Martin and Jennifer Reyes opened Donde Los Tacos near the Bishop Arts District in April. It took more than nine months from signing the lease to put all the finishing touches on the space, and they continue to make updates as needed. Business fluctuates as they are new to the neighborhood. Some Taco Tuesdays are filled to the brim with other days just bringing in some consistent regulars.
Neon lights with the Spanish phrases “Provecho!!!” and “Tu, Yo Unos Tacos” (“Advantage!!!” and “You, Me, Some Tacos” respectively) welcome you into the indoor seating area. The main gallery piece is an array of black and white photos with phrases heard in the restaurants of Mexico written in the primary colors.
The couple often visited taco shops in East Dallas for date nights and when their go-to El Taco Loco on East Grand Avenue vanished, the idea started to circulate to finally create their own shop.
“My daughter actually loved that place. She’s very specific with her food, and she loved that place. They shut down for one thing or another, I’m not sure why,” she says. “So we couldn’t find a taco place at all. And my husband was like, ‘Well, what if we just open a taco restaurant?’ It was always just in the back of our head.”
One day the right place finally came at the right time. A former law office and crystal shop at the corner of North Tyler and West Davis, the irregularly pentagon-shaped building with faded ruby bricks, was up for grabs. Right across from Abruzzo’s and diagonally from the pastel pink Talking Out of Turn, even though it needed much love, they went for it.
“At the end of the day, you don’t know unless you take that step,” she says. “I’m like, ‘We’re going to be stuck with, ‘Oh, what if?’ What could have been, you know? It was weird, our whole relationship is based off of, let’s just do it. We don’t even think about it. We just jump into it.”