Hunter Berry has always loved breakfast tacos; he had a feeling Asheville would too.

Ask Hunter Berry how his locally loved and nationally known West Asheville restaurant Taco Billy came to be and settle in for an entertaining and somewhat preposterous story. Back in 2013, the Texas native was living in Tulum, Mexico, working in the jungle, directing operations in the construction of a sustainable housing project headquartered in the U.S. He and his family had been there for four years, but as his four daughters were getting older, it felt like time to get back to the states and a more structured school system.

“I had done a lot of jobs, but I always wanted to have my own business,” he says. “I thought about what kind of business I could do, and I hit on breakfast tacos. They’re my favorite food. No one does them outside the state of Texas and I thought I could do that.”

Starting your own independent business is always a leap of faith; creating a restaurant with absolutely no restaurant experience was more like jumping out of a plane strapped to a parachute rigged by a chimpanzee.

Hunter jumped. “I knew how to work hard, and I figured I could figure the rest out.” He already knew he would bring the breakfast taco gospel to Asheville, an epiphany he came to on an exploratory site visit. “After one day being here, I felt like this is where I’m supposed to be.”

Back in Tulum, he wrote his business plan in his friend’s restaurant; six months later, plan in hand, he moved to Asheville. Driving around seeking available space with his youngest daughter, she spotted a For Rent sign on a decrepit, vacant building on the leg of Haywood Road in East West Asheville that turns to the river. Hunter braked, parked and called the number. “The property manager answered the phone and told me it was $500 a month and I said I’ll take it. He asked what I was gonna do with it and I said I’m gonna put a restaurant in there. He said he didn’t think a restaurant would work, and I said I would make it work.”

The nearly century-old building definitely needed work. Hunter spent more than nine months transforming 800 raw square feet into a restaurant, converting believers along the way.

“When I went to Rob Foster at Blue Ridge Restaurant Supply, I told him I needed equipment for a restaurant and he asked what I needed and I said I don’t know, I’ve never done this before. He asked what my menu was and I told him I didn’t have a menu, but it was going to be tacos. He kind of shook his head and laughed, but then told me what he thought I needed and that was the original line.” The name emerged during a conversation with a couple of friends at dinner in Tulum who asked what he was going to call this restaurant then living only in his head. “I said it would be taco something and one guy said you’re moving to the Appalachian Mountains, you should call it Taco Billy. I liked the way it sounded; it really rolled off the tongue.”

Through a mutual friend from Austin, he met Will and Amy Hornaday of Hornaday Design for beers at the Wedge and walked away with a promise to do his logo, pro bono. The goat was born. “As soon as I saw that Billy goat, I knew we could roll with it.”

His brother-in-law, a carpenter and art director, came to town with his Pantone colors book, and started painting samples on the walls. “He woke up the second day he was here and said he saw the colors in his dream – gray, blue and orange. I was like, ‘Okay! Let’s do that!’”

Building the menu and naming the tacos was fun, he recalls. “The breakfast tacos were easy, I grew up eating them. They’re pretty much egg and something – bacon and cheese, sausage and cheese, potatoes and cheese. Migas are super popular in Texas. I wanted something with just vegetables and some green, so that became Bright & Early, and Mama’s Favorite is a combination of some of our favorite things.”

He knew he needed more than breakfast hours and breakfast tacos (though they are available all day), so he came up with a lunch menu (now lunch and dinner) of chicken, pork, beef and veggie tacos; naming them was a group effort that pulled on a lot of history.

The San Cris is for San Cristóbal de las Casas, a town in Mexico he loves. One of his three sisters is a vegetarian, so he named the black bean and cheese taco Little Sister.

The Santi is the nickname of the son of the chef in Tulum who spent a week working with him to develop his culinary skills and recipe creation. Kirb Service pays homage to Kirby Wilson, one of his best friends growing up.

All the tacos were on corn or flour tortillas (sourced from Molina’s); the plantain tortilla was a recipe developed in his home kitchen and brought to the restaurant. The décor began with kitschy, framed landscape and still life paintings picked up at thrift stores and yard sales; his friend Kim suggested placing a little orange goat somewhere in each painting. “They’re a hit, people love the hidden goats.”

Taco Billy opened with a line out the door on Saturday morning, September 12, 2015. He spent the night before in the restaurant prepping and says he practically lived there for the first two years.

He bought the building in 2018, expanded it, and over time, turned the back yard slope into leveled outdoor dining; he opened a second Taco Billy in Black Mountain in 2022.

“The whole thing, from the beginning, kind of just unfolded. It was a heart-lead passion project and we put everything we had into it. I tell my girls that I hope they find a dream they can chase. There’s not a better feeling in the world than having a feeling of what you want to do and then going out and doing it.”

More about Taco Billy.

— Written by Kay West

— AIRfare is sponsored by McGuire Wood & Bissette

Photos courtesy of Taco Billy.