Restaurants have been part of Jake and Gavin Wheeler’s lives for as long as they can remember. Their father, Brian Wheeler, founded Tijuana Flats in 1995 and grew the brand to 140 locations before selling the company in 2015. He later opened Tibby’s New Orleans Kitchen, but Jake and Gavin didn’t learn the restaurant business from the sidelines. They worked at Tibby’s through high school and during their college summers, getting their hands dirty, learning it firsthand and developing a real passion for restaurants.
Then they had an idea of their own.
From a Family Nickname to a Restaurant
Big Taco opened its first location in Casselberry in November 2023, but the name had been around for much longer.
“Big Taco” was a nickname their dad’s high school friends gave him after he opened Tijuana Flats. Years later, Jake and Gavin brought it back as a nod to their father and the family’s Tex-Mex roots. It had history, personality and just enough attitude to feel like theirs.
The concept itself started with Jake and Gavin. They approached their father about building a new Tex-Mex restaurant: straightforward food, made to order, generous portions and genuinely personal service. The look would be current, the restaurant would have personality, and the experience would feel more like a local restaurant than another standardized chain.
Big Taco wasn’t a concept pulled from a filing cabinet. The three co-founders worked on it together from the beginning, testing recipes, building the brand board, choosing artwork and figuring out what the restaurants should actually feel like.
The result is a new generation of the Wheeler family restaurant story—rooted in decades of experience without trying to recreate the past. Today, Jake and Gavin are the restaurant operators behind Big Taco—running it, shaping it and making the idea work every day.
Tex-Mex, Built Big
Start with the food. The menu is familiar Tex-Mex and intentionally straightforward. Alongside tacos and burritos are enchiladas, quesadillas, chimichangas, nachos, tostada salads, Street Fries and the Phat Tony Burrito, a massive made-to-order burrito covered in queso and house Texas chili.
That same personality carries into Taco Tuesday, one of Big Taco’s weekly traditions: two large tacos, chips and a drink.
The idea is simple: make it to order. Don’t skimp on ingredients. Give guests the full experience from the start. Big Taco sums it up in three lines: “Upsizing unnecessary. Built Big. We don’t skimp. Ever.”
Counter Service, With Actual Hospitality
“Made to order” means exactly that. Big Taco isn’t built around the typical assembly line, where a guest moves down the line while ingredients are added in sequence. Guests order at the counter, but the food is made in a full Tex-Mex kitchen, with the flexibility to make it the way they want it.
Then comes the part guests don’t always expect from counter service. The team brings food to the table, checks back in, refills drinks, clears tables and provides service throughout the meal. Managers stop by the tables. Guests aren’t treated like a number just because they ordered at a counter.
That mix is the point: quick ordering and great hospitality don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
A Restaurant With a Point of View
Inside Big Taco, you’ll find bandana-wearing cultural icons, unexpected artwork, carefully selected music, an exceptional sound system, a pink LED arrow and the Hot Sauce Wall.
The room is colorful, a little irreverent and intentionally unlike a cookie-cutter chain.
The Hot Sauce Wall might be the best example. It does a job, but it’s also part of the experience. You can grab your food, choose a sauce and find out how brave you actually are.
From Casselberry to Oviedo
The first Casselberry restaurant gave the three co-founders room to put the concept into practice, learn what worked operationally and make adjustments before opening a second location in Oviedo. It wasn’t about changing Big Taco. It was about tightening the systems, procedures and day-to-day execution that keep the restaurant running the way it was intended to.
As the brand has grown, that same approach has moved beyond the restaurants. Catering carries that approach into office lunches, parties and team gatherings: plenty of food, flexible options and a team that helps make the whole thing easier to pull off.
The menu has also expanded to include full-size gluten-free burritos and quesadillas alongside nachos and chips. Guests who eat gluten-free shouldn’t have to settle for a scaled-down Big Taco experience.
Big Taco isn’t trying to recreate what came before. Two restaurants in, the food, hospitality and point of view are unmistakably Big Taco. The family history gave Jake and Gavin their roots. Big Taco is what they’ve built from them.
