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    let's go tacos

    Houston taqueria's 2 new locations will serve cocktails by Anvil owner

    Eric Sandler
    Sep 16, 2025 | 10:00 am
    Tacos A Go Go Heights Lola Diner

    Chef Maribel Gomez, Tacos A Go Go founder Sharon Haynes, and Anvil owner Bobby Heugel.

    Photo by Dylan McEwan

    A staple Houston taqueria will open two new locations before the end of the year. Tacos A Go Go is moving its Heights location and adding a new outpost in Briargrove/Memorial.

    The restaurant has claimed the former Lola Neighborhood Diner (1102 Yale St.) and Killen’s STQ (2231 S. Voss Rd.) spaces for the new restaurants, which are scheduled to open in late 2025. As both of these locations are substantially larger than either Tacos A Go Go’s current Heights location on White Oak Dr. or its original location in Midtown, they will offer larger kitchens with room to prepare family packs from sister concept Fajitas A Go Go and to make fresh corn and flour tortillas throughout the day.

    Both new locations will offer bar seating — a first for Tacos A Go Go. Adding bars means serving cocktails, To create a cocktail menu, founder Sharon Haynes turned to Anvil owner Bobby Heugel, who is a longtime Tacos A Go Go customer. Known for businesses such as Anvil, Refuge, and his former agave bar The Pastry War, Heugel’s cocktail menu will take inspiration from Mexican cocktails and ingredients and utilize tequilas and mezcals from family-owned distilleries.

    “I’ve always wanted to have a real bar inside Tacos A Go Go with margaritas, mezcal and Mexican cocktails. These two locations have the space for it, and when Bobby offered to help, we knew it was meant to be," Haynes said in a statement."

    “I’ve been a fan of Tacos A Go Go for nearly 20 years, so this project is especially exciting for me,” Heugel added. “I’m working to bring the same creativity and care their team puts into the food to the bar program, so guests enjoy an experience that feels just as fun and delicious as the tacos.”

    Both restaurant will serve Tacos A Go Go’s familiar menu. Led by chef and co-owner Maribel Gomez, it includes street-style tacos with fillings such as carne guisada, pastor, picadillo, and barbacoa. In addition, the restaurant offers breakfast tacos all day and more elevated options such as grilled shrimp and smoked brisket. Non-taco options include burritos, quesadillas, and salads.

    “I came to this country in 1991 with a dream of cooking the food I grew up with,” Gomez said. “To share those recipes here, in a place that has become my community, is a dream come true. Thirty years later, I’m proud to be doing what I love and grateful for the chance to bring people together with food that reminds me of home and hopefully makes them feel at home, too.”

    Tacos A Go Go will announce grand opening plans for both locations in the weeks to come.

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    What's Eric Eating Episodes 523 and 524

    Acclaimed Austin duo dish on their wine-obsessed neighborhood restaurant

    CultureMap Staff
    Jan 16, 2026 | 1:08 pm
    Birdie's Arjav Ezekiel Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel
    Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly
    Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

    On this week’s episode of “What’s Eric Eating,” chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel and beverage director Arjav Ezekiel join CultureMap Houston editor Eric Sandler to discuss their Austin restaurant Birdie’s.



    Widely considered one of Austin’s top restaurants, Birdie’s has earned local, regional, and national acclaim, including a place of the 2025 Time100 Next list, Food & Wine magazine’s 2023 Restaurant of the Year, and a 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service to Ezekiel. In a 2024 column, James Beard Award winner Chris Shepherd recommended that Houstonians visit Birdie’s the next time they’re in Austin.

    Sandler’s conversation with the duo begins with a little bit about how they met while working together in New York and their decision to move to Austin. From there, it turns to Birdie’s counter service model that’s unusual for a restaurant of its quality. Sandler asks whether not offering traditional table service has lowered the restaurant’s profits.

    “It’s the opposite. Because we have a leaner labor force in the dining room, our margins are probably double what they would be if we were a traditional restaurant,” Ezekiel explains. “What we’re able to do is take a portion of that margin and invest it back into our team. We talk about ‘Conscious Capitalism’ a lot. That extra margin pays for paid family leave that we offer to everybody on our team, the month of paid and planned vacation every year, the subsidized health insurance, the subsidized mental therapy we offer. We needed to find more change under the cushions, so we could invest it back into our team.”

    Initially, Birdie’s opened with an a la carte menu. In 2025, it switched to a prix fixe format that offers diners six courses for $80. The switch means the restaurant serves fewer diners per night, which has shortened the wait to order from up to an hour to 20 minutes or less. Chef Malechek-Ezekiel explains that this change has also expanded the range of dishes she’s able to serve and broadened the techniques she uses to create them.

    “We can cook fish confit. We can use the Japanese robata grill to cook on charcoal. We can hot smoke fish to order. Now, I feel like, wow, look what we can do now. Before, we had the skills, but we couldn’t physically do it with how tiny our space is.”

    Listen to the full episode to hear more about how Birdie’s guides diners through its wine list, which of the monthly prix fixe menus has been the most successful, and the couple’s thoughts on potentially opening a new restaurant.



    In this week’s other episode, Craft Pita chef-owner Raffi Nasr joins Sandler to discuss some recent news in the world of Houston restaurants. Their topics include Tex-Mex restaurant Superica transforming into a casual steakhouse; the imminent opening of delivery-focused Shredders Pizza; and a change in operations at Weights + Measures.

    In the restaurant of the week segment, Nasr and Sandler describe their recent meal at Oru, a new sushi restaurant in the Heights from the team behind Michelin-recognized omakase counter Neo and Upper Kirby hand roll concept Kira. Listen to hear their favorite dishes as well as Sandler’s quibbles with a couple of aspects of the experience.

    -----

    Subscribe to "What's Eric Eating" on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hear it Sunday at 9 am on ESPN 97.5.

    Birdie's Arjav Ezekiel Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel

    Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly

    Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

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