La Carnita

We didn’t used to read WordUp! magazine, but the concept for La Carnita did transition from fantasy to reality in a way similar to Biggie’s life, less a few Coogie sweaters. It began when Andrew Richmond, a creative chef trapped in a design director’s body, was hired by Amin Todai, a chilled-out entrepreneur trapped in a chilled-out entrepreneur’s body. They worked side by side at OneMethod, Amin’s Digital + Design anti-firm, where they were thinking of a master plan:

Start a pop-up (mobile store without a front) experiment that pairs street art with street food and see what happens.

From there we got a local artist to create a Día de los Muertos skull out of taco ingredients, called some friends to help cook, sent out a few tweets, and then sold some limited edition art work with some limited edition tacos. Everything sold out so we decided to do it again. We called another artist, called a few more friends, sent out a few more tweets, and popped-up two weeks later. For the next 11 months we did this a number of times, involving a variety of local artists and talented chefs (both who taught us much along the way).

About six months into our run we thought a restaurant might be in order. That was verified at UNO in April, a fairly massive party where we hosted a few thousand people, a number of absurdly talented chefs, and over 35 original works of street art by some of North America’s finest creators.