UP OUR ALLEY

It’s taco Tuesday and Sally Coates has found the newest hot spot for the Mexican favourite, along with refreshing tequila tipples

THEY say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, but Lucas and Erin Schranz of Easy Street and Luckies Diner fame have proved that theory wrong. They opened pastel-powered Mexican restaurant Tacocat last week, but Lucas says it just sort of ... happened.

“It’s pretty funny, we never really plan anything,” he says.

“So we just sometimes walk around and say, ‘That’d be a sweet place for a restaurant,’ even if it’s not for lease. It was a burger shop and for the past two years we’ve been saying, ‘That’d be a cool place for a Mexican restaurant’.

“It was more of a comment, not like, ‘OK we’re going to do a Mexican restaurant, let’s go looking for spaces’. It just happened.”

The most incredible part of the story is that, along with having a new Mexican restaurant baby, they also have a new seven-week-old human baby, Matilda.

“The opportunity came up when Erin was eight months pregnant, but the thing is we’d been looking at the spot for two years thinking how cool it would be,” Lucas says.

“She was nearly due and it was the worst possible time for it to come up, but we thought well we have to get it ‘cause we’ll kick ourselves.

“Having a baby is way harder than what I thought it would be – kids need attention 24 hours a day, and so do restaurants – but Erin has been a superstar.”

The menu is divided up into La Comida (the overarching food), tostadas, quaesadillas, dessert and of course, tacos – from crispy confit pork to shredded prawn with char-grilled corn and cerveza fried zucchini flower with goats curd.

“I thought making tacos was easier than it actually is ... credit to people making tacos,” Lucas says. “Obviously we like to do things a little bit differently and I think we’ve achieved that.

“We’ve modernised old-school Mexican – traditional flavours brought into the 21st century.

“In Mexico the food we know came from street food, cheap workers food, dollar tacos.

“So we’ve brought that into the restaurant atmosphere with high-quality seafood from Ballina and free-range meat from our butcher we’ve been using for eight years.

“It’s good quality and in a nice setting rather than a cart on the corner.”

The carefully crafted cocktail menu is another feature.

“The food and drinks are equally important,” Lucas says.

“Our barman – Rupert Tremayne – he knows everything about tequila and mescal ... he even knows how to pronounce all the words.

“He’s an alcohol encyclopaedia. He’s got style and flair, but at the end of the day they taste amazing. We’ve got six different margaritas – one amazing one is cucumber and honeydew, it’s ridiculous, so tasty.”

Tacocat, 6/26 James Street, Burleigh Heads