Rusty Taco brings street-style Mexican fare to Pleasant View
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- The interior of Pleasant View’s Rusty Taco restaurant, photographed Tuesday, June 18, 2024.
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- The exterior of Pleasant View’s Rusty Taco restaurant, photographed Tuesday, June 18, 2024.
PLEASANT VIEW — People living and traveling through northern Weber County are among the first Utahns to have access to a restaurant chain that is putting its own spin on the taco stand experience.
Rusty Taco, founded in Dallas in 2010 by Rusty and Denise Fenton, opened a pair of franchise locations in the Beehive State recently, including in Pleasant View at 380 W. 2650 North, Suite 3.
On June 10, the Pleasant View location — owned and operated by Home Run Restaurant Group — celebrated its grand opening.
To mark the occasion, the restaurant is providing patrons the opportunity to bring a can or jar of shelf-stable queso sauce (for donation to a local food bank) and exchange it for a free order of chips and queso.
“We know that if you went to the grocery store and bought queso, it has nothing on our queso,” Andrew Hyde, Rusty Taco’s director of marketing, told the Standard-Examiner
The promotion will run through Sunday with a limit of one order per family, per day.
According to Hyde, the restaurant chain “was born out of Rusty’s passion and love for tacos.”
“As his family would travel, they would always try to search out for the best tacos,” Hyde said. “So, they’re going all over Texas, going to taco stands, big and small, a lot of them built off a gas station or these small little taco shops.”
Eventually, that led to the opening of Rusty Taco’s first location in Dallas. Flash forward to now and Hyde says there are 33 restaurants throughout the country, with locations as far east as Virginia and as far north as Minnesota.
Hyde says there are designs on getting to 40 restaurants nationwide by year’s end. He added that franchisees in Utah have committed to building more stores in the Salt Lake City area over the next few years.
Rusty Taco’s menu features a myriad of street-style tacos with flavor profiles that are representative of a variety of locales and culinary disciplines.
“Our menu, it’s very broad in the sense that it has some stuff rooted a little bit more traditional with the fajita tacos, to a little bit more Tex-Mex with brisket kind of pulling in the Texas flavors, to kind of all over the place with fried chicken,” Hyde said.
Hyde cited the Baja shrimp tacos and breakfast taco varieties as signature items alongside the aforementioned queso, which has been made “Rusty’s way” since the beginning.
“We’ve been using the same recipe for the 14 years we’ve been doing this because it works and it’s so good,” he said.
While the “fresh, in-house” food is part of what differentiates Rusty Taco from other restaurants, according to Hyde, the chain also emphasizes the fostering of a welcoming environment.
“We want to try to encapsulate that taco stand experience,” Hyde said. “It’s very come as you are. … You’ll see people having business meetings there. You’ll see first dates. You’ll see a family. And it works well for all those occasions.”