"In mid-January, when Mexican restaurant Nina’s Great Burrito Bar threw open its doors on the Upper West Side at 522 Columbus Avenue, near West 85th Street, the debut marked a culmination of decades of work for its namesake proprietor Nina Flores and her family. Oaxaca-born Flores is the former owner of the Great Burrito, a shoebox-sized shop on the Upper West Side where she and her family sold burritos and quesadillas for neighborhood regulars for nearly 30 years. In 2020, complications with the building’s landlord brought the operation to a halt just as the city itself shut down, according to Flores’s daughter, Beatriz Flores. The family made a quick pivot to takeout and delivery, in partnership with neighborhood restaurateur Jeremy Wladis, and ending up being able to sustain the operation for nearly two years throughout the pandemic. That success has now morphed into Nina’s Great Burrito Bar, a full-scale, sit-down Mexican restaurant owned by Beatriz and run by the Flores family." - Erika Adams
