Sometimes food just tastes better when it’s served in a portable ambulatory form, especially through a walk-up window. While Five Points Pizza always served a fine slice of pie, it wasn’t until they expanded and added quick-serve window service that it really took off as a neighborhood stalwart. For those of us who have lived here long enough to remember a time before Nashville had a big food truck fleet, Pizza Buds and Mas Tacos, Por Favor were revelatory additions to the late-night party scene, showing up outside East Nashville clubs and 12th and Porter around closing time to offer the perfect drunk snacks before revelers tried to figure out how to get home (before there was such a thing as Uber or Lyft).
Even before they officially open (hopefully sometime in the next few months,) the folks behind The Mockingbird are making waves with an announcement of an upcoming late-night service. The culinary duo of Brian Riggenbach and his husband Mikey Corona are planning to offer tacos from a walk-up window after dinner service is over on Fridays and Saturdays, beginning at 11 p.m. until they run out. The window will be called the Window of Delicious Opportunity, or WODO, and Chef Brian will serve three choices from a list of regular rotating options:
- Potato and egg
- House-made chorizo and egg
- Spiced bacon and egg
- Bean and queso
- Barbacoa
Riggenbach and Corona discovered the lack of wee-hour grab-and-go dining options when they first started to visit Nashville in preparation for their restaurant concept, and they came up with the idea for a taco window during a trip to visit Mikey’s hometown of Corpus Christi. They plan for their tacos to be a take on a South Texas classic, wrapped in a flour tortilla made using a recipe from Mikey’s family.
After The Mockingbird gets its bird legs under it, they plan to open the restaurant for all three meals, and breakfast taco options will be added to the window offering. All I can say is I wish this development had been around back in my club-hopping days, when I would party at 12th and Porter until they turned on the overhead shop lights to chase our asses out. Where were you boys back then?!
