‘It was like a carpool line’: From Charlotte apartment queue to Mariah’s Taco restaurant debut
When dozens lined up at her Charlotte apartment for tacos, she knew it was time to level up.
Looking back at the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, homes were transformed into remote work offices, virtual classrooms, DIY craft centers and even makeshift dance studios for the latest TikTok trends. But for Mariah Brown, her two-bedroom apartment in South Charlotte unexpectedly became a bustling taco business.
“I really did not expect for a hobby that I took on out of boredom during the pandemic, just to kind of keep me busy and sane in the house, to really turn into the business that it is today,” Brown said.
While working from home full-time for Duke Energy, she didn’t intend to use her extra time in quarantine running a makeshift takeout taqueria spot out of her kitchen.
But thanks to a random cooking video she found online, what started out as experimenting with a fun recipe and posting about it on her own social media quickly turned into a becoming a hot spot for taco lovers around the city.
How it all started
“I like to create, and I’m a foodie at the same time. So, I just remember one day I was just scrolling on Instagram … and [saw] these really cool, cheesy tacos that people were dipping inside of some kind of sauce — I didn’t know, at the time, what it was. I was like, ‘Wow, that looks really, really good.’” she explained.
“I didn’t notice that anywhere here in Charlotte at the time had those type of tacos, so I just made them at home for my family just to try, and I originally wanted to be a food blogger.”
After getting a lot of positive feedback from her friends and followers online just from her food photos, she decided to launch “Meals by Mariah” in which she’d coordinate pick-up orders through Instagram.
“As crazy as this sounds, it was a decent amount of people coming to get tacos. I would post to the page, ‘tacos available,’ like on a Tuesday … Once they would send over the cash app, I would text the address, for pickup,” Brown explained.
“It was a full blown house operation. I was making the food, customers would text their orders, and then I would organize their orders in my notepad on my iPhone.”
Then for two to three months, after clocking off from her corporate job, Brown would spend evenings perfecting her recipes — made with tender, slow-cooked beef chuck and melted cheese, garnished with savory seasonings, onions and cilantro in crispy tortillas. She’d cook them up on a $20 griddle while her friends hustled to and from her second-floor apartment to carry out orders to customers in her apartment parking lot.
“I cannot tell you what came over me … but I did and the power of the internet honestly. It really, really just took over, and I definitely feel like I decided to do something during such a chaotic time because I don’t really put fear in front of me,” she said.
“The feeling of cooking inside of my apartment — I will be honest, it was comfortable because I was familiar with my kitchen … It’s nowhere near having access to a large kitchen, which I’m aware of now … It was easy, it was efficient, and it did what it needed to do.”
Now, more than four years later, she’s on her way to opening her first brick-and-mortar restaurant.
‘It was like a carpool line’
Though she has a political science degree, Brown actually got her start in the food industry at 16 years old with her very first job at Jersey Mike’s, followed by several other gigs as a waitress and bartender years later. It created a full circle moment after leaving Duke Energy once her business started booming.
“To be honest, it started to get so overwhelming — the amount of people that were coming to an apartment that one day, I’d never forget, it was me and two of my friends. I told them, after we had … probably 50 people… I was like, ‘This is extremely illegal, and I cannot do this anymore, someone may call the health department… It’s not one or two people, or you’re feeding your neighbors or taking food to a pool … It was like a carpool line,” Brown recalled.
“I looked at them and I said, ‘You guys, this is the last day I can sell these tacos out of my apartment. We’ve got to find a commercial space … I’ve got to figure out a way to legitimize this, this business, it’s doing something, so we might as well run with it.’”
That’s when she discovered that she could serve her specialty tacos out of the ghost kitchen The City Kitch West End.
[HUNGRY FOR MORE? Your ultimate guide to where to get solid birria tacos in Charlotte]
‘I’m a taco girly at heart … even outside of my business’
“I’ll never forget the first time I bit into a birria taco … and I’m like, ‘Man, there are so many other people on this planet that need this experience.’
“And when I realized how amazing this experience was, the first thing on my to-do list was, ‘How can I share this with people?’ so that’s always been the core of what I do, is, I wanted to do this for others.”
The growing craze over Brown’s delicious birria tacos pushed her to expand to a food truck with a new name nearly two years later — Mariah’s Taco Spot — and it’s since become a staple for street food lovers.
And soon, you’ll be able to get a taste of Brown’s tacos, oven roasted wings and combo boxes in her restaurant opening in NoDa.
“Did I think that we would make it this far in such a short period of time? No. But I always like to think about what’s the next step,” she told CharlotteFive.
“I’m a bigger picture type of person. So I’m like, ‘OK, boom. We’re in an apartment and we’re getting this much? OK, we gotta make it to the next level.’ Then when I was in the ghost kitchen, I’m like ‘Hmm. What’s bigger than this?’
“Now the food truck, I’m like, ‘What’s bigger than that?’ So now that God has blessed the business structure to be in a position to grow as quickly as it’s grown, now I’m thinking, ‘Where are we going to put the second brick-and-mortar?’”
A ‘destination location’ with an ‘aesthetic experience’
Once open, the new restaurant will feature all of the fan-favorite menu items offered at Mariah’s Taco Spot food truck, including her birria tacos, chipotle surf and turf taco, oxtail taco, oven roasted wings, taco boxes and more. There will be some new options too, like creative taco bowls and nachos. Plus, there will be a bar and live DJ.
“It will be fast casual, but it’s gonna be a vibe,” Brown said. “If you don’t know what Mariah’s Taco Spot is or you’ve never tried it … you can expect to see the branding elevated to a whole new level. And if you’ve already had Mariah’s Taco Spot, the experience just gets better.”
Aside from the menu, Brown is also designing ways for the space to capture her brand’s classic black and hot pink aesthetic — with colored furniture and neon lights to create “Instagrammable moments inside of the building.”
An official opening date has yet to be set, but Brown is hoping that the new restaurant will be open this winter.
“I really have big, big, big plans for this so it’s a very, very special and impactful position for me to be in, and I take it very, very seriously because I know the potential that it has. I know how many eyes are on the business so I don’t want to let anybody down,” Brown explained.
“Some of these customers still come to me to this day. They’re like, ‘I remember when I was picking up food from the apartment.’ There was just some type of instinctual trust that they had in me from the very beginning of my journey, and it’s carried on … It’s a feeling that I really just can’t even explain. I’m just full of thankfulness. I’m just so thankful that whatever it is I did, it worked.”
Mariah’s Taco Spot
Location: 4100 Raleigh St, Charlotte, NC 28206 (opening winter 2024)
Cuisine: American, tacos
Instagram: @mariahstacospot
An inside look at Charlotte: The Charlotte Observer takes you behind the scenes of your favorite Charlotte teams, landmarks, businesses and more to show you how it all works. Follow along to see where we’re going next.
This story was originally published August 26, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
.jpg)