New Papillion Business: The Papillion Taco Guy

PapillionBusinesses.com Interview with “The Papillion Taco Guy”, Scott Nedved

Scott Nedved-The Papillion Taco Guy

How did you think of the idea of doing tacos and bringing them to Papillion?

The original company I started was called Braai Time. Braai is basically a South African backyard barbecue. The only difference is they tend to cook it over wood, so everything’s kind of naturally smoked. That was the original idea of this company. I obviously can’t start a fire on the street corner, right, to smoke the wood?… but that’s why we started off with smoked meats. And the sort of the different tacos was one of the items that we did, but we were just doing a couple events a year. We started in 2018 and 2019. I went full time in 2020. January 2nd [I] left the full-time job benefits and all of that stuff.

And 75 days later, COVID was hitting and we were told we had a permanent place or regular place that we can go every day. And we got told that we couldn’t go back there at least until this whole thing blew over. And what they thought would be about two weeks. And then that two weeks turned into about 10 months. So, while we were down when we were trying to figure out what we’re going to do. We were lucky that we were had put just enough away in the piggy bank that we were able to get this cart and we thought let’s take our most popular item which was our tacos. And we’ll just push up on the corner and we’ll just start a separate brand that I can run myself without a staff. It’ll be easier to move it around the city and all of that. So, that was just kind of the idea was taking an idea from there. We call it taco guy because we thought that’s what they’re going to call us anyway, just be the guy in the corner. Let’s lean into it. It’s okay to make fun of ourselves have a joke with it’s okay to have a sense of humor about it. And so, we said we’re just going call ourselves “The Taco Guy” and we’ll go up there and then the idea being that when COVID blew over, we were able to, you know, if my other trailer didn’t need my help, well, I could still go and put the cart out by myself, now operated by myself, and still be doing something extra and not just you know, sitting around not over watching something doesn’t really need me there. So, and we did it like that for awhile, but you know after COVID went got over with.

The phone was ringing for The Taco Guy and not really for the other food truck, like no one really knew about it and cared about, . . . but the taco was kind of blowing up. We ended up selling that trailer and we bought a new trailer that we converted into a food truck to just do tacos in. And now we were lucky to have a conversation in the grocery store with Jeannie because we’ve done a couple of pop ups with her. I bumped into [her] in a grocery store and she had the idea and the thought that we know she was looking to find something more regular and more steady. She was trying to come up with some ideas and we kind of meeting in the middle and finding a way to hopefully it worked great for both of us for us to be in there, in their former pop-up space.

Is she still here and will pop ups still occur?

Essentially, we will be the permanent pop up. Okay. We didn’t, we’re not, we didn’t sign a traditional lease like a normal restaurant would. Right, because I … honestly it was a big move for us. We had, we were, we were blessed with opportunity to bring the cart out to Werner Park this year. So, we’re out there for all the Omaha Chaser games, all the Omaha Union soccer games, and a handful of other events. And so, I knew that was happening so we were heavily investing in some equipment for that. So, we’d be prepared for that this year. But I was not prepared to open a restaurant nor … I’ve ran restaurants a lot in the past, so I know the time you have takes not only running them also getting them started up. So, when we ran into these challenges it was discouraging, but not unusual that we run something like that and so we so just with that said, you know, I really am in agreement I’ve made my wife is that I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go take out a loan and get overextended. We would never lose the house because I wanted to make tacos. So, we would basically set up as a permanent pop up in there.
Just studying it and hopefully it worked out. I have a good feeling. And we’ve been, we’ve had people stopping by every day. I’ve been getting phone calls. Somehow we got on Google. I don’t even know about that until my daughter found it. I’ve been getting calls every day and people stopping by. And so, we’re able to kind of look to know what’s coming. Right. And we’ve been able to get the sign up and kind of try to get some of that stuff going, but you know, essentially, as we’re trying to get there.

What kind of menu items are you going to be having?

So, we’ll stick with our traditional tacos and we’ve always. So, for right now we’re doing our traditional tacos, very similar to what we were doing in the past. We will have, I will, since it will be here, we’ll have a little bit more capabilities. I’m going to start selling meat by the pound too. I guess my hope, you know. It seems like that’s a popular thing. My hope is that, you know somebody comes here for lunch and they know that they want to have barbecue sandwiches with their kids at their house and then maybe they can buy a pound of meat to go, right?
We will probably eventually bring in a breakfast menu. So, we’ll have breakfast burritos, maybe biscuits and gravy. We’re working on maybe figuring out. We have a breakfast taco option. We might bring in a breakfast taco. So, we’re we’re kind of playing with that. I don’t know how big breakfast will be in this area, but I’m going to be there smoking meat anyway. Um, I will see if I can sell anything and if people like it’s great, we’ll sell a lot of it that they don’t then buy so a little bit that’s all I need, you know, just something to do while I’m there anyway.

We are looking at, I have done some work with another guy who does donuts. A cooperation co-op with him where we might be one day a week doing donuts out there. So, fresh, fresh made donuts. That will just be selling them out of there. Probably Saturday mornings. So, we’d have you could think of it as a pop up, but kind of like we’re going buy donuts from him. He’s going to make them fresh and we’re just going retail straight out of there.

And maybe do a little more of a coffee shop idea one day, so is the idea. I’ve also thought about some ideas that we’re working into that we’d like to try as we upgrade. I might, a couple of times a month, maybe once a month, or twice a month, pick a night, probably a Friday night and do just straight barbecue. So, we would do a lot of our recipes, but we would do more instead of a brisket taco. We would slice it down like a traditional Texas style brisket. Maybe do brisket sandwiches. We just smoked a bunch of ribs and just some ribs, so they’re gone. You know, so ribs might be telethon for us one night a week or one night a couple nights a month or something like that. So, we have a lot of ideas with the space we have Gives us an opportunity to try some other things that we haven’t done before. So, those are some of the ideas we are playing with.

Delicious Tacos

I’ve had your food. It is very good.
[Chuckles] Thank you

You can’t beat the company and the friendliness too. It’s very nice so, I am very much looking forward to your opening.
Thank you. Thank you.

Why did you pick Papillion?

My wife lived and was living in Bellevue for a while and she loved the Bellevue/Papillion area and she just, she really specifically love Papillion. And so, when we got married, she goes it was kind of always her goal was to move into Papillion. So, after a few years, we found a small condo here and then we eventually were by some grace and miracle able to find that home right over there. When the, when the market was at its craziest, we were able to find something that we could not only afford, but was perfect for our size of family and, and so yeah, and kind of checked all the boxes for both of us. So, we were very blessed and surprisingly so.

The more that I got, you know, to spend time down here, … Papillion is just an area that really embraces small businesses, really wants to watch people succeed and grow and help each other. And I mean even just the calls I get just, “Hey, you know, we’re excited that you’re growing. We are excited that you’re going to have your store and all this stuff.” So, we, we just feel really, we feel like no matter what’s going on in the background, and we’re like, oh geez, we gotta knock down walls and we got to do all this stuff. We always know like Papillion is cheering us on.

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