We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kimberly Bazan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kimberly, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
The whole concept of El Veneno from the beginning was to move away from the standardized image of Mexican food. There is such a lack of representation for our food in the states despite it being one of the most diverse cuisines on the planet. Mexican food as it’s known in the states has been Americanized to the point that no one knows/believes what Mexican food actually is when they see it. So we as a business have decided to focus on bringing actual Mexican flavors, recipes, foods, and traditions to our business. A lot of times things we do can be viewed as non traditional. But I see it as taking a traditional and very important aspect from our culture and presenting it in a new way. A prime example of this is our Black Al Pastor. Al pastor is one of the most popular taco fillings. It originated in Mexico City from immigrants. It’s THE taco of tacos. Now, it’s traditionally made red with achiote. We however make it black. The way we get it to be black is by using a traditional marinade from Yucatán called recado negro. The various recados are indigenous recipes of Mexico from the Mayans. We take both ideas and create something new and exciting showcasing lesser known flavors of Mexico. We have a very specific way of doing things here that ruffles some feathers. We’ve received a lot of backlash for not making certain things like nachos, quesadillas, loaded fries, chips and dips, etc. We have also received a lot of backlash from our own community for not doing things the way they are used to seeing it. But I think it’s important to stay true to ourselves and the vision we have created. El Veneno is an outlet for me to be creative. And our work reflects that. We are one of very few businesses that will have a new menu item every week. That will merge concepts that others see as failures. We push what we want to push until it’s accepted rather than giving up when facing resistance. Quality here always means more than quantity. We struggled a lot from the beginning because sacrificing quality was something I refused to do. Our food costs are crazy high because we source the best and make everything in house. We could definitely find cheaper and easier ways to do things. But the thing is, it won’t taste or feel like Mexico. It wouldn’t feel like us. The industry has forced a lot of us to find cheaper alternatives and to standardize all businesses into the same model. But when you go somewhere to eat it shouldn’t be robotic. It’s shouldn’t be a system. Food varies my region. And even in that region each community has a variation of that food. And inside each community each family does it differently. We lose story telling by standardizing the food industry.
To sum it up, I think what we’re doing is important because we are bringing culture and love back. I honestly feel that if more of us don’t step up and change the way our culture is viewed here all its rich and beautiful history will be erased for future generations. Food will forever be a way for people to connect and it’s important we keep that food culture alive.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I got into food as a means to help my family. My father was a single parent who worked long and hard hours. Every morning and night he’d always make sure to cook for us. When I was 7 I had a realization of how hard this must be for him. So I took it upon myself to learn how to make eggs! After this I started cooking eggs for us every night so he wouldn’t have to cook.
My curiosity for food only continued to grow. And for a long time it came from a place of necessity and wanting to care for my family. It later became an outlet for my creativity. I loved to cook and try new things, although they didn’t always taste good.
Traveling to Mexico when I was a kid only helped fuel this passion. Seeing all the street vendors and eating excited me.
In high school I knew I wanted to be a chef. I wanted to own my own restaurant and make crazy foods that moved people. My family wasn’t very supportive of this because it’s a hard industry. So I went and got my bachelors in nutrition science. This was the closest I could get to food while in school. Graduating made my dad very happy, but I was not. I didn’t want to work in a hospital/office for the rest of my life.
In 2020 I started doing food pop ups at local breweries while juggling schoolwork. After graduating in 2022 I got my first job as a line cook in a Mexican restaurant. I learned a lot here and it solidified my vision of cooking for a living. I stayed there a year and a month after leaving I opened the food truck. And I guess the rest is history ! I’ve had the truck open for a year and a couple months and it’s been insane.
When I started doing pop ups I was only 20 years old and I didn’t know anything about running a business and much less anything about the hospitality/restaurant industry. Opening the food truck at 22 came with a lot of hardships. A lot of times I felt ignored and treated less than just because people viewed me as young and dumb. I don’t have much experience in the industry at all and I think that’s off putting for some people. But one thing I have always had is passion. And I express that love and passion through my food. I am always learning and striving to be better. But being in the public eye also makes that hard. I receive a lot of criticism and sometimes it gets the best of me. But I have always been someone to admit that I do not know everything and there will always be people who know more than me. And I’m okay with that, it actually makes me happy. Because that means I can always learn more and do more. I love working with other people and seeing their ideas and being able to bounce off of that. Cooking is crazy in that way. There is no right way, no perfect plate, no nothing. Food is what you want it to be. And that can be anything.
El Veneno is freedom. Here we can teach, learn, love and create. All our projects, little or small, reflect that. And they always will. Some people see us as just a taco truck, but people who really get to see us know that it’s much more than that. And I’m very grateful for all those people who have not stopped seeing the best in us even at our worst.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Going into the food truck industry I knew I wasn’t going to be making lots of money off the rip. But I did expect for us to hit the ground running hard. But what I didn’t account for was having to book places to have the truck running and getting actual employees. I didn’t consider how marketing would have to be different. For the first half year I was only working 2-3 days a week and only bringing in a couple hundred dollars worth of sales each day. Some weeks I couldn’t even pay my brother who was my main employee. The rest of the help I got was from friends/family volunteering to help out. By December of last year I was really scared on how viable this was going to be for myself. I was months behind on bills. I could barely cover rent for our commissary kitchen. In general it wasn’t really looking good for the business at all. I kept pushing specials in hopes of getting new people out. After the year ended it suddenly took a turn for the better. January was really good for us. Sunday our “brunch day” started becoming our most popular day of the week. We were selling out every weekend. None of us could keep up in the kitchen or on the truck. It seemed never ending. I was able to finally hire someone to help me with prep. And we just started picking up lots of momentum. Our marketing and specials were brining a lot of people in. We’d get lots of people saying they saw our funny posts on Instagram and that’s what made them come. Or seeing the different specials we were running and not wanting to miss out.
The thing that kept me going was that vision of being able to bring real Mexican flavors to the city. And I knew I couldn’t give up. We’ve only been in business for a year but I think we’ve created a pretty good name and brand for ourselves. People follow us anywhere and are willing to try anything that we put out. We’ve been able to host multiple seated dinners where we really get to show that creative side of our business and really showcase our culinary vision for the future.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Our social media is probably the most important thing for getting our brand out. It’s come such a long way. If you scroll to our old posts you can see how bad the picture and video quality is. But because we want everyone to see our work. We continuously kept working on ways to increase our social media presence and quality. Because we’ve gotten so busy it’s become kind of hard to stay as active on social media but we still try to push marketing. We make sure all our designs are eye catching and are always updating our schedule and such. I think what catches people’s attention that most is that we post through our social media as if we’re talking to our people directly. We keep it super chill and relaxed. It’s not very posh and serious for us. We will make reels and stuff dancing and making fun of certain things. Doesn’t always come off as funny to everyone and trust us we’ve gotten a lot of negative comments but at the end of the day it’s just a video. Making jokes and having fun keeps you relatable to people. So that would be my suggestion. We don’t filter ourselves just to seem professional. Like our food, you get what it is no fake stuff.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.elvenenotacos.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/el.veneno.clt?igsh=MjJtczB2ZjV0Y21t
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/el.veneno.94?mibextid=LQQJ4d
- Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-veneno-charlotte
Image Credits
– Wendy Hernández
– Clubhaus Creative