El Famous Burrito jumps to the top of local search and turns visibility into $192,000+ in catering sales with Popmenu.

For 40 years, El Famous Burrito has served the Chicago area recipes brought straight from Mexico. In a city where it can feel like there’s a Mexican restaurant on every corner, the brand has not only held their ground, they’ve expanded to three locations and built a loyal following that keeps coming back.

Owner Kevin Walker credits that lasting success to a single principle: a restaurant can only grow as far as its systems will carry it. Long before he turned his restaurant into a marketing powerhouse, Kevin learned that consistency and quality at scale don’t happen by force of will; they happen because the right systems are in place to run without him managing every detail.

We sat down with Kevin to learn how he’s approached the digital side of his business and continued to expand his revenue streams, including the addition of a new concept. We’re sharing what we learned so other operators can do the same.

“I can’t be in six places at once. We have to have systems in place that let us grow so we can maintain consistency and quality whether or not I’m there.”

— Kevin Walker, Owner, El Famous Burrito and Extract Juicery

Getting found is a system, not an accident

Kevin recognized early that the way guests discover restaurants had moved online, and that his digital presence wasn’t keeping up. His previous website got the basics done, but it was static. It didn’t provide a compelling experience, and it didn’t help new customers find him. “My old site got built once and then just sat there, obsolete two years later. It wasn’t engaging, and I don’t think it made us discoverable. It was just kind of there.”

Partnering with Popmenu gave Kevin a living website instead of a static one, including features like dynamic menus with high-quality photos, customer reviews and likes under each dish, and a site that updates with the times rather than aging out of relevance. Just as important, all of that activity does double duty: every review and every like signals to search engines that El Famous Burrito is active, credible, and worth surfacing. Kevin noted, “Google rewards activity and frequency. It establishes authority and credibility. Having customers leave reviews directly on our site is huge.”

For Kevin, the results showed up where it counts: visibility. In his words, El Famous Burrito went from showing up sixth, seventh, or eighth in local search to claiming the top three spots — no small feat in one of the most saturated Mexican-food markets in the country. Not only does El Famous rank high in Google search results, they also show up in searches on answer engines such as ChatGPT.

That discovery engine is now the brand’s primary front door. Organic search drives 69% of all website sessions, and 76% of the people landing on the site are brand-new visitors; clear evidence that the site both serves as a destination for existing fans and a tool that introduces El Famous to new guests every day. To date, the brand has collected 358 reviews and 388 likes, with each one feeding the loop of activity and authority that keeps El Famous discoverable.

Turning discovery into a relationship

Getting found is especially valuable if you can bring guests back. That’s where El Famous’s marketing system comes in. By consolidating its guest contacts — including those imported from its Square POS — into Popmenu, the brand turned a list of 60,000 guests into a powerful marketing engine.

The strength of Popmenu as a marketing platform is in how easy it makes sending the right message at the right time. Whether the team is crafting a campaign for all guest contacts or targeted segments or letting behavior-triggered emails do the work automatically, the messages land. Automated emails average a 52.4% open rate and a 9% click-through rate, dramatically higher than the industry average. All told, El Famous has earned over $27,000 in marketing-attributed revenue through Popmenu.

One example shows the system working quietly in the background. A welcome email — offering $5 off a guest’s next in-store visit — automatically greets every new contact and has driven over $5,000 on its own. This is a message the team never has to send by hand and allows the restaurant to “work” around the clock turning first-time guests into regulars.

Scaling “20 pounds of steak at a time”

If discovery and marketing set the table, catering is where Kevin sees the clearest path to scale. But it wasn’t always that way. Before Popmenu, catering was the brand’s biggest bottleneck as a manual process that ate up Kevin’s time and tested his customers’ patience.

“Before Popmenu, [catering] wasn’t even a form. It was phone calls and a PDF menu. I’d sit on the phone for half an hour walking someone through an order — and I couldn’t even send them an invoice.”

With online catering ordering, that friction is gone. Guests can browse, schedule, and pay in a few clicks, without ever needing to call. The volume of catering phone calls has dropped so far that Kevin can count them on one hand each month — freeing his team to focus on food instead of phone tag.

That matters because Kevin doesn’t see catering as a side project. He sees it as the fastest, most efficient way to grow.

“I can move the needle one burrito at a time, or twenty pounds of steak at a time — and I want to do twenty pounds at a time. Catering is the best marketing there is: a hundred people trying your food at once.”

— Kevin Walker, Owner, El Famous Burrito and Extract Juicery

The data backs him up. Across three locations, El Famous Burrito has driven 452 catering orders and over $192,000 in catering sales through Popmenu. At an average order value of $425.43, a single catering order is worth a full day of walk-in tickets, which is exactly the leverage Kevin is after. And it’s accelerating: monthly catering volume has climbed steadily since 2023 and recently reached an all-time high, a direct reflection of the brand’s growing emphasis on the channel.

Operationally, the system is smooth because catering orders captured in Popmenu inject directly into El Famous’s Square POS — no tablets to manage, no manual re-entry. Orders simply appear where the team already works, so a busy catering week never pulls staff away from the guests in front of them.

A partner that grows with you

Applying the tenets of exceptional digital hospitality, Kevin continues to expand his business with Popmenu. He launched a second concept named Extract Juicery that now has three locations and a fan base of over 30,000 guests. Like El Famous Burrito, Extract Juicery boasts a visually rich interactive menu that ranks high in searches to bring new guests in and automated marketing to keep them coming back again and again.

Across nearly five years with Popmenu, what’s kept Kevin invested is that the platform keeps evolving alongside his business. New capabilities arrive, integrations deepen, and his systems get stronger without him having to rebuild from scratch.

“The thing I love is that Popmenu is a company that keeps growing and innovating — so we can keep growing too. Find a partner you can grow with.”

— Kevin Walker, Owner, El Famous Burrito and Extract Juicery

For operators weighing whether modernizing their systems is worth the effort, Kevin’s answer is direct. “100% do it. You’re missing so many opportunities by not having that process simplified and easy for people. It can transform your business.”

In a market this competitive, ambition only takes an operator so far. The restaurants that keep growing are the ones with systems designed to carry them through — and that’s exactly what Kevin and his team built.