TACO TICO LOCATIONS IN FLORIDA DRIVERS

For the rest of my time in high school, both Lexington Taco Ticos were frequent hangouts for me and my friends. We even found a second Taco Tico on the similarly unfashionable east side still open for business. The food tasted exactly the same as it did when I was a little kid. Later that week a few of us piled into Trevor’s red Saturn and made what was the first Taco Tico run for any of us in years. One Monday morning, my buddy Trevor reported he’d encountered a still-operating Taco Tico tucked at the edge of a shopping center on Lexington’s less than fashionable north side while exploring Lexington in his car.

TACO TICO LOCATIONS IN FLORIDA DRIVERS

I was in high school, and my friends and I had just gotten our drivers licenses. It was the late nineties, and I thought that was the end of the story for Taco Tico, at least in Kentucky.įast forward to 2002. At any rate, Tacos Too lasted for three or four years before shutting down. I can’t find any information about Tacos Too online, but I suspect it was probably the brainchild of a single franchisee looking to circumvent franchise fees.

A few Taco Ticos converted to something called Tacos Too before closing for good. It was the mid nineties when most of the Lexington area Taco Ticos closed for business, while new Taco Bell locations opened at every imaginable location. With the Pepsi money flowing like a shaken two liter bottle fueling Taco Bell’s expansion and marketing, Taco Tico struggled to keep up. Taco Bell’s national domination began in 1978 when Glen Bell sold Taco Bell to PepsiCo. Both chains grew steadily into the seventies, mostly in separate regional markets, both giving many Americans their first taste of Mexican food. Taco Tico had beaten Taco Bell to the Lexington market by about ten years, and in the early nineties Taco Bell was just starting to catch up.ĭan Foley opened the first Taco Tico in Wichita, Kansas in 1962, the same year Glen Bell opened the first Taco Bell in Downey, California.

Taco Bell was relatively new to the area, having entered the market in 1986.

(I also had more than one birthday dinner at Chi-Chi’s, but that’s another blog entry.) At the time, there were a roughly equal number of Taco Tico and Taco Bell locations in and around Lexington. My parents, having lived in Southern California in the previous decade had gained an appreciation or quick and cheap Mexican food, and would often take us to either place for an inexpensive, fun family dinner. When I was a kid in Central Kentucky in the nineties, there were two options for Mexican fast food, Taco Bell and Taco Tico.

Taco tico locations in florida