First Look: Somos Tacos Arabi

Thanks to Somos, Luis Mendoza and Tony Musleh have gone from neighbors at one South Austin food truck park to business partners in another. Now open at the Yard at 440 E. St. Elmo, the taco truck brings Palestinian and Mexican food together to showcase each culture’s traditional street foods. 

“When Amanda [Hernandez] and I would shut down our truck at the Thicket, we would look at each other and say, ‘We’re gonna go grab some hummus from Reem’s,’ and that’s how this whole thing got started,” says Mendoza, the El Paso-raised owner of Un Mundo de Sabor. Before moving their Mexican business to Wimberley, Mendoza and his pastry chef partner Hernandez operated their truck at the South First park alongside Palestinian American Musleh’s truck Reem’s Falafel, adding leftover barbacoa and pickled habanero onions to his hummus to “Mexican-ify” it, Musleh says. 

“We just couldn’t stop eating it,” laughs Mendoza. “I don’t know if we were just so freaking hungry or if it was just actually really good. I was like, ‘This is not right but it’s amazing!’”

Musleh and Mendoza remained friends after they both left the Thicket and eventually began discussing what a potential partnership would look like. “I guess that’s what makes this partnership good: he cooks, I don’t,” Musleh explains. “I love dealing with the back end of the business.

“It’s a very good partnership where we each have respect for what the other person does, and does not want to get involved with what the other person does.” 

Mendoza began experimenting in the kitchen and, with Musleh’s help, figured out how to incorporate Middle Eastern elements into his Mexican cuisine. The duo concocted Somos’ homemade za’atar tortillas, for example, while trying to reverse engineer tacos árabes, the famous Arab-influenced Mexican dish that originally inspired what has become al pastor. Using pan árabe, a pita-inspired Mexican bread, makes the tortillas thicker than normal, and traditional herbs like za’atar kick it up a notch. Add in some Al Habibi Chicken (which comes with housemade cucumber labneh) and that signature hummus and onions, and you get something that’s unlike any other taco in Austin. 

I was blown away by Somos’ lamb birria and barbacoa, as well as the special lamburguesa, a lamb burger that comes with halloumi cheese, labneh, grilled sumac onions, pickles, and lettuce. The Somos Fries, dusted with za’atar and topped with goat cheese queso, feta, cilantro, and “Somos sauce,” are another standout, one Mendoza credits to his Un Mundo de Sabor customers. 

bacon breakfast taco, sausage breakfast taco, Al Habibi chicken taco, and Al Jefe beef taco Credit: Haris Qureshi

“In Wimberley, they kept asking us if we had queso,” he explains. “I didn’t want to just open up a can of queso and heat it up. If we go back to my family back in El Paso, everybody’s got their own version of queso – Velveeta with chopped peppers and onions – and everyone says theirs is the best. It’s delicious, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t see myself serving that to people [while] knowing that it’s not cheese.

“So one day I was like, what would happen if we just made a goat cheese queso?” Mendoza continues. “So we add the goat cheese queso, the habanero harissa, then Panela cheese and cilantro. You can add the pickles, jalapenos, pickled red onions, or cucumbers to those fries and you get all the acidity that kind of complements the richness of the cheese. It’s so good!” He recommends throwing some fries in the tacos in a quasi-San Diego style. 

Somos even offers halal breakfast tacos stuffed with beef bacon or sausage. “It’s really just like an Arabic breakfast,” Musleh says. “You have olive oil, za’atar, bread, eggs, protein, pickles – that’s pretty much like a Middle Eastern mezze breakfast.” Indeed, the breakfast tacos here are something you can easily imagine getting at a glamorous hotel, not necessarily a hot parking lot across from a Tesla garage. Perhaps this is part of the Yard’s allure, where St. Elmo’s blue-collar warehouse background meets its present day of art galleries and fashionable drinking parlors.

Mendoza and Musleh have been in the game as entrepreneurs for almost five years, and their joint venture shows their creativity shining through. “We’re going to bring something [new] and we’ll actually have a chef’s kiss to this,” says Musleh. Whether it’s lamb birria on pan árabe-inspired za’atar tortillas or loaded goat cheese fries, you can’t find Somos’ unique spin on popular street food anywhere else in South Austin. 

“We want to be a little bit extra, a little bit different, something that people remember,” Mendoza declares. “People will say, ‘We can get tacos anywhere.’ Yes, you can. But the tacos that we’re doing over here? Now we’re playing with your head a little bit.”

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