Taco Bus to open downtown site, revise operations

Tampa's own Taco Bus is looking to make a leap from charmingly low-tech to cutting-edge.

The region's well-loved Mexican oasis with the food truck motif will soon open a sit-down location in downtown Tampa, complete with hip communal benches, an online pickup window and HDTVs aplenty.

Still family-owned, the restaurant also is laying groundwork for a future expansion through more professional operation — and betting that its rabid fan base will help the business flourish where other Mexican restaurants foundered.

"This is very exciting for us," said owner Rene Valenzuela. "This is going to be a great experience for fans of the original bus."

The newest location is a 60-seat space at Franklin and Madison streets with the same menu and prices of the original bus, parked in Seminole Heights. The tentative opening date is Jan. 25.

Unlike the intentionally rustic original location, which still operates with a renovated school bus as a kitchen, the downtown spot has polished wood booths, HDTVs on the walls, and a walk-up window facing Franklin Street dedicated to customers who order online.

With a separate prep line devoted to take-out, Valenzuela said the pickup process should take just a few seconds.

Unlike nearly every other downtown restaurant, the Taco Bus will stay open late: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, then open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday.

An original opening date of early January was pushed back after construction workers found some utilities from the former West Shore Pizza space led into the brick walls of the building next door. Reworking those lines took a few more weeks.

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Any new location would be a good location, say some of the Taco Bus devotees.

"You get the craving — the Bus craving," said Jeanette Dyer, a soccer coach in Tampa, picking up a veggie burrito for herself and a carne asada burrito for her boyfriend.

Waiting along with about 20 people at the bus, she said, "I've probably had everything here at least once. … You can go here really late at night and the place is mobbed."

One spot ahead of Dyer in line, Charles Seaberg considers himself a recent convert.

"I just discovered it a few weeks ago," he said. "That first weekend, I think I was here three times on Saturday and Sunday … A downtown place — that'll make it easier for me to end up there."

Valenzuela knows expanding comes with risks, as the local landscape is scattered with Mexican restaurants that hit the skids.

Off the top of his head, he lists several. Don Pablo's closed its Tampa locations. Estela's restaurants on South Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa and Brandon Boulevard each are trying to reorganize through bankruptcy. Algusto Tortilla & Salsa Restaurant on Kennedy Boulevard closed in a bankruptcy proceeding.

There's a wide and dangerous gulf between a restaurant company with a few locations and a national chain such as Chipotle, which has a finely honed business plan with every ingredient and process down to a science, said Cindy McLaughlin, a restaurant analyst in New York with the consulting and accounting firm BDO.

A single-site family business generally has only three ways to expand, she said: Use current cash flow to build one or two sites a year, bring in investors or partners to double that pace, or try franchising. Franchise investors typically want to see several locations successful for several years before jumping into a project.

"Once you get multiple units, the question is, how easily is the menu replicated," McLoughlin said. "Does it have a lot of items? What's your shtick? How do you translate that same quality and taste from one location to the other. It can be very difficult."

Making a rough calculation, she offers grim odds for family restaurants succeeding as large chains: "I'd say one in three make it."

That's one reason Valenzuela is working to professionalize the Taco Bus mini-empire that began as anything but.

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Long before food trucks became fashionable, Valenzuela's extended family was driving a Taco Bus around town offering food through a window cut in the side of the vehicle.

The menu included simple yet popular items: Barbacoa burritos before Chipotle became a national phenomenon and Cochinita Pibil, a shredded pork dish based on a 5,000-year-old Mayan recipe.

Ten years ago, the bus became popular enough to park permanently on Hillsborough Avenue in Seminole Heights, where it still functions as the kitchen for take-out orders and an adjacent indoor restaurant.

Many weekdays after midnight, a line stacks up at the bus's window.

Valenzuela had run food carts in Mexico and over the years he bought out the Taco Bus operation from family members and started expanding. Last year, he opened a more modern, sit-down location in St. Petersburg.

He's also working to professionalize operations. There will be new employee manuals, standards for how to prepare food, projects to measure how operations work down to the second, and a mini-warehouse for some food preparation across locations.

Still, there's a long way to go.

Clerks still hand-write orders on paper pads, unlike the point-of-sale systems at modern restaurants that can instantly calculate customer tastes, food costs per check and payroll hours.

But the more modern restaurants don't have the Taco Bus buzz, which makes it a magnet for food celebrities coming through town.

Food Network featured the bus in the "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" traveling food show, where host Guy Fieri hung out in the original Taco Bus and watched Valenzuela cook up burritos. The bus has also appeared in other food shows such as "Man v. Food," and "Eat Street."

And Mexican cooking expert and cookbook author Diana Kennedy visited the bus on her way through town a few years ago, signed her books and served as a guest chef.

"I've wanted to go ever since seeing it on Food Network," said Terry Lawrence, a downtown worker taking a lunchtime peek through the windows of the soon-to-open location. "I'm not the biggest Mexican fan, but I can't wait."