Interview with Restaurateur Dario Wolos, pt.1

Base: Can you shed some light on the genesis of Tacombi?
Dario Wolos: I grew up in Mexico, and when I was 15 my parents sent me to a boarding school in Canada. At this boarding school in Toronto, I realized there was zero Mexican food in Canada – this was when I really started to realize how much I love Mexican food. Each time I would go home, my mother would send me home with a package of the Mexican products that we would cook with at home. Eventually, my roommates (at school) started loving this food. So on trips back to Mexico these friends and I would hang out in real Mexican settings, eating tacos in the downtown.  I decided back then that I wanted to do this at some point in my life.  I wanted to bring the proper tradition of Mexican eating, the real way, to places that didn’t have it.

B: Did you see yourself wanting to emulate more than the culinary traditions of Mexico?
DW: Yeah, over the years I learned that it’s Mexican taco culture, a whole way of eating – sharing food in a family convivial setting. In Mexico, tacos are found in a street food setting, but still made in a mom and pop kind of way. Your typical taco stand in Mexico is a family operation, where the mother wakes up at 4 am, cooks the food, and the husband takes the food to the market and sells it until it runs out. Because they’re relatively cheap, rich or poor will go [to the stand]. In modern Mexico, you can be on the main street of Mexico City next to a bank and a Louis Vuitton store and you’ll have people from those stores along with the street cleaner buying tacos together. It’s kind of an equalizing force.  [The taco stand] is a simple little place, where everybody is enjoying the same thing.

B: Having lived internationally, and now focusing all of your attention on the humble taco, where do you see Mexican food stacking up relative to its more vaunted culinary brethren?
DW: In Mexico, as far as food cultures go, it’s probably in the top five most diverse in the world. You have the Indian/Native American heritage, the Spanish influence, the French, along with the others over time. All of these things together make for a very special food culture.  From eating tacos in Mexico, I have seen very few places that replicate that experience. What most people have done is to turn it into a fast food experience, which kills it right there. The idea of Tacombi was to set that experience up properly and to create a brand that had aspects of the lifestyle that we picked up on in Mexico.

B: The details of the restaurant are highly resolved.  It has an amazing ambiance, from the tables to the sink in the bathroom. How did you get it all to this point?
DW: We took the time, three or four years in Mexico, starting and developing the brand. We didn’t just want to make it authentic, we wanted to set up a business that remained really true to everything we were thinking about. Starting it up in Mexico was key.

B: What was it like to create Tacombi?  Where were you in your life when that began?
DW: I had returned to Mexico from living in London with the idea to start the business in Mexico and ultimately returning to the UK. Not having a background in the restaurant business, it was pretty chaotic. I just opened up and said, “Let’s do it!”  Once I began in Mexico, I hired local cooks, who knew how to do their job and just started toying around with it. We opened [the first Tacombi stand] in a beach town in Mexico [Playa Del Carmen] a holiday destination. As you can imagine, in a place like this, everybody was happy, it was a good place to do something like that, all in all, pretty simple.

B: And you were running it out of the microbus on the beach?
DW: It was a set up of its own that was more in tune with its climate. We knew that when we brought it to New York we couldn’t run it in an outdoor setting.

B: So, is there a history of the little red bus that’s in Tacombi NY?
DW: This particular bus I bought from a gentleman in Mexico who was a VW collector from the state of Tabasco. I bought it online and he drove it from Villahermosa, a town at the bottom of the Yucatan Peninsula, to Playa. The bus had won a couple of medals, best in show kind of stuff. This bus is actually the second bus we’ve used. The first bus I bought in Mexico City with the idea of driving it out to Playa, a road trip to have a fun little story to begin the project. But when we crossed over the volcano, I found the car was totally unstable, a deathtrap. So we had to ship it from there to the beach.

B: And once you finally made it to the beach?
DW: Once it got to Playa I had about 6 months to research, build it and get everything ready. During that time, my business partner and I started collaborating on the vibe and the style of Tacombi. We started playing around with different Mexican carnival and street graphics and details.  We began to define the where we were headed.  Everything since then has been turned into an artisanal project, looking at materials locally and building things in that fashion. We built little taco carts, we built the tables for the restaurant in Mexico, the chairs – everything was re-purposing things we found. In this vein, we carried that philosophy throughout to everything we’ve been doing here.

B: What is the significance of re-purposing found materials?
DW: The people that usually run the taco stands come from the lowest economic section. Their whole lifestyle is geared around recycling, producing, re-utilizing whatever they can. It’s very typical to see taco stands made out of old combis [VW microbuses], old pickup trucks, whatever.

B: So, you were building the elements of a strong brand as you went along?
DW: We hope so. A lot of it was just experimenting with materials that felt right.

B: That sounds terribly fun.
DW: Yeah, it’s been an amazing project. We ended up making up and printing all of our own graphics. That’s something that has stuck with us from that one project in the beginning, making everything from scratch. This led to, for example, the print on the wall which was influenced by the images and ideas we collected.

B: Have you been driving the design?
DW: It’s always been collaborative. We’ve been lucky that we’ve never been under pressure to do any of this. The ideas come from what my business partner and I call “idle-fucking-around-time.” From having this time, we get to come up with concepts that are based on experiences we want to recreate. We have decided that it’s so important to us as we continue to develop the business. We section off time each week were we can just go and talk, often pulling something nice out of it. As well, [graphic designer] Dieter Wiechmann and I have collaborated on every single item we have built.  From the tables, which are re-purposed bridge tables, to the old university chair – trying to recreate that re-purposed Mexican look and to give it that new vibe that we’ve created.

B: And it’s been carried through the brands?
DW: Whether it’s the graphics for our Mezcal brand or the graphics for our soda brand, we’re working to build and employ this whole concept. Fonda Nolita houses the four or five brands that we’re developing. We’re taking fictional concepts that came from our idle-fucking-around-time and put them into actual play here in this space.

B: It seems that you’re basically outlining a portfolio of products. Do you think that incorporating active design and creation in your process has played a part in that?
DW: Yeah, totally. Without knowing it, we’ve put something in play that has now began to grow on its own five years down the line and it’s really cool. It’s been a really cool learning process from the operational point of view, and now the brand is starting to live on its own.

Check in next Friday for Part II of this interview