Profiles of prosperity: Tacopreneur Memo Torres

Memo Torres describes himself as a third-generation landscaper, the host of Yerbalife, a taco journalist, a director for LA Taco, a finalist for the Ruben Salazar award, a contributor to Netflix’s Taco Chronicles and as a correspondent for Apple Maps Guides. I was fortunate to get about 20 minutes with him on Zoom and even though I don’t know him well, I saw him differently. I saw him as the quintessential entrepreneur whose talent seems perfectly made for this era and this city of Los Ángeles. As this is the final entry for the series, I saw him as the perfect candidate to close out the series and to showcase a hardworking Chicano entrepreneur who is making a name for himself in a lane that never existed in the world of food writing. In past eras, both Steve Martin and Randy Newman galvanized the world at large with their perspectives of the quintessential I ♡ LA character. For me, that character is Memo. 

Sergio: Please describe your childhood home?

We were trying to make a stable home but we moved around a lot. I lived with my mother, father and two sisters. We lived in duplexes that were really run down in Inglewood and we lived in nice homes with swimming pools in Canyon Country. Sometimes we moved for our own safety and other times we moved because of market instability. My father had a landscaping business and I remember that my mom pushed my education on me and my father pushed hard work on me to help out with the family. When I was 12, I began to work with my father and then when I was old enough for college, I went to UC Berkeley. My father asked me why I didn’t just go to Santa Monica College (SMC). He didn’t understand the difference between Berkeley and SMC.

Sergio: When did you begin to fantasize about prosperity and did you tie your vision to an image of a home?

I did want to have a home in Los Angeles. I didn’t particularly envision what it looked like. I wanted to have zero debt. I wanted to have some investments. Some retirement money. Kids that were successful and well-educated.

Sergio: What were you planning to do for work?

Even though I went to Berkeley, I knew the landscaping business. I don’t think my father expected me to become a landscaper but my mom got cancer and so he had to take care of her in Mexico and I had to take care of the business. They are from Zacatecas. We had our share of hardships. At a certain point, we started to butt heads and so we agreed to split up. I took my clients that I had signed and went my own way with my own landscaping business starting from the ground up. I was young and eager and I was already married and I had two children so I was a recent college grad with a lawn mower in L.A. I got my license and started developing my brand and now it's a small company. This is actually how I started to know Los Angeles and the culinary scene because I was eating around where my accounts were, I started to enjoy writing about the experiences. It was the Editor of LA Taco that persuaded me to take it more seriously and that’s how I became known as El Tragón de LA on social media. I’ve been at LA Taco for four years and I’ve been writing about food for the same amount of time.

Sergio: What does your home look like present-day?

I worked for twenty years and I finally bought my first home with my fiance this year. I couldn’t do it alone. It’s a funky looking two story home with old white stucco siding on the old side of the home and wood siding on the new side of the home. It looks like somebody took a 100 year old house and then stuffed a small modern custom built home into the middle of it.

Sergio: How did the Apple Maps project come about?

Apple reached out to me a year ago. This food thing was something that I did personally and it’s been spiraling ever since. It’s not a business but it is a separate income source. I source five new locations every month for them and they place it in their Apple Maps Let’s Eat project. I was on a Netflix show called Taco Chronicles, I was a judge on a cooking show but really I feel a bit of imposter syndrome because I know there are people out there that struggled to become food journalists and I didn’t do that. I wasn’t looking for this path and opportunities have just come up.

Sergio: Has anybody talked to you about being the next Anthony Bourdain?

No, that sounds ridiculous. That seems unoriginal to me. I’m not out here pitching people that I want to be like that. I did see Anthony Bourdain because he was so popular. I think that Jonathan Gold opened the door for me but I wasn’t trying to be like him either and I didn’t even read his work. I see lots of people trying to be like Bourdain … I have my business. I’m here in L.A. I’m enjoying the writing. I like it when people respond to my recommendations. If something else opens up, I’ll take it.