New Year! New Tacos!

Happy new year, friends! We’re starting 2026 with big dreams and high hopes. As you know, the Business Manager visa underwent some sudden and massive changes a few months ago. Since then, we’ve been thinking and planning and dreaming, for pathways that lead towards meeting these new requirements before the October 2028 deadline. One thing we’re considering: Tacos!

Well to be more specific, not just tacos. Mexican food in general could include many things, such as: tacos, tortillas, chips, salsas, hot sauce. Who knows, maybe even branching out into other offerings like chilaquiles, tlayudas, or birria. Whatever form our Mexican food dreams end up becoming reality, we know that we will aim towards a farm-to-table product. Ingredients like tomatillos, cilantro (‘pakuchi’), and Mexican corn, are quite difficult to source in Japan. So we will grow much of it ourselves, and hopefully, get other local farmers involved as well. But, we’ll share more details later as our plan starts becoming more clear.

Today, let’s look at our first Taco Pop-up event! Thank you to the owners of Miyaura Shoten for hosting the 3-day New Year holiday event; they also let us rent their prep kitchen and ‘kitchen car’. Thank you to Radar Room coffee, for being fun and synergistic pop-up collaborators. And of course, thank you to everyone who braved the cold weather to visit us on the first three days of January! 102 taco plates and 25 horchata beverages were enjoyed.

⌄ The tacos in this photo were actually made with our leftover Thanksgiving turkey, for the photo shoot. But the taco options at our pop-up were: wild boar ‘inoshishi’ or chicken. In the future, we plan to add a deep-fried fish or other seafood option, and more sauce choices.

⌄ We offered a spicy salsa roja and a mild salsa verde. Both sauces were made with our own homegrown tomatillos, tomatoes, and peppers. Interesting to note that almost every sauce cup came back empty, and zero food scraps, which implies that almost every customer ate both spicy and mild salsas.

⌄ A few more taco portraits.

⌄ In order to catch the many Japanese tourists and families walking to and from Oyamazumi Jinja for the New Year holiday, we set up our booth outside Miyaura Shoten, at the entrance to Ōmishima’s historic ‘sando’ street.

⌄ All three days were pretty cold! The five of us running our booths together kept warm by the kerosene heaters, and of course enjoying hot Radar Room coffee. Over half of our taco customers decided to ‘dine in’ instead of ‘take out’, so they could sit to enjoy their meal inside warm Miyaura Shoten.

⌄ A few images of our booth setup. This was a test setup, which we were pretty happy with. It was easy to differentiate the taco party branding (not our official name, also just a test) from the Benton Homestead honey branding. We also sold 8 jars of ‘hyakkamitsu’ wildflower honey. Evan looks cute in his apron!

⌄ The actual tacos, which were sold in sets of three. While Evan has built his own tortilla press, and makes a really solid tortilla, we opted to use Tokyo’s Molino Campo Noble tortillas for this event. They were great!

Here are a few fun statistics from our first Shimanami Kaido taco pop-up event:

Total taco sets sold: 102
Total tacos: 306
Wild boar ‘inoshishi’ taco sets: 56
Chicken taco sets: 46
Horchatas enjoyed: 25
Dine-in on vintage dishes: 52
Take-out on paper plates: 50
Japanese customers: 92
Foreign customers: 10
Farthest distance traveled for tacos: 3 hours!

Here’s our YouTube video covering the the two prep days and three event days ⌄