Will YES! Taco bring the fancy food truck craze to Cowtown?
Too soon to tell. But we love to hear "free tacos" -- especially when they are of the gourmet variety, and washed down with complimentary beer and spirits.Eleanor Burkett, 29, an acting and lighting major at Texas Christian University, and her business partner, Michael McDermott, 31, a recovering patent attorney from Dallas, have reinvented themselves by equipping a $50,000 repurposed Fedex truck called Dolly.This Friday, YES! Taco will be launched with a free event at 809 at Vickery, an event venue located at, no surprise, 809 W. Vickery Blvd. in Fort Worth. Free vittles will be served from 7 to 9 p.m., then Fish Fry Bingo, Waiting for One, Tim Miller and Zuriel Bertch will provide music till 11 p.m.Cap and Hare, an area amateur home-brew society, will be supplying the beer inside while a Kentucky bourbon brand is offering straight and mixed drinks.From July 6, their truck will have a permanent spot outside Sineca Studios at 1013 W. Magnolia Ave., serving breakfast and lunch weekdays from 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., before moving off to do evening events.Burkett and McDermott met at Austin's Acton School of Business, affiliated with Abilene-based Hardin-Simmons University. They got entrepreneurial MBAs during the explosion of the food-truck and -trailer craze in the state capital. Every meal was research.Earlier, Burkett had studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, managed the Trip to Bountiful cafe in Austin and ran a catering business in her hometown, Graham. McDermott said he enjoyed lawyering but had enough pleasure to last him a lifetime. They declined to discuss the equity split between them, but said they have enough capital left after buying and equipping the truck to weather a few months, come what may.And it's not all tacos.Their grilled al pastor and bistec were inspired by trips to Guanajuato, San Miguel and Mexico City. The Laotian-style laab, served in a cabbage leaf, was discovered during a visit to Southeast Asia. The North Carolina-style pulled pork was a result of McDermott's undergraduate days at Wake Forest. And the self-proclaimed "best vegan black beans legally available" is influenced by the great vegan/veg food found all over Austin.The local food truck pioneers can be reached at contact@yestaco.com, or follow them at www.yestaco.com, on Twitter, twitter.com/yestaco, and Facebook, facebook.com/iloveyestaco.New car dealershipBurleson's new Honda dealership is open for business and will be throwing the doors open to its new neighbors this week.Honda of Burleson, off Interstate 35W at 632 N. Burleson Blvd., is a new venture formed by Ken Schnitzer, owner of the Park Place dealership group of Dallas, and Henry Coffee, a Seguin auto dealership consultant.The dealership will host a public grand opening from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday with free food from Fuzzy's Taco Shop, live music, sky divers and an air show, as well as games for kids. New Honda vehicles will be available for limited test driving.Construction began in April 2010 on the 11-acre site and the 65,000-square-foot dealership sales and service complex. A customer lounge includes computer and Wi-Fi access and complimentary beverages.The dealership is LEED Silver Certified and has incorporated numerous energy and water conservation features.Pier 1 To-GoA lot has been going on at Pier 1 Imports.The Fort Worth home furnishings retailer last week soft-launched its new Pier 1 To-Go service, under which consumers can reserve items online, then visit a store to pay for them and pick them up.So far, the average ticket price is up and Pier 1 customers are taking the opportunity to buy more when they get to the store.All of which "tells us there is significant potential once the customer is in the store," Alex Smith, Pier 1's CEO, told analysts and reporters on a conference call Thursday."It is very early," Smith said of Pier 1 To-Go. "I don't want to be a hostage to fortune on this. It is higher so far really because of the mix. We are selling relatively more furniture [in the online portion of the transaction]. That is what's driving the average ticket up."Pier 1 also is sprucing up its stores. By midsummer, Pier 1 will have added "a subset" of new fixtures to every store, Smith said. A "select group" of stores will receive a "full set of new fixtures" and a general face-lift. And the company is fully remodeling five stores with a new prototype design that all new future stores will follow.The first prototype will be in New York, where a Manhattan store closed after Memorial Day and will reopen in September.Southwest museumIt looks like a Southwest Airlines plane didn't hit the brakes in time before it got to a hangar at Love Field.But it's actually a Boeing 737 that is part of a new exhibit at the Frontiers of Flight Museum that showcases the carrier's 40-year history.On Thursday night, the Dallas-based carrier and the museum unveiled the new exhibit that includes a bronzed version of the infamous napkin where Herb Kelleher drew a triangle connecting Texas' three major cities and how a new airline could serve those cities.Museumgoers walk up a set of flight stairs to the entrance of the Boeing 737, where they can look at documents and newspaper clippings about Southwest's start in the late 1960s. There are, of course, orange hot pants from flight attendant uniforms in the exhibit and one of Kelleher's motorcycles.Asked whether he ever envisioned that his airline would be around for 40 years, Kelleher laughed."Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the state of Texas thought we'd never get off the ground and then that came down to about 98 percent after we got started who figured we wouldn't last a year or two," Kelleher told staff writer Andrea Ahles. "We weren't envisioning things; we were just surviving."Sandra Baker, 817-390-7727sabaker@star-telegram.comScott Nishimura, 817-390-7808snishimura@star-telegram.comBarry Shlachter, 817-390-7718barry@star-telegram.comHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
