45 years and counting

MOSES LAKE — In Moses Lake on June 1, 1977, Columbia Basin Machine defeated Zip Trucking in Little League, Japan Airlines held a model airplane contest for kids and new potatoes were 10 cents a pound at Thriftway. While “Star Wars” was breaking box office records across the country, Lake Theater was still showing “King Kong” from the year before. Oh, and a little taco stand opened up downtown near the swimming pool.

“My parents were agricultural workers,” said Pete Gonzalez, owner of The Taco Shop. “My dad was a farmer. My mom used to work at a clothing store right across from Bank of America and he would bring her here for lunch, pick her up for lunch on Saturdays in the park. He'd see this place closed three summers in a row and he thought ‘Next summer if the place is closed I'm going to see if I can buy it.’”

Gonzalez, a Moses Lake native, was a teenager when The Taco Shop opened and he’s been there ever since, first working for his father, Fred Gonzalez, and then taking over as owner when his dad retired in 2017. Fred passed away in July 2021, and his wife Aurora in April of this year. The place has undergone a few changes since 1977 – it was originally an open-air concession stand before Fred enclosed it so it could operate in the winter – but The Taco Shop has established itself as a fixture in the community, something visitors can count on.

“You know, it's gone on for generations,” said Gonzalez. “We'd see young couples come in and they got married, had their kids. Those kids end up getting married, having their own kids. We see a lot of families coming in here and still coming in to this day.”

Gonzalez’s business partner Rae Anne Journey is also a lifelong resident of Moses Lake, and she’s seen the same thing, she said.

“At least once a day I hear people come in and talk about how we had the Olympic-size pool over here and they remember coming wrapped in their towel just like I did, running across the hot pavement and ordering a taco or getting some Jolly Ranchers or whatever, I hear about it every day. Everyone has at least one story.”

Journey came on board in 2017, and found her work cut out for her, she said. Gonzalez had just taken over for his father, and while he knew how to turn out the food, he was a newcomer to the business side. Journey had a background in upscale restaurants, and she immediately found ways to streamline things.

“We’re very spatially challenged,” she said. “Maximizing the space that we've got here and becoming as efficient as possible has been a really big challenge.”

Journey made some changes to the roughly 800-square-foot building, making more efficient use of space and replacing the cement floor with tile. Not every change went over well with the public right away, she said.

“When we changed the look of the lobby here, we donated this artwork that we had here, and I'm like, 'Pete, it's got to go. It was outdated a long time ago.' So we donated it to the senior center. And our handyman who was helping us with these things takes it down there. And the guy down there says ‘You can’t donate this, this belongs to The Taco Shop.’ He bought it and brought it back.”

The community eventually warmed to the new interior, Gonzalez and Journey said, but the same can’t be said for all changes. The menu is essentially unc when the place opened: tacos, tostadas, burritos. It’s all made in-house, everything but the tortillas, and it has to be fresh, Journey said, because storage space is minimal. She also streamlined the procedures in the restaurant, she said, shortening wait times for customers.

“People were waiting 45 minutes or an hour for tacos,” she said. “And happy to do it, which is crazy to me. We've improved that time a lot through making small changes here and there. Those ticket times have improved greatly, but during Springfest, we were warning people, ‘Hey, we're over an hour out’ and they’re like, ‘That's OK.’”

People are very invested in their favorite taco joint, Gonzalez and Journey said, and any little change is noticeable.

“I was doing the books and working outside of the business for the first couple of years,” said Journey. “Then when I started working inside the business, I was hearing comments about the hot sauce, 'What did you guys change about this hot sauce?' I go to Pete and I'm like, ‘Hey, what's changed? People have noticed that there's a change in the hot sauce.’ He said ‘Well, I started buying the peppers roasted already instead of roasting them.’ And I'm like, 'Okay, you got to go back because people are noticing, you know? They don't like those slight changes.' It seems so small but it's a big change when people have been eating that hot sauce all their lives.”

The recipe went back as it had been, Journey added, but they were still getting comments about the hot sauce being different. The culprit, she said, turned out to be the new blender they had bought to replace the ’70s-era unit the shop had been using.

One change has been very popular, Gonzalez said, and that’s the new patio. Where The Taco Shop previously had one picnic table on the grass outside the building, now there’s a new outdoor paved dining area with six tables.

Gonzalez said the construction of the patio really brought home to him how much the community loves The Taco Shop. He’d been wanting to build a patio for a while, and when his mother passed in April, he decided to do it in earnest.

“I talked to a friend of mine, Kevin Burgess, and he said 'You're going to want to start doing that. I'll just get a bunch of guys rounded up and you just feed us.’

Burgess, owner of Windermere Real Estate in Moses Lake, was as good as his word, Gonzalez said. He came in with a backhoe and started working on the excavation. Gonzalez tried to call a halt temporarily for medical reasons, but Burgess and friends were having none of that and the construction continued.

Burgess also surprised Gonzalez by starting a GoFundMe page to help pay for the patio. At first Gonzalez felt really awkward about it, he said. But Burgess assured him that the community loved his food and service, and it turned out he was right.

“When Kevin started the GoFundMe,” Journey said, “I think it was two days before the goal was met, and then it just continued to grow from there. We almost doubled the goal.”

“It’s humbling,” she added.

“I'm just feeling awed and overwhelmed by how this all came together,” Gonzalez said. “This place has grown dramatically, spread out all over the place… We’ve got customers that come here three to four times a week. The community has kept us in business. It's just a real blessing; everything came full circle. I got the opportunity that my parents laid out, where I'm now able to really pour it on and continue to grow for years to come.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.