By Ken Wells

      Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

     7 February 1984

     Copyright 1984, Dow Jones & Co.

     BARROW, Alaska -- It is noon in January in the high Arctic. The sun went down two months ago and hasn't been seen since. It is dark and foggy.  The wind blows at 30 knots off the Arctic Ocean. The wind-chill factor is 50 degrees below zero.

      A group of men, most of them Eskimos buried deep in fur parkas, walk hurriedly along an icy street. In these parts they could easily be on their way to watch polar bears romp in their feeding grounds. But today they have their own stomachs in mind. They are on their way to eat tacos.

     Si, tacos. Their destination is Pepe's North of the Border, perhaps the world's most oddly placed Mexican restaurant. Here on the tundra north of the Arctic Circle, on the rim of an ice-bound ocean 500 roadless miles from anywhere, Mexican cooks and waiters cheerfully dispense south-of-the-border cuisine.

      Pepe's is one of only two restaurants in the village -- three if you count the tiny coffee shop at the tiny airport. "Eskimos love hot sauce," says Pepe's owner and founder, 54-year-old Fran Tate, "and they put lots of Tabasco sauce" on just about everything.

     But Eskimos also like their traditional foods -- muktuk (raw whale skin), caribou meat, a good polar-bear steak now and then, and several varieties of raw fish served frozen. So when Mrs. Tate first planned to open her restaurant, the big question was whether Barrow's Eskimos, who make up about 80% of the village's 2,800 people, would even occasionally trade native dishes for Mrs. Tate's Mexican fare.

     Eleven banks that she asked for loans had one opinion: no. A 12th involuntarily lent her about half the money when Mrs. Tate overdrew her checking account by $11,000 to pay for kitchen equipment. Mrs. Tate put up the rest herself, and Pepe's opened about six years ago in a converted two-bedroom house.

     "Luckily we got real busy real fast and I was able to cover the checks," Mrs. Tate says, "but a lot of people in town thought I was nuts. They said we'd last 90 days."

     The energetic Mrs. Tate originally thought that what Barrow really needed was a McDonald's. When McDonald's turned her down -- Barrow, it said, had too few people and was rather remote -- she turned to personal experience.

     "I was a waitress for a little while at a Mexican restaurant in Renton, Wash.," says Mrs. Tate, a native of Washington who came to Barrow for a visit eight years ago and never left. "I was never a cook, though. God, home ec kept me from being valedictorian of my class. But I just thought that spicy food in this climate might just go over big."

     Now, several hundred thousand tacos and enchiladas later, Pepe's has moved to more-spacious quarters and seems about as ingrained here in the U.S.'s northernmost city as polar ice and the northern lights.

     The town has several attributes that are better known than Pepe's restaurant. Among them are a winter night that lasts about three months, cold down to 99 degrees below zero, occasional nomadic polar bears on the fringes of town, and rugged Eskimo whalers who still hunt from sealskin boats. These days, Barrowans boast, the town also is the only place where you can eat "tacos on the tundra."

     Margaret Opie, a Barrow native who once ventured "outside" (the Alaskan term for everywhere else), says that Pepe's Mexican fare is better than the food she once sampled in Mexico. On this particular day, however, Mrs. Opie didn't have lunch at Pepe's. "I ate at home," she says, smiling. "We had caribou in seal oil."

     Many Barrowans think that Pepe's succeeds because, like caribou served with seal oil, there is something authentic about it. A drab, bunker-like building from the outside, Pepe's on the inside is cheery and full of flourishes worthy of almost any upscale Mexican restaurant on either side of the border.

     Hand-painted bullfight murals adorn the walls alongside posters trumpeting the next appearance of the great matador El Cordobes. Pleasant mariachi music drifts from a sound system. The menu is extensive, the service is attentive and the waiters are well dressed.

