Trompo, a lauded Oak Cliff taqueria with a decorated and complicated history, has closed permanently.
In an interview with The Dallas Morning News, owner Olvera said the closure comes after months of financial struggle since opening on Jefferson Boulevard in 2022.
“I’ve been losing money since I opened at this location,” Olvera said. “I literally poured everything I have into this and I just keep struggling. I just decided that the best thing to do here was just say goodbye.”
The closure punctuates a decade of triumphs and challenges for the Dallas taqueria.
Trompo got its start 10 years ago as a pop-up in Luis Olvera’s Oak Cliff backyard. After finding a following for his Monterrey-style street tacos, Olvera went on to open a small walk-up counter space on Singleton Boulevard in 2016. It was there Trompo gained national recognition and was included in Bon Appetit’s list of the country’s 50 best new restaurants.
Olvera then moved Trompo to 10th Street and Bishop Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Bishop Arts District, in 2019. He said he never planned to leave the location he rented on Singleton Boulevard location, but the building did not meet city code.
In August 2021, Olvera opened a second location off Gaston Avenue in East Dallas. Months later at the end of 2021, the Oak Cliff location shuttered after Olvera couldn’t reach an agreement with the landlord on a rent increase, he said. The closure of the East Dallas location followed in May 2022.
Trompo lived on in the form of a ghost kitchen in West Dallas for several months until Olvera moved it into a restaurant space on Oak Cliff’s Jefferson Boulevard in September 2022. That location, he said, was the epitome of what he’d been looking for in a restaurant space all along. But a little over a year after opening on Jefferson Boulevard, Olvera found himself locked out of the building for falling behind on rent by $36,000.
He announced Trompo’s closure on social media in January 2024.
“Since 2014, every single year, I have invested in a new property, a new project, trying to find my permanent home, trying to find my forever home for Trompo,” Olvera said in a video announcing the January closure. “For a business to have to spend a lot of its time, resources, money into a location every single year, to try to just be able to operate, it’s a little challenging.”
Just 10 days after the closure was announced, Trompo reopened. Olvera said at the encouragement of supporters of him and his business, he reluctantly set up a GoFundMe. He received $20,100 through the online fundraiser and raised additional funds through a pop-up taco event he hosted. It was enough to payback his landlord and reopen.
The momentum from the reopening lasted a short two weeks, Olvera told The News. He held out hope that the business might turn around, but sales continued to decline. The fervent support for small businesses he saw and experienced during the pandemic vanished, he said.
“I never took an investor because they didn’t get the vision,” Olvera said. “I’m not just trying to look at the profits. I’m doing something that was a calling for me. It was really cool that Trompo was highly regarded as a place to go to if you wanted tacos that had integrity and were true to the culture. My whole thing was doing it for the culture.”
Olvera said with this closure, Trompo is truly gone.
“I’m completely 100% out of money,” he said. “We are not opening another Trompo anywhere. It’s dead. I had a great 10 years. I’m done suffering and I’m done being in pain because this is not just a business to me and it never had been. It ran its course. What can you do except blame yourself?”
If anyone were to ask him why Trompo failed, Olvera said he’d tell them it was ultimately because of bad real estate choices.
“Do not rent in Dallas,” he said as a warning to other small business owners. “Because the only people getting rich here are the landlords.”
Walking away from Trompo after 10 years of trying to keep it afloat is painful, he said, but he’s not walking away from tacos. Olvera plans to “get a regular job and do regular things,” but eventually he will dust off his trompo and take catering orders on the side.
Trompo was located at 337 Jefferson Blvd., Dallas. It closed August 2024.
