‘Picante’ owner dies

BALBOA ISLAND — Residents and shop owners have turned Picante Martin’s Mexican Restaurant into an impromptu memorial shrine, leaving flowers, candles and messages by the front door after the owner’s unexpected death last week.

Martin Diaz-Puente, a Mexican immigrant who founded the restaurant in 1998, died Thursday at the age of 44 at his Costa Mesa home.

Since then, the restaurant, which Diaz-Puente ran with his family, has been closed indefinitely, and friends and neighbors have expressed shock at the death of a man many considered an institution on the island.

“For the whole two blocks, everyone who lives around here is just devastated,” said Jane Patterson, a saleswoman at the Sculptures of Balboa shop across the street from Picante Martin’s.

According to the Orange County Coroner’s Office, Diaz-Puente went to lie down shortly after noon Thursday when he did not feel well, and a family member discovered him not breathing several minutes later.

An autopsy has been performed, but Supervising Deputy Coroner Dan Aikin said the results were inconclusive, and officials were awaiting toxicology results in a few weeks.

“We’re presuming the death to be natural,” he said.

News of Diaz-Puente’s death spread gradually around the island over the weekend.

Doug Liechty, a resident who often eats at Picante Martin’s, said he first learned what had happened when he passed by the restaurant and found the door locked with a note from Diaz-Puente’s family taped to the window.

The note read, in part, “Let’s all remember him for the great person he was and send our thoughts and prayers to him.” Some of the candles on the pavement below were still burning Tuesday morning.

The family could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but customers and fellow store owners remembered Diaz-Puente as a gregarious man who often donated food to community events and catered house and boat parties. Many also said he had a photographic memory of his customers.

“If you walked in there once and introduced yourself and told him your name, he’d recognize you from then on,” said Carolyn Carr, who writes the Island Breeze newsletter and runs a shop nearby. “He’d recognize your voice on the phone.”

Laurie Allen, the owner of the Barkery dog boutique next door, said Diaz-Puente lent her a hand more than once when she took over the shop a year ago, introducing her to the locals and having his staff deliver food to her so she wouldn’t have to wait in line.

“He was always there for a little pep talk,” Allen said. “Just, ‘Hang in there.’”

A rosary for Diaz-Puente is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday at First United Methodist Church, 2721 Delaware St., Huntington Beach.

The funeral will be held afterward in Mexico.

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com.