     Over all of this presides the exuberant, chatty Mrs. Tate, who added a bit to Pepe's authenticity not long ago by marrying her Mexican cook, 24-year-old Juan Ramirez. Mrs. Tate -- Tate was her third husband's name and she still goes by it -- won't let an hour go by without a foray into Pepe's three dining rooms. She greets her regular customers by name, introduces herself to any visitors and always asks how the food is.

      The replies on this evening run from "good" to "great," a judgment unscientifically confirmed by this reporter as he polishes off an iceberg-sized steak burrito-steak, rice and beans wrapped in a tortilla.

     Besides importing her tortillas, beans and taco shells from Mexico, Mrs.  Tate imports almost all her labor from there. Currently, 11 Mexicans work at Pepe's. Mrs. Tate says that she starts her cooks at $9.15 an hour and that a cook in a comparable Mexican restaurant in the lower 48 states starts at $5.50 an hour.

     The difficult part in luring Mexican workers to Pepe's, Mrs. Tate says, was convincing her first Mexican cook and her first Mexican waiter that they could survive in Barrow, a place as dark and wintry as Mexico is sunny and warm. "It took me a while to explain where Barrow was and what it was like," Mrs. Tate says. "But after I got my first two guys in here, I had no trouble getting others. Word got around that this was a pretty neat place to work."

     Jose Gomez, 25, a cook from Guadalajara, agrees, though he says he spent three sleepless nights after accepting Mrs. Tate's job offer by telephone. "I thought the restaurant would be like a big igloo," Mr. Gomez says in halting English. "I thought we would be walking around in big coats waiting on tables, like this." He assumes an exaggerated crouch to show how you might serve a taco in an igloo.

     Mr. Gomez says the adjustment to Barrow has proved surprisingly easy.  After working long hours at Pepe's, he and his co-workers usually have parties to fill up Barrow's long winter nights.  "We have tequila," Mr. Gomez says. "Sometimes girls come to visit."

     So, occasionally, does the Border Patrol. The Anchorage office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service says that at least twice in recent years, Border Patrol raids of Pepe's have turned up illegal aliens.  "Wouldn't you know it -- it's always during the busy time just before Christmas," Mrs. Tate says, shrugging off the raids. (Immigration officials note that it isn't illegal to hire illegal aliens. They say Mrs. Tate hasn't done anything wrong.)

     Occasional personnel problems aside, Mrs. Tate spends most of her time doing what she does best: selling Pepe's to the local residents. Barrow does get a few tourists, too, mostly summertime adventurers who fly in to view the midnight sun or to stand at Point Barrow, the official northern tip of the U.S.

     "But the tourists are usually pretty cheap," Mrs. Tate says. She says they are sometimes shocked by Pepe's prices. A burrito plate, for instance, is $15 -- but then a gallon of milk at Barrow's local market is about $6 and a gallon of gasoline at the lone gas station is about $3.50. The prices are principally a reflection of the high cost of transporting goods to Barrow.

     Most Barrowans understand that.  And most, cashing in on jobs created by Alaska North Slope oil installations, don't seem to mind paying the inflated prices. "There's a lot of money being thrown around carelessly up here," Mrs.  Tate says with a laugh. "I decided I'd like to make some of it."

     So she does a great deal of promoting. At Easter, she dons a bunny suit and passes out candy to kids on Barrow's streets. At Christmas she plays Santa Claus. On one recent cold day, Mrs. Tate, who could pass for 39, appeared at Pepe's in a rather skimpy outfit. "It generated traffic, I'll say that," she recalls. "But stuff like that keeps people interested. It leaves them wondering what the dummy's up to next."

     Among the surprises Mrs. Tate has in mind is a plan to open the Arctic's first ice-cream parlor. "Why not?" she asks, anticipating the skeptics. A few years ago, Mrs.  Tate gambled that Barrowans, though surrounded by thousands of miles of ice, wanted something other than sea ice with which to mix their drinks. She started selling machine-made ice -- at $3 a bag.

     "Sometimes," she says, "I can't keep up with the demand."

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