Tacoholics Restaurant Opening In Brick A Tale Of Persistence

BRICK, NJ — The night before their first food truck event, Nick DeAngelo, Rob Bruno and Lou Raccuglia discovered they had a problem. The propane gas wasn't working in their truck.

With some elbow grease they got it up and running. The next morning, however, was worse.

"We had no water," DeAngelo said recently during a break in ongoing work preparing for the opening of their restaurant, Tacoholics, just down the road from Brick Memorial High School, where the trio of 25-year-olds went to school. "The pipes had exploded so the steam table didn't work."

Running late, the trio arrived with their Tacoholics food truck and started working, and despite the struggles with the gas and the water and the steam table, they soon had a line of people. They did a second event. And then a third. And it was at that third event, in Atlantic City, where they knew they were on to something.

"We sold out of everything," DeAngelo said. "That's when we understood how big we could be."

A little over a year after making the leap into the food truck business, the trio of Brick Memorial graduates is making another leap to a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Lanes Mill Road strip mall where Jersey Farms is located — a dream they've achieved with lots of hard work and even more persistence.

"I don't take no for an answer," he said. "None of us do."

That persistence will be rewarded on Saturday, Nov. 25, when the restaurant opens at last.

DeAngelo said the idea sprouted one day while the three friends were staying at a home that belonged to Raccuglia's family. DeAngelo had just graduated from Rider, Bruno from Stockton and Raccuglia from Ramapo and were vacationing together.

DeAngelo and Bruno were sitting at a taco place in Miami, talking about the food, and "Rob looked at me and said, 'I can make it better.' "

Soon the trio was back in New Jersey, Bruno working on his MBA, DeAngelo working for an accounting firm, and trying to find a food truck. Attempts to get a loan to buy a new truck failed. "No one would give us a dime," he said.

Undeterred, they learned of a truck that was for sale. The father of a friend's fiancee was selling one, and he agreed to allow the three to pay him $2,000 per month over 17 months.

"Everything was broken on it," DeAngelo said. But they had a truck. Then Bruno was able to get a $10,000 business credit card that allowed them make necessary repairs.

They forged ahead, and by the end of last summer, the trio, who were avid taco consumers throughout high school and college — Bubbakoo's Burritos and Fins were among their favorites — found their own tacos were in demand.

"We did Fall Fest and our line must have been a hundred people deep," he said. They also are one of 12 trucks that participate in every food truck event at the Laurita Winery. They have won awards, too, with their coconut shrimp tacos with sriacha aoli named Best Seafood Taco in NJ and Best Vegetarian Taco for their fried avocado tacos at the NJ Taco Festival. Their biggest seller, however, is their bang-bang shrimp taco, he said.

DeAngelo said each of the three brings a different skill-set. He handles the accounting, the taxes and booking events. "Rob is the creative one, and Lou is the elbow grease," he said. They have had help from family members and their girlfriends, all three of whom have worked the truck. Bruno's girlfriend, Teresa, is working on her doctorate, and Raccuglia's girlfriend, Kelly, helps out frequently, as does DeAngelo's girlfriend, Camille.

"She (Camille) was our first employee," he said. "I was actually paying her out of my pocket."

As the opening of the restaurant nears, the trio's excitement grows.

"Our dream was always to open a restaurant," DeAngelo said. "We'd never made tacos. We'd never worked a food truck. We went in with no experience. We went in with passion and persistence."

"We dropped thousands of dollars we barely had," he said. "When we get through (the final details of opening the restaurant), we're going to make it. It's just crazy."

"People love tacos. The key to success is give people what they want, and that's tacos."

Photos provided by Nick DeAngelo