Gicela López, an immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager, didn’t know how to make tacos, but she always had an ambition to run a business. When a friend in 2010 told her about a taqueria that was for sale at a good price, she jumped on it.
“We didn’t know anything about cooking,” she says. “At the beginning, we were only making $40 or $50 a day.” Ms. López describes cooking with one hand while holding recipes in the other.
Persistence works. The business, Taqueria Izucar, now makes 10 times as much each day as it did when it started, and it wins awards for tacos that the Village Voice recently called “truly transcendent.”
