Apartment building’s kitchen is perfect for making carry-out breakfast burritos

Tim Harty, The Business Times

Imad and Anna Burleigh were looking for a brick-and-mortar store for their business, Lil Richard’s, which had been selling its breakfast burritos from a food truck. Early in their quest, they visited the tiny kitchen and lobby in the Downtown Suites building, then ended their search for a storefront.

“As soon as we saw the kitchen, it was game over,” Imad said. “It was like, ‘Yes, we’ll take it.’ Whatever we gotta do, we’ll make it work.”

That was in December 2025. Then, the grab-and-go restaurant’s soft opening at 104 White Ave. in downtown Grand Junction arrived in mid-August.

“We did some small renovations to the front area and the middle area, and really nothing in the kitchen except for throwing a fryer in there,” Imad said. “And then it took six months of back and forth with the city.”

Despite the delayed start, Lil Richard’s is up and running seven days a week and growing its following, overcoming an obvious obstacle to do so: It doesn’t have its store sign up yet. But it’s coming soon, the Burleighs said.

In the meantime, customers just need to know the building is at the corner of First Street and White Avenue, and Lil Richard’s entrance is right below the large Downtown Suites sign on the corner of the building.

Imad said some customers have mentioned how difficult it was to find the store, but he alleviates any tension and draws a laugh when he tells them: “This is our burrito speakeasy of Grand Junction. So, if you find it, you’re doing pretty good. The password is Big Richard.”

Ah, the Big Richard. That’s the burrito Lil Richard’s is known for. A pound-and-a-quarter of meat, cheese, eggs, crispy tots and green chile sauce, which Imad says is “my attempt at the best breakfast burrito on the planet.”

And if you take the burrito home and weigh it to see if it really is 20 ounces, Imad said you’ll see it actually weighs more.

“It’s more like a pound and a half,” he said. “You don’t want them to come back and say, ‘This was one pound and, you know, one-eighth.’”

Of course, the Big Richard isn’t the only burrito size. There are smaller sizes and many variations of the ingredient combinations.

But by design, Lil Richard’s keeps its burritos simple and flavorful.

“The model in general is very simple menu, extremely good ingredients and extremely well-executed food, so that we can be consistent,” Imad said. “And a focus on customer service that I think has kind of disappeared in the service industry.

“One of our mottos is: Come hungry, leave a regular. It’s every single person that comes into this business should feel like they’ve come a hundred times before, right? So that’s kind of the core of the model.”

Imad revisited and emphasized the customer-service element, saying, “I want to reintroduce hospitality to the service industry, even if it’s just quick-serve breakfast burritos. We can literally make somebody’s day different by the way we treat them. So, that’s been a huge focus for us, and, you know, our employees have all kind of embodied that and really love it. It’s been really cool, really fun, and the more we get to interact with the community and they interact with us, the more we love it.”

The fun factor is important, too, as he added, “If this wasn’t going to be fun for us, it wasn’t going to be worth doing. As long as we’re still having fun and getting to engage with our employees and our customers and our community, we’re at a really happy space.”

When Imad said he thinks Lil Richard’s has served more than 5,000 breakfast burritos, Anna chimed in with: “Oh, we’re way over 10,000 at this point.”

That’s a far cry from Lil Richard’s beginnings as a food truck in May 2025, when Imad said they prepared for their opening day with enough ingredients to make 100 breakfast burritos and towed their unmarked red food truck into a liquor-store parking lot and said, “We’re gonna do this.”

Instead, Iman said, “I think we had three customers, so it was like $60 in sales or something like that.”

It was a huge letdown, he said, and acknowledged, “That could have been the end of it, where we were just like, ‘You know what? This isn’t gonna work. Let’s move on to something else.’”

But they decided to try again the next day and quadrupled the number of people who stopped at the food truck. Better yet, they got some encouragement.

“People that drove by the day before said, ‘Oh, we saw you yesterday. We were hoping you would be here today, and sure enough, you guys were back, so we decided to stop.’ And then, you know, that was a pretty good day,” Imad said.

The following weekend – the food truck was limited to the weekends, because Anna and Imad had full-time jobs during the week – Imad said, “I think we tripled the amount of people that came on Saturday. And then the next day we doubled that. And then the next weekend we doubled that.

“So, it was exponential growth from that point on, and it was just amazing. The community and the support for the food truck and the feedback that we were getting on our food was just so much fun, and it was exactly what we had planned, right?”

Hence, the need for a storefront.

And the Burleighs said the store is off to a good start, aided by built-in customers from the apartment building. And the location is directly across the street from The Junction apartment complex and its 256 apartments.

Anna said the Downtown Suites tenants quickly figured out who their new neighbor is, and many of them have become regulars.

“You know, somebody will just walk downstairs, place their order, go back, take a shower, get ready and pick up their burrito on their way out to work or something,” she said. “So, it’s cool. Everybody here has been awesome. And then for some of the regulars, we know them well enough, and we know where they live even, so oftentimes I’ll go and do a special delivery.”

Food truck still running

Lil Richard’s started in a food truck, and now that the breakfast-burrito business has a brick-and-mortar home, the food truck has been on vacation.

But the hiatus will end, as owners Imad and Anna Burleigh said during a Sept. 24 interview, “We’re gonna open it back up.”

Initially they will cater some events with the food truck, such as business or school events, weddings and even an upcoming baby shower. They also want to resume setting up at youth-soccer tournaments and such, but that will require more bodies, because those events are extremely busy.

“So,” Imad said, “we’re still hiring.”

Giving the crew their due

The employees already on board are impressing the Burleighs.

“Something we’ve been blown away by is the people that we brought into the business and that have been working with us for the last month,” Imad said. “They have been absolutely incredible.

“We hear that the restaurant business is rough, and finding people is really hard and has a lot of just really negative ideas on the people that work in the industry. And I just want to say that’s the farthest from the truth that it could be. We found incredible people that have really made this what it is right now. And they’re gonna continue to do so into the future.

“And that’s something that’s extremely important to us is taking care of our employees and making sure that they feel like they’re a part of our growth.”

Hey, Mom! Wanna job?

Imad’s mom, Susan Burleigh, started out as a volunteer, helping Imad and Anna with the Lil Richard’s food truck, and eventually she became their first employee.

Her impact on the business went beyond work. Susan is from Grand Junction, and Imad said she has a lot of friends in the area and talked up Lil Richard’s to them, especially people in her swim aerobics classes.

“We had so many people that would come from the swim classes, and they say, ‘Hey, I heard about you from Susan,’” Imad said. “So she was kind of our, like, guerrilla marketing as well, which is incredible.”

Susan also is responsible for the simple-to-use point-of-sale system Lil Richard’s uses, because she often worked as their cashier, and Imad in turn designed it for “somebody who is retired and can just kind of jump right into a cashier station, rather than it being this crazy bells and whistles and everything.”

He added, “It made it so much better for anybody that has to jump onto the cash register and use it. It’s just easy. It’s super intuitive, which, if we hadn’t had her on the cash register, I don’t think it would be that easy, right? … So, we’re really grateful for that.”

Named after the dog

The wallpaper in the front room at Lil Richard’s has a repeating theme that includes a dachshund wearing a white chef’s hat and coat. Around the store, you might find tiny dachshund figurines. Those represent Imad and Anna’s 9-year-old, 20-pound dachshund, Richard.

And yes, he’s the Richard the business is named after.

Richard has quite the backstory, and The Business Times will try to address it in an upcoming edition in a feature we call, “More to the Story.”

In the meantime, Imad sums up Richard with: “This little guy ended up being the most socialized dog I think I’ve ever met.”