because nobody in my family likes seafood, except for me.”
Two words that come up often when talking about the business with Dee are “work ethic.” He believes a lack of it is what hampered his efforts in downtown Superior.
“There’s not a work ethic out there, you know,” Dee said. “Everybody’s asking for the big money, and they don’t even show you what they have.”
Besides himself as head chef, Dee has four employees at the new location.
“Lucas Androski, he’s been with me since he was 15. He started washing dishes, and now he’s 20 and helping me in the cooking. His sister, Claire, worked for me too. She started when she was 16, washing dishes. Then she started being a bartender. Then she went to college and she’s graduated now.”
“Yeah, my sister Claire, she’s the reason I got the job,” Lucas said. “They were short on staff and my sister offered. She was like, ‘I don’t know if he’ll be a good worker, but we can give him a shot.’ She eventually moved on, went to UMD. She just graduated this year for chemical engineering, but she gives a lot of credit to Dee, like he gave her a work ethic. That’s what she says, and that’s what he says too. And I just stuck around.”
What has made him stick?
“Dee treats me like family,” he said. “He’s always helping me out with things at work, and also cares about me outside of work. Also, he’s a very funny guy. I just have a lot of respect for him because he’s dealt with a lot of stuff in life.”
Having worked for the restaurant for so long, Lucas is able to move around to wherever he’s needed.
“I do a little bit of everything,” he said. “I mostly cook and run food and make drinks, but most of the time I’m cooking. I like cooking, but, not to sound greedy, I like the server money, too. but I like being able to talk with the customers. You run into nice people most of the time.”
Lucas had one other thought to share. “People who read this should check out the place in real life. It’s really good food.”
“I’m happy to be back and appreciate everybody for the support,” Dee said. “I’m not chasing the bread or cabbage so much. I’m just kind of trying to spend more time with my family. If I take a vacation, I just shut down the place. I don’t think people go out late at night like they used to, so around nine o’clock if it’s quiet, I shut down, and that’s it. That helped to make it easier on myself. I’m getting old, and you have to find the balance somewhere between work and home life. That’s one of the things probably the other place gave to me, you know, thinking more about reality and what I want to do in my life. And I think enjoying my kids now and having a good time, and not just working, working, working, because you never know when you’re gonna go.”
Jim Lundstrom is editor of Positively Superior.
