After more than four years, a new occupant is coming to the former site of a Jack in the Box restaurant at 564 Pearl St. in La Jolla. 

With a planned opening in April, the El Pueblo Mexican restaurant is to join other locations in Del Mar, Cardiff, Carmel Valley and Carlsbad. The first of them opened in Cardiff in 2012. 

“We’re big on good food at a great price,” said El Pueblo General Manager Nony Funes. “That is the core value. We want you to come in and have a really great meal and not break the bank.”

That philosophy has been at the heart of El Pueblo since it opened as a 600-square-foot shop offering 99-cent fish tacos. 

“We kept doing that for 10 years because it just took off,” Funes said. “Then we went up to $1.50 and there was a lot of backlash, so we went back to 99 cents and made a promise to our customers that we would only go [up] 10 cents every year.”  

Now, the fish tacos are available for $1.39 every day. 

The property at 564 Pearl has been unoccupied since it was purchased by the adjacent Bishop’s School in September 2021 and the Jack in the Box abruptly closed. 

When the $5.5 million purchase was announced, Bishop’s Head of School Ron Kim said the school’s plan was to lease out the site in the short term and later convert it for student use. It currently is fenced off and used for school bus parking.

“We’re a great school and want to continue to be a great school, so this was about imagination and looking at our vision for how we can learn and grow better,” Kim told the La Jolla Light at the time. “Whenever we think about the future, we have the desire to expand what we can do. We want to make sure that space constraints aren’t going to prevent us from doing something.”

A deal with a prospective tenant fell through in August 2022, causing the school to restart its search.

In June 2023, the school told the Light that the building “remains for lease,” with no deadline to find a tenant before converting it for school use.

With El Pueblo now lined up for the space, Bishop’s School spokeswoman Cathy Morrison said this week that “the school determined this is the current best use of the site for both Bishop’s and La Jolla.”

“We are glad we found the right match in a tenant that will be available to the community once they open for business in the coming months,” Morrison added. “Knowing that the neighborhood is eager to see the property put back into use, we are pleased that El Pueblo has begun improving the site in anticipation of opening the doors.”

Details about the lease and the school’s possible long-term plans for the site were not immediately available.

As for El Pueblo, Funes said management prides itself on making everything in-house.

“We are as close to a scratch kitchen as you can get,” she said. That includes salsas that are “hot with flavor, not just spice” and cheese that is shredded in-house.

“We could order our produce pre-cut or meat pre-marinated and probably save time and money, but we would be sacrificing quality,” Funes said. “Quality really matters.”

That includes the communities El Pueblo chooses for its locations, she added.

“We are always looking to expand our brand into the right locations, and it can’t get any better than La Jolla,” Funes said. “We definitely wanted to be part of the La Jolla community.” ♦