Ramon Soriano can tell you exactly how many tacos La Calle Tacos has sold in ten years: 4 million. He can also tell you that those tacos weigh roughly 750 tons, that stacked an inch thick they would rise about 63 miles into the air, and that lined up end to end they would stretch around 315 miles. His short-term goal is to sell enough to line them all the way to Mexico City, where the food comes from. He is about halfway there.
That mix of operational obsession and genuine delight in the details is what makes Soriano one of the more compelling operators to sit down with on Behind the Numbers. A third-generation restaurateur and founder and CEO of Houston’s La Calle Tacos, Soriano joined hosts Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney to talk through the numbers behind a concept that has grown to three locations, with a fourth on the way and a franchise model now live. The headline figure: one location runs a 32% net profit margin, up from 13% before he tightened his systems. In an industry where 10% is considered a strong year, that number stops the conversation cold.
Ask Soriano what the most important thing he does day to day is, and he does not start with a spreadsheet. He starts with the mission: make the guest fall in love. His job, as he describes it, is to provide everything the operations side needs so that the last person on the line, often an 18-year-old who may not be highly experienced, can take care of the guest. That person, he argues, is the most important in the entire organization. Everyone above them exists to remove obstacles.
He credits his time at Front Burner Restaurants with teaching him to build everything around brand DNA. Once he understood how a brand identity drives every decision rather than sitting as a poster on a wall, he wrote a business plan in weeks after failing to put one on paper for 18 years. La Calle’s DNA comes down to three words: simple, economical, and replicable. Anything that does not fit gets cut.
Soriano’s origin story is the one most independent restaurants share. He had opened roughly 80 restaurants for other companies across a career spanning more than 300 locations, so he knew how to operate and how to open. He did not know how to build. He took a second-generation space (the only landlord who would give a first-time concept owner a chance asked to see his business plan, liked it, and signed), funded it with a small loan from his mother, an SBA loan, and his last few dollars, and expected to open in three months. It took nine.
He turned the delay into a marketing runway. Already out of his job with nothing to do but sit at a folding table on the site with his laptop, he built buzz on Facebook for months ahead of opening. By day one, people were already craving it. A local food writer came in about a week after opening, tasted everything in near silence, then stood up and said people were going to be excited about this. The story he published drove at least 500 people through the door that week. Soriano asks nearly every guest how they found La Calle, so he knows.
And year one, unlike most restaurants, made money.
Soriano started on Restaurant365 in 2019, his first period live on the platform. He had been running QuickBooks, which he found too generic for restaurants and which would have required separate logins as he opened his second location. He wanted everything under one roof.
When COVID hit, he got sick almost immediately and spent about three weeks locked in his house with no human contact, his computer, and Restaurant365. He used the time to load recipes and units of measure and configure modules, going deep on the operations side first. His guiding principle: garbage in, garbage out. Get the configuration perfectly clean, and the numbers become trustworthy.
The payoff shows up across several figures:
He runs three restaurants, soon four, with no corporate staff, no assistants, just himself and his business partner plus one marketing person. The automation is what makes that possible.
La Calle’s margin is built into the menu design, not bolted on afterward. Soriano built the kitchen and line twice from scratch: once for high volume, optimizing for items that hold on the well and move fast through a Chipotle-style line, and once for low volume, optimizing for items that will not generate waste when there are no guests. There are dishes he would love to serve but does not, because they would slow the line.
The result is a skeleton crew of two people, one bartender and one cook, who can still hit every point in the circle of service. Few brands can be efficient at low volume, avoid waste, and still handle high volume. That flexibility is the engine behind the 32%.
Because his data is clean, Soriano tends to be the first to raise prices when costs climb. He sees it coming. Competitors who wait until they are already losing money end up raising prices more than necessary to catch up. As Sweeney framed it, the goal is a system of action, not a system of record.
That same instinct shows up in how he is handling the industry-wide decline in alcohol sales. He is noticing the decrease, though he says what is really driving his current moves is location and timing: one of his bar concepts sits between the fencing and the stadium in a bar-hopping area, and with the World Baseball Classic recently behind him and the World Cup ahead, he is converting it from a Thursday-through-Saturday nightspot into a seven-day, lunch-and-dinner elevated taco concept. He is also building a small mocktail menu rooted in what you would actually find at a street stand in Mexico City rather than generic mock-mojitos.
Soriano has started feeding his rebranding notes into ChatGPT and treating it like a business consultant. One example he shared: planning a social space, the tool advised tall bar-height tables over short ones, because guests on high tops can stand, move around, and talk to people walking by at eye level. He canceled the table order and switched to high tops.
The more striking AI story is on the demand side. Soriano asks every guest how they found him, and the answer has migrated over the years from Yelp to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat to TikTok. Recently, in a single week, two guests told him they asked ChatGPT where to get tacos. So he asked the tool what he needed to do to get recommended more often, and got a list of concrete steps back.
La Calle’s franchise model is now live, with the focus on the Houston market first and openings possible elsewhere. Soriano sees franchising as the fastest path to getting that line of tacos across the country, and he will mandate both Toast and Restaurant365 for franchisees, partly because it helps them make money and partly because it protects consistency and keeps operators from going rogue on products.
His hot take to close the show was the opposite of flashy: keep to the basics. Across freezes, floods, a pandemic, and housing-market swings, he has watched every turnaround plan come down to getting back to fundamentals. Keep it simple, build around the brand, and remember that it is about love.
That, and 4 million tacos and counting.
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