Tacombi Is Embarking on a Massive Expansion Plan.Shake Shack's Danny Meyer Is Coming Along for the Ride

Legendary restaurateur Meyer dines out with Tacombi founder Dario Wolos to discuss the recipe for growing a food chain into a household name.

- Kevin J. Ryan

DARIO WOLOS WAS MISSING a key ingredient when he opened a taco stand in Mexico in 2006: restaurant experience. Wolos had worked for a software startup in London for the previous five years, but he'd dreamed of opening a Mexican restaurant for the better part of a decade, having lived in his mother's native Mexico as a child.

So, after installing some cooking equipment in a 1963 Volkswagen bus, Wolos founded Tacombi in the beach town of Playa del Carmen-the name is a combination of taco and combi, a word for minibus in Mexico. When the taco stand took off, Wolos moved to New York City and opened a Tacombi restaurant in a converted garage. The company has since expanded to more than 20 locations on the East Coast, including 11 in New York City.

"I knew there was talent in this city that I wasn't able to get in the early days in Mexico," says Wolos, 45.

It was in NYC that a chance encounter with Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer in 2017 would put Wolos and Tacombi on a new trajectory. Wolos asked the restaurateur to be his mentor, and though Meyer politely declined, the meeting started a relationship that eventually saw Meyer's Enlightened Hospitality Investments leading a $27.5 million investment round in Tacombi in 2021. EHI invests in "people-first" food and hospitality companies, according to Meyer, 65, who says his investment decisions often come down to two simple questions.

"We always ask ourselves, 'Is this a business we wish we had thought of, and is this founder someone we wish we had hired?"" says Meyer, adding that Tacombi and Wolos checked both of those boxes.

Now, less than one year into a fiveyear plan to add 75 Tacombi locations across the U.S., we brought Meyer and Wolos together at Tacombi's Greenwich Village restaurant to talk challenges in the restaurant business and how to navigate rapid expansion-and, of course, for some tasty tacos and quesadillas.