Dario Wolos

FOR SCALING A NATION’S FLAVOR

LLAST FALL, SHOPpers at Whole Foods may have noticed a new line of handrolled frozen burritos that featured genuine Mexican flavors: fire-roasted chicken, Oaxaca cheese, and cactus, all marketed under the Vista Hermosa brand. The road to those freezers began 16 years earlier when Dario Wolos, who was raised in Mexico, started selling tacos out of a sawed-off VW van in the Yucatán Peninsula beach town of Playa del Carmen, calling the makeshift eatery Tacombi (combi is Spanish for “minibus”). Four years later, he opened a Tacombi restaurant in New York City that evoked the van’s casual open-air vibe and served the same style of handmade tortillas and thick, salty totopos—both made the traditional way, from corn nixtamalized in slaked lime before being ground on volcanic stone. By the end of 2022, Tacombi was operating in 15 locations in NYC, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Fueled by a $27.5 million boost from a December 2021 funding round led by Shake Shack kingpin Danny Meyer, Wolos plans to expand Tacombi to 75 locations nationwide in the next five years. He’s also been working to get those handmade totopos and tortillas (the flour ones are made with avocado oil instead of lard) to more consumers: Vista Hermosa, the packaged food line he launched in 2012, is now sold at more than 2,000 retailers in the U.S., while a new 30,000-square-foot distribution and production facility in Brooklyn has helped expand operations. Both businesses, Wolos says, try to capture the festive atmosphere he associates with Mexican markets from Oaxaca to Ensenada. “That is our challenge, 100%,” Wolos says. “How do you scale that feeling?”