Before Willie Nelson took the stage at the 11th annual Luck Potluck this spring, guests settled in around long tables while smoke from open fires drifted across the ranch. Chefs moved between the flames and the crowd, serving dishes rooted in Mexican and Latin traditions. Edgar Rico of Nixta Taqueria cooked alongside Bricia Lopez of Guelaguetza, Emmanuel Chavez of Houston’s Tatemó, and Ana Liz Pulido. This was Rico’s first time joining Potluck as a featured chef, though he had been to Luck before. He first visited the ranch in 2022, when Nixta joined the Austin Food and Wine Alliance to serve late-night food at the first Luck Reunion after COVID. When he returned this spring, he came back to a place that already felt special to him.

“It’s very magical every time you hit those grounds,” he says. “You feel the spirit of Willie all throughout. It’s such a dope place.”

Looking back on Potluck, what stayed with Rico most was the chance to cook with friends and represent Mexican culture together.

“You definitely build some strong bonds that you’ll walk away with,” he says. “Spending a moment like that with someone in that particular place… It’s something that you will never forget. Those moments are kind of like a fever dream. You don’t forget those kinds of things.”

Rico talks about food easily and with enthusiasm, especially once duck is mentioned, but his stories make even more room for the people behind the food. The restaurant’s construction brings him to Natalia and Pancho, who helped turn dinner-table sketches into furniture. The garden leads him to the cooks pulling herbs for a recipe. The Taco Mafia begins with a few tired restaurant workers who met after their shifts because they liked each other and loved tacos.

That instinct to make room for other people has been part of Nixta from the beginning. Much of the restaurant was figured out over dinner, when Rico and his partner Sara Mardanbigi would talk through an idea with their friend Natalia.

“We’ll have dinner with [Natalia] and start talking about an idea,” Rico says. “We’ll put pen to pad, and it becomes a reality.”

When Rico and Mardanbigi opened the East Austin taqueria in October 2019, there was no investor or general contractor. Friends painted the restaurant, landscaped the property, and built furniture. Rico connects that independent streak to Willie Nelson and the old Armadillo days, when people gathered the right friends and built their own corner of Austin.

“There was never a general contractor,” Rico says. “There was never anything. It was just us and the people.”

Behind the restaurant was a 10,000-square-foot yard and only so many tables they could reasonably put in it. A few garden beds eventually grew into more than 60 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and trees. Some of the produce goes into Nixta’s dishes and drinks, but Rico is equally interested in what the garden teaches his staff. In most kitchens, produce arrives after someone else has planted, cared for, and harvested it. At Nixta, a cook might pick something they tended for months.

“The cooks get to see that we plant something, and months later it’s cultivated from months of awesome hard work from everyone’s hands that are involved in it,” Rico says. “Most of the time in a normal restaurant, you just order something that comes in the next day, and you kind of lose that connection in nature. Having [the cooks] go out there and cultivate things is something I always geek out on.”

Beyond the backyard, Rico tries to source as much as possible from Texas and Mexico. For their homemade tortillas, Nixta buys much of its heirloom corn from independent farmers in Mexico who use the milpa system, a traditional Mesoamerican farming method in which corn is grown in the same field as beans, squash, and other crops. Corn is also built into the restaurant’s name: Nixta comes from nixtamalization, the process of cooking and soaking corn before grinding it into masa. Rico hopes Nixta’s tortillas can eventually reach grocery stores across Texas and beyond, while continuing to work with the farmers who grow the corn.

“There cannot be just one type of corn in the world,” he says. “We need to champion small farmers that are growing corn like that.”

That sourcing philosophy carries through the rest of Nixta’s menu. Duck has become a fixture at Nixta because Rico