By Pam Register

The Tex Mex Connection is moving up in – but not out of – North Wales.

On most weekends, Tex Mex serves as many as 170 dinners a night from tables that seat only 44.

Next month, the owners will ask North Wales Borough Council to allow the restaurant to double its space by moving the dining room upstairs where two apartments now are.

Space is so tight that on the restaurants’ menu, owner Jane keyes, 36, implores customers not to dawdle when they eat. In fact, the former real estate agent and wholesale clothing seller is not above asking people to leave when they are done.

“I’m sure I’m notorious for asking people for their table,” she said.

When Tex Mex opened five years ago, dilapidated buildings surrounded it on narrow Walnut Street where parking is scarce.

Backed with nothing but love for Mexican food and cooking, Keyes asked her father Bill Keyes for use of the empty dining from adjacent to North Wales Junction, his bar at East Walnut and Second Streets.

The restaurant’s location had its complications: Some people simply could not find it.

She said patrons liked to tell friends: “You won’t believe where I found this restaurant.”

Keyes once thought of moving Tex Mex out of its cramped North Wales location.

But the borough started to look just right for business when she and her father were able to buy the property next door for parking. Plus a tiny, but tidy new Walnut Street Park replaced the old buildings across the street.

The Keyes family venture into North Wales business came on a lark, she said. Bill Keyes, her father, bought the bar as a retirement investment.

Of all small businesses, restaurants most frequently fail, Keyes said. When she went hunting for financing on the renovation project, only Bucks County Bank was willing to talk with her of those she surveyed, she said.

Keyes believes the bank listened to her because they saw how she had built the business so far.

“I’m a very stubborn individual. Anybody with any common sense would have closed this place down years ago,” she said.

After working 12- to 16-hour days for several years, Keyes said she is starting to take some time off.

“I’ve learned that I can go and the place still runs – which was hard for me to accept at first.”

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