Since 1999
Authentic home-style Mexican, with a flare.
Four California kitchens. One family recipe book. Twenty-plus years of the same promise.
Our Story
Bakersfield, 1999.
Qué Pasa Mexican Cafe was established in 1999 with its first restaurant in Bakersfield, California. We opened with a single mission: to serve authentic home-style cooking with an inventive Mexican flare — the recipes we grew up with, made the way they were meant to be made.
Twenty-plus years later, we've grown to four California restaurants across the Central Valley and Central Coast, but the promise hasn't budged. Food is prepared to order. Every plate that leaves our kitchen is built from scratch for the guest sitting at that table.
What we cook
Our menu is rooted in classic Mexican staples — guacamole, ceviche, tacos — and grows from there. Steak Santa Fe. Enchiladas de Mole. Sizzling Enchiladas served straight from the plancha. Fajitas on cast iron. Fresh seafood, cooked to order.
How we cook it
Our corn and flour tortillas are handmade every day. Salsas are stone-ground each morning. Beans simmer all day. We use only the finest and freshest ingredients available, and our steaks are all-natural prime Angus beef. No shortcuts. No microwaves. Just a recipe book, a plancha at full heat, and the kind of food that makes strangers at the next table lean over and ask, “what did you order?”
The bar
We're proud of what pours out of our bar. We feature one of the largest selections of tequilas in the region, and a wide selection of margaritas — hand-shaken with our own exclusive margarita mix. Fresh-squeezed everything. Rims we build by hand. A signature cocktail list you'll want to work through.
Our promise
We consider our business built on a return-customer basis. Every plate, every drink, every table matters — because the best measurement of what we do is whether you come back next week. We invite you to experience the wonderful, authentic Mexican food and warm, friendly service that has been our name since 1999.
Come hungry. Leave planning your next visit.
Meet the Owner
Baldo Cisneros.
The name behind Qué Pasa since 1999.
Meet Baldo Cisneros, owner of Qué Pasa Mexican Cafe.
Baldo opened our first restaurant in Bakersfield in 1999 with a simple idea — serve authentic, home-style Mexican food the way it was meant to be made, and treat every guest like family. More than two decades later, four California kitchens, and thousands of returning regulars, that vision hasn't changed.
He's still the one signing off on every recipe, every plate, and every hand-shaken margarita. If you spot him at one of our restaurants, say hello — Baldo will be the first to ask what you're eating and whether you loved it.
“We consider our business built on a return-customer basis.”
In the News
Bakersfield grand opening coverage
Local news covered the opening of our Bakersfield restaurant on Coffee Rd.