Austin’s Best Taco Spot Veracruz Opens New Restaurant With Antojitos and Cocktails Soon

Veracruz All Natural, one of Austin’s best taco and Mexican food trucks and restaurant mini-chain, is opening its next new restaurant this spring. Veracruz Fonda & Bar will open in Mueller at 1905 Aldrich Street starting on Saturday, April 8.

For the new restaurant, co-owners and sisters Reyna and Maritza Vazquez are taking their cues from their hometown of Veracruz, Mexico for their new restaurant. This includes their mother’s now-closed restaurant in the country, which was named Fonda.

The table-service restaurant will offer daytime and evening menus. For breakfast, there will be a breakfast menu that will include picadas, essentially Veracruz-style open-face tacos stemming from Veracruz, Mexico (which the truck and restaurant have served from time to time at other locations), as well as conchas made by Reyna Vazquez. The coffee menu was developed with the coffee truck and roastery Desnudo’s Juan and Sergio Trujillo. It’ll include cafe lechero, which is basically Mexican cafe con leche, a style popular in Veracruz, Mexic). The pairing makes sense seeing as Desnudo’s trailer is parked in the same food truck court run by Veracruz on Webberville Road.

During the evenings, Veracruz Fonda will serve moles, antojitos (small Mexican plates), and other entrees such as camarones enchipotlados, a dish of sauteed head-on shrimp with rice and blue corn tortillas. There will be a first-time full bar with a menu designed with Mexico-based bitter company Bitter Barrel’s Osvaldo Vazquez and ATX Muertos’s Ernest Ramirez, with cocktails, beers, and wine

Before Veracruz Fonda, the Aldrich Street address had been the home of fried chicken restaurant JT Youngblood’s, which had been the revitalization of Texas fried chicken chain Youngblood’s, which had closed in the 1970s. JT Youngblood’s opened in 2017 under Jeffrey Weinberger (who passed away in 2021), Lenoir’s Todd Duplechan, and Jeff Haber. They closed the restaurant in 2018. The address’s leasing company had reached out to the Vazquezes about opening a new restaurant; they had already been running a truck in the neighborhood. The new Veracruz Fonda space was designed by architect Charles Melanson and interior design studio BRWN Collective.

The Vazquez sisters started their food business as a food truck on East Cesar Chavez in 2008. Their company grew with several food trucks and restaurants around Austin, plus a short-lived food truck out in Los Angeles. They’re working on opening another physical restaurant in East Austin on the Webberville address to open sometime later.