How this man is bringing the flavors of festive Mexican markets to a restaurant near you

Last fall, shoppers at Whole Foods may have noticed a vibrant new line of hand-rolled frozen burritos that featured genuine Mexican flavors, including fire-roasted chicken, Oaxaca cheese, and cactus, all marketed under the Vista Hermosa brand. The road to those freezer shelves began 16 years earlier when Dario Wolos, who was raised in Mexico, began selling tacos out of a sawed-off VW van in the Yucatán Peninsula beach town of Playa del Carmen, calling the makeshift eatery Tacombi (combi is Spanish for “minibus”). Four years later, he opened a Tacombi restaurant in New York City that evoked the van’s casual open-air vibe and served the same style of handmade tortillas and thick, salty totopos—both made the traditional way, from corn nixtamalized in slaked lime before being ground on volcanic stone. 

By the end of 2022, Tacombi was operating in 15 locations, including NYC, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Fueled by a $27.5 million boost from a December 2021 funding round led by Shake Shack kingpin Danny Meyer, Wolos plans to expand Tacombi to 75 locations nationwide in the next five years. He’s also been working to get those handmade totopos and tortillas (the flour ones are made with avocado oil instead of lard) to more consumers: Vista Hermosa, the packaged food line he launched in 2012, is now sold at more than 2,000 retailers in the U.S., while a new 30,000-square-foot distribution and production facility in Brooklyn has helped expand operations. 

Both businesses, Wolos says, try to capture the festive and energetic atmosphere he associates with Mexican markets from Oaxaca to Ensenada, and it’s a quality he’s striving to hold onto as Tacombi expands. “That is our challenge, 100%,” Wolos says. “How do you scale that feeling?”

This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2023. Discover the full list of groundbreakers who’ve achieved something meaningful in the past year.