Taco Fresco, Babylon, NY
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By Natalia Ortega
On December 30th, Taco Fresco opened its doors to the public at the Long Island Railroad Station in Babylon, New York. The restaurant is the creation of a dream team in which each one brought their best talents. There are the investors Mike Tochluk and Charles Kwon, entrepreneurs with vast experience in the restaurant industry. And Benito Vásquez, the chef and creator of a menu faithful to the authentic flavor and recipes of Puebla street food.
Months of Training
Tochluk and Kwon were looking to open a restaurant and visited many businesses, but they couldn’t find the kind of partner they were looking for until they found Vásquez, who runs El Café de Hoya Mexican Grill in Elmont, New York. In April 2024, the trio took a trip to Vegas to explore the taquerias there and how they adapt Mexican cuisine.
To create a menu with authentic flavors, Benito Vásquez had to go back in time and learn all the recipes his grandmother and mother used to cook from scratch. It was his wife, María Elena Coyotl Gomez, who trained him.
“Ten years ago I didn't know how to cook Mexican food and my wife trained me. She is an excellent cook, she was born with it, she has great talent and people skills, because all our workers love her, even more than they love me,” Vásquez says with a laugh.
At El Café de Hoya, Vásquez and his wife serve food to Mexicans who work at the nearby horse track. But Taco Fresco is a new challenge, as it is a restaurant that aims to offer the best of Mexican street food to both Mexican and American audiences.
After months of preparation and exhaustive research, Vásquez trained a team of 15 people who are now working in the kitchen of Taco Fresco. He taught them how to cut the onion, the cilantro and every other ingredient as it should be cut, because everything affects the final result. He showed them how to prepare the sauces and every detail of the dishes they offer. All the workers know exactly how to prepare each recipe, thanks to the training they received over a period of weeks.
“Mike and Charles, my partners, are excellent people as well as great bosses. They brought in workers from other restaurants they already have, and you can see that they are good because everyone speaks highly of them and wants to continue working with them. They have very strong values of integrity and honesty, and they accept the union of different cultures in their team,” says Vásquez.
Back to the Past
“My story begins in the State of Puebla, in Mexico. Most of the migrants who come to the state of New York come from there,” he says.
Puebla is one of the most important states in Mexico in culinary terms, as it is the origin of the moles and tacos al pastor. According to Vásquez, “when the Spanish arrived, the nuns from Castile implemented their food, fusing it with local ingredients and created the moles. Later, with the arrival of the Lebanese, the now-famous tacos al pastor were created, which they filled with lamb, but which the locals adapted with pork.”
In Puebla it is not common for men to cook. So for him it was an adventure to go back in time to find out how to recreate the exact flavor of his ancestors.
“I wanted to go back to the authenticity of my grandmother’s sauces. In her day, there were no refrigerators in Puebla, so she prepared everything fresh and nothing could be stored. That’s how we do it at Taco Fresco, that’s where the name comes from,” he explains. “We don’t throw anything away, and everything is prepared to order: the recipes we offer are to take you back to the past, to the authentic.”
That is to say, if a customer orders a particular dish, it is prepared on the spot. “My principle is to use the best meats and the freshest ingredients. Each sauce is made in the morning, and the dough for the tortillas is also homemade. We don’t add additives to any dish. If someone orders three tacos, those three tacos are cooked instantly,” says Vásquez.
That’s why the menu is small. Since every day his mother cooked for nine people – Vásquez has six siblings -- and managed to keep everything fresh, Vásquez knows that it is possible to prepare food for several people with the freshness of his mother and grandmother.
Benito Vásquez and Mike Tochluk
Although the recipes have been an exploration of the past, they also include the new restaurant models that they learned from the research that the three partners did on their trip out west.
“What impressed me most on our trip and what we now apply is the open kitchens. In Mexico, the tradition is for kitchens to be closed. But the fact that they are open here means that people can see how we are preparing the food,” explains Vásquez.
Now, he and his team of chefs roast the tomatoes and chiles on the grill, just as his grandmother and mother used to do. He knows that there are many restaurants that do gourmet or fusion Mexican food, but for him, this return to the past of serving fresh food is raising quality to the maximum.
The combination of food from the past, together with the modernity of what is trending in fashionable restaurants, plus a team of dedicated, inclusive and prepared people, has made Taco Fresco a success.
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