Taco John's has been around for decades and looks as if they're expanding.
Some call it an oasis. The CEO calls it a home for “cult” food.
But to Gary Meyer, owner of the Athens’ Taco John’s, his restaurant is “kind of a freak.”
Of the roughly 400 Taco John’s restaurants in about half of the U.S. states, none come within hundreds of miles of Meyer’s establishment on Richland Avenue and none is any farther northeast. Aside from one in Fort Knox, a U.S. Army post south of Louisville, Ky., the closest Taco John’s is more than 300 miles away in Elizabethton, Tennessee.
The Cheyenne, Wyoming-based company set up shop in Athens in 1987. Meyer, a Kansas native and former railroad worker, had already brought Pizza Hut to Athens — the first of that chain east of the Mississippi River, he claims — 21 years earlier.
His pizza place on Richland Avenue did so well, Meyer said, that “when they had the riots here, see they closed the streets up here near the river. So (students) walked across (the Hocking River). We were open down here and had a full house while they were rioting (on campus).”
So Meyer, 76, decided to bring another Western U.S.-based fast food company to Athens.
And he quickly learned that customers would be more than willing to drive hundreds of miles for a $3.19 super burrito or heaping cup of the restaurant’s signature Potato Olés.
Especially those folks with roots in the West, where he said the chain is “always big.”
“Two nights ago there was a guy wheeled in here from Utah,” Meyer said. “He knew what he was doing. He’d been here before. We could tell that.”
Doug Eveland, who’s been Meyer’s manager since the beginning of the George H.W. Bush administration, said if you see a Utah or Colorado license plate in Athens, chances are it’s on a car in the Taco John’s parking lot.
They just can’t pass up the chance at Tex-Mex cuisine in what amounts to a Taco John’s desert, he said, adding his belief that “any who comes through from the Western portion of the states” stops on Richland Avenue in Athens.
“We have people who’ve been coming for I bet you 20 years,” he said. “We have a couple who comes up from Cincinnati all the time.”
CEO and President Jeff Linville even admits that the Taco John’s of the East is much different than its Western counterpart, where states often have scores of restaurants.
“Most people out where you are, I bet, don’t even know Taco John’s,” Linville said Wednesday.
Meyer said he reels in plenty of OU students now that housing complexes have moved near Richland Avenue, but that wasn’t always the case. He had to give students and Athens residents a reason to come to his restaurant because “nobody knew what it was.”
But Linville, who took over the company last year, said he hopes to change that. And expanding into the frontier where Meyer has long been the lone outpost is part of the plan.
A new restaurant will open on Long Island, New York by the end of September, Linville said, adding that he’s also “looking at Indianapolis.”
That could pose a drastic change to Meyer’s single-restaurant franchise, which he said has been largely unchanged for the last 27 years. But Meyer said he’d welcome anyone who’d like to join the ranks elsewhere in Ohio.
He and his wife, Pat, both said that for the first time in years, they’ve heard from prospective owners who are interested in starting their own franchises on the south side of Columbus.
Their children and grandchildren have thought about expanding, too.
“It’s just the way it is,” Pat said. “Nobody else has come out this far. Our grandson who is 27 has been wanting one in Columbus for years.”
Patrick Burge, a 63-year-old carpenter who lives near Stewart, said he’s been coming to the Athens’ Taco John’s every few weeks for about 15 to 18 years. He’s always been intrigued by the Tex-Mex fare, he said, because he’s never come across another Taco John’s anywhere near Athens.
“I often wondered that,” he said between bites of his burrito. “I knew they were a chain, but didn’t think they were a big chain because there aren’t any others around these parts.”
But Meyer said he doesn’t spend much time reflecting on his decision to bring Taco John’s farther northeast than any other franchisee before him.
He thinks it makes perfect sense.
“Athens is sort of an unusual place anyway … (because) you’re in Appalachia, it’s a college town,” Meyer said. “It’s a sort of a different place.”
@SamuelHHoward
sh335311@ohio.edu
