Skift Take
The road from taco stand to truck to brick-and-mortar location is paved with lessons about hard work, creative thinking, and really good timing.
If the food truck revolution began in 2008, when Roy Choi served his first Kogi taco, by 2012 the market was oversaturated. The streets of Los Angeles and many large cities around the country were teeming with four-wheeling food, with cooks at every level serving kalbi quesadillas, loaded hot dogs, wood-fired pizza, papusas, Filipino rice bowls and soft-serve swirls on late-night street corners, at festivals and in office parking lots just about any time of day. So for Wes Avila to start slinging tacos from a small cart outside of a coffee house in LA’s still relatively undiscovered Arts District neighborhood, it was a gamble.
Of course, it paid off. As a pedigreed chef making food with seasonal market ingredients, and executing with fine-dining technique mixed with LA. taquero soul, he garnered praise and acclaim by local taco aficionados, national food personalities and publications, and especially Jonathan Gold. Awards were won; there’s now a cookbook. And in July of this year, he opened a brick-and-mortar Guerrilla Tacos a few blocks from his original stand, retiring the original graffiti-stylized ride.
For Avila, diving into the unknown worked to his advantage, and he now has sights on making a successful go at a full-service restaurant and expanding his brand. He talks with us about lessons learned along the way, bot
