TACOS, A LOVE STORY

How a kid from Philly moved to Austin and brought home with him a deep and transformative passion for breakfast tacos.

Boy meets taco

Nano Wheedan left Philly and moved to Austin in 2004 with a handful of songs and a whole lot of dreams. What he found was sunshine, swimming holes, and an easy kindness with nearly everyone he met. What he didn’t find was an egg & cheese for breakfast. Not on a sandwich, not on a bagel, nothing. No amount of warm weather was going to replace the happiness brought by the salty, fatty, comforting hug of a breakfast sandwich.

Somewhere in that first year, Nano ate the Burrito Compuestos at Polvo’s which completely remade his conception of what Tex-Mex could be. Later that spring, on a beautiful Sunday morning, he joined his new friends for Hippie Church at Maria’s Taco Xpress. Gospel music. Old-Heads hippie dancing and handing out flowers. Bloody Marias. And chorizo and eggs in a flour tortilla. Nano ate his first breakfast taco.

First there was rocking. And pizza

Nano spent the first 10 years in Austin trying to be a rock star. He kept the lights on helping to build what has become an Austin institution: Home Slice Pizza. Home Slice opened on South Congress Ave. in November of 2005 and Nano was behind the bar on day one. Over the next 15 years, Nano became the right hand to the owners, and grew into his final post as director of operations of a 250 employee local restaurant group. It was the best education anyone could ask for and Nano learned that you really can spend your days believing in what you are doing. There is an art to taking care of people, and running a business is an extremely meaningful challenge.

A mystical confluence of...bagels?

Also there on Home Slice’s day one was Philip Korshak. Nano and Phil spent 13 years working across from each other as they supported the creation of up to 6,000 pizzas a week. Through a series of cosmic coincidences that surprised Phil and Nano most of all, Nano became a minority partner of Phil’s at Korshak Bagels and helped open it in May of 2021 on the corner of 10th and Morris in East Passyunk. “Every bagel is a love letter.”

A tortilla and a dream

Delighted to find himself falling in love with life in South Philly, there was no masking the breakfast taco sized hole in Nano’s heart. With years of practice rolling flour tortillas in his own home kitchen, he had to try and re-create the joy of all those Austin mornings. The pandemic kinda smashed his plans for a full-service restaurant, but learning from other local pop-ups, (shout out Kismet Bagels!) he and his wife, Carinne—a native Texan also obsessed with breakfast tacos—started giving away breakfast tacos made with hand rolled tortillas in front of their house in East Passyunk. Charging only donations to The People’s Kitchen, the Saturday morning pop-up brought Texans out of the woodwork. It soon became clear that people in Philly knew about these breakfast taco thingys…and they wanted more!

Now there’s a taco where there once was a heart

Taco Heart opens in summer 2022. Serving breakfast tacos, and with the dream of improving the lives of all who enter, Taco Heart seeks to delight.

Big thanks go to Carinne Wheedan, Phil Korshak, Emily Heyward, Bok Building, Emily Gambone, Jeff Newman, Jen Zavala, Mat Falco, Ben Miller, Maddy Sweitzer-Lamme, Michael Klein, and of course, Mom & Dad.