When pop-up Chilito came onto the Charlotte dining scene, its breakfast tacos became a must-try for food-lovers around the city who’d been craving the dish. When Chilito co-owner and chef Hector Gonzalez-Mora opened El Toro Bruto inside of Resident Culture Brewing in South End, breakfast taco lovers rejoiced. While breakfast tacos have been on the menu here and there, El Toro Bruto hasn’t yet been open for breakfast. Now, with Resident Culture Coffee kicking off service in the brewery, breakfast tacos will be back on the menu permanently on Sunday, June 26. They’ll be available from 7 a.m. until 11:30 a.m., when the lunch menu will kick in.

Gonzalez-Mora, a Johnson & Wales graduate whose resume includes fine dining spots like The Asbury and The Porter’s House as well as creating the menu at Comida, has grown a passion for breakfast tacos since launching Chilito. We asked him why Charlotte hasn’t seen much of them, how his new space will let him do more, and what else we can expect from El Toro Bruto.

Unpretentious Palate: El Toro Bruto has been up and running in Resident Culture for a while now. Why did you decide to wait on the breakfast tacos until now?
Chef Hector Gonzalez-Mora: The truth is that I’ve been doing them kind of all along, but just doing them on the weekends and in limited supplies. Most recently, we’ve done them on the weekends for pickups. But we didn’t launch doing them full time because we haven’t been open for coffee yet. It just took a while for the coffee department to kind of come along. We were the first ones to launch with Resident Culture, El Toro Bruto. And the coffee just kind of took a backseat until they found the right person. They finally found the right person, so now things have been moving along. And so now we’re launching them. When we first opened, it was just dinner. So it was hard to do everything else that we wanted to do.

UP: When did you fall in love with breakfast tacos?
HG: I fell in love with breakfast tacos when I started doing Chilito with my old partner. We just kind of figured it was a cool thing to do, because nobody really specialized in them or really took the intentionality for it. I really saw the opportunity to develop a little bit of a culture around it. And from that, that’s where it came from. It was like, ‘Well, what is something that is not so seen, that people would like that is easy to sell and that I can have a good impact in the scene for? And that’s just kind of why I decided to do breakfast tacos.

UP: What do you hope that impact is?
HG: Just something good that people want to eat, honestly. Something simple and something good that people can enjoy. That’s the main reason. And then the more I thought about breakfast tacos and doing them, I thought, I can really develop good recipes and have something of a, like I said, a bit of a culture around. And so far it’s been something that I love doing and focusing on. You can tell by the effort I make, I think, in creating the recipes and the taco itself.

UP: What do you think is the reason breakfast tacos didn’t really exist in Charlotte?
HG: I just think nobody has really cared about it. I don’t think it’s the most hard thing to recreate or produce, but people love other things for breakfast, like bagels and biscuits and donuts. The breakfast taco was something that for some reason nobody had done yet. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I can’t speak for everybody in the culinary community here, but it just seems something that wasn’t done. And I didn’t even realize it until until I saw an opportunity for it.

UP: For people who were fans of Chilito, what should they expect from El Toro Bruto now that you’ve got a kitchen to serve from?
HG: Some similarities for sure, like the barbacoa or the really simple one with just egg and cheese in it. Those will stay on the menu, but I have the opportunity to do more. Now, I have the space and the equipment to make our own tortillas. Before, it was so hard to make because of the space that we didn’t have, so we’d just buy good quality tortillas. Now we’re making our own. A big difference between Chilito and El Toro Bruto is that we take the approach to make everything from scratch. We’re getting creative; the steak and eggs one is going to be like a stew with some steak, chilis, and tomatoes. Apart from that, we’re going to do other things as well — pan dulce, our bread that we make in house, it’s going to be like traditional Mexican pastry. That’s something that I’ve always been into, and we have the space to do it.

UP: Any other things coming up or changes things you’re excited about?
HG: Working with Charlie [Sullivan, Manager of Coffee Operations] to do the coffee, we can push an all-day menu and we’re doing lunch, too, because that’s something that we’ve been wanting to do — to do lunch in this neighborhood. And I think for the hours that we’re going to be in business, that’s what I’m looking forward to — a lunchtime scene. For the longest time since we opened, it was just dinner and the weekend. And now with the extended hours, we’re going to do a little bit more of a different style of food and service.

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