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Urban Taco closes Dallas restaurant

The Mexico City-style taqueria is now selling its food for delivery from a ghost kitchen.

After 16 years in Dallas’ Mockingbird Station, Urban Taco closed on March 2, 2023.

The company is “moving to the cloud,” owner Markus Pineyro wrote on Facebook. Its tacos with barbacoa, chicken tinga and mushroom al pastor are now for sale from a delivery kitchen, OOMI, that Pineyro opened in November 2022 on Ross Avenue in Dallas.

Markus Pineyro stands inside OOMI Digital Kitchen in fall 2022, just before it opened.
Markus Pineyro stands inside OOMI Digital Kitchen in fall 2022, just before it opened.(Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)

OOMI is a ghost kitchen where chefs make or package food from more than a dozen companies, including Which Wich and Paciugo Gelato. Some of the brands on the online menu were created just for OOMI, like Hot Lips (Asian food) and Savage Rabbit (salad).

Pineyro says his customers have been drawn to delivery and carryout since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We see this as a way to bring Urban Taco to more diners,” Pineyro says.

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He started Urban Taco as a 24-year-old SMU grad. Ten years later, Pineyro moved the original Urban Taco in Mockingbird Station a few hundred feet, to a bigger restaurant space with more visibility. He operated a second Urban Taco on Dallas’ McKinney Avenue for nine years. It closed in 2018, and the building is now a Velvet Taco. Pineyro also opened and closed Urban Tacos in San Antonio and at DFW International Airport.

Urban Taco was known for its bright, buzzy dining rooms that were often full of recent college grads drinking margaritas.

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“Brick and mortar is part of my DNA and always will be,” Pineyro says, “but I am looking forward to this new phase.”

Reps from Mockingbird Station wouldn’t comment on what might move into the Urban Taco space.

Urban Taco closed at 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, on March 2, 2023.

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For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.