VAN BUREN, Maine — Ay Ay Tacos, a new restaurant that offers authentic Mexican street food without cutting any corners, quickly grew from an in-home operation to mobile food trucks and now will be opening multiple spots to meet growing demand.
The Van Buren shop will be the first of three in the region, with the other two planned for Caribou and Houlton. It will serve as a bakery from which tortillas will be brought to the other locations. The owners also plan to get a new food trailer ready for next spring and plan to bring their tacos to central Maine.
If all goes well with renovating and preparing the space, business owner Valeria Ayers hopes to open in September. She hopes to open in Caribou at the end of October and in Houlton in early 2027.
The business is primarily run by Ayers with help from her husband and sons. It was named Ay Ay Tacos as a play on the family’s name. At first, she was thinking of the business as a fun summer job opportunity for her two oldest sons.
Ayers, who refers to herself as a “border kid,” is from northern Mexico. She grew up in the Mexican state of Baja California, which borders San Diego, California.
She met her husband, who is from Tennessee, in San Diego. He works for the U.S. Border Patrol and recently had an opportunity to transfer. Their choices were Spokane, Washington, Vermont, and Maine. After looking at photos of coastal Maine online, Ayers said the lobsters, beaches and coastal atmosphere made her think of San Diego.
But she did not realize how much different life is in northern Maine, which is known for long and often harsh winters, compared to the state’s warmer coastal region.
“Nobody told me there were two Maines,” she said.
The first winter in particular was hard on Ayers, who was suddenly cut off from most of the food she was used to having in San Diego.
“That winter was really hard, because I was crying over food,” she said. “Like who cries over food?”
After their first winter, she said she found a local eatery that claimed to sell “authentic Mexican tacos,” but both she and her boys were devastated to see that cold store-bought tortillas were used and touted as authentic. This became the impetus for Ay Ay Tacos.
“I went crazy, and I told the boys, ‘You should sell tacos. I’ll make them for you, and you can sell them so people will get to know a real taco,’” she said.
She told her husband, who was away for work in Texas at the time. He asked her to wait for a few more months until he returned home in October. But Ayers said she was impatient and wanted to get started immediately, so she bought all the materials and started posting about selling tacos from their home.
They sold their first tacos during August of last year out of their home in Caribou. It was out of their kitchen at first, then it became the garage. Soon word spread and she was selling food every day.
But a state health official located her and told her it was technically illegal for her to be selling food, particularly beef which is highly regulated, from her home kitchen.
“I think she understood that I didn’t have any knowledge of that, I’ve never been involved in a restaurant before,” Ayers said of her encounter with a health department official. “She was really nice.”
So from there, she set up the business as a mobile food truck with everything inspected and up to state standards. The momentum from their humble beginnings selling out of their home was still ramping up.
They started in Caribou, but that wasn’t enough. Then they moved to Presque Isle, Fort Kent, and Houlton.
“We were going once a week to each place,” she said. “It just went crazy.”
Ayers would cook 200 pounds of beef and sell out in just three or four hours. From the start, the goal was to make everything from scratch in order to ensure authenticity.
“There’s nothing that I don’t cook,” she said. “The salsa, the beans, the tortillas, everything is from scratch. So in order to sell today, I have to prep two days ahead, and at least ten hours. It’s a lot for a tiny trailer.”
When she’s not cooking and prepping food, Ayers is telling stories about the food and culture behind it via the Ay Ay Tacos Facebook page.
“I’m not selling only a taco, I’m selling you the complete experience behind this,” she said. “I think that’s what attracts a lot of people.”
It is not uncommon for a customer to come up and ask about one of her boys, or about a story that Ayers recently posted online. The page has gained close to 4,000 followers since it went online in March.
When she first started making tacos from her garage, she said a group of farm workers from Mexico found her and were thrilled to see what she was offering. This, she said, is the experience she hopes to share with everyone who tries her food.
“They were walking up and said ‘Oh my God, it smells like Mexico,’” Ayers said. “So I want that; I want you to be so far away from Mexico but I can bring you back with that tiny moment or experience.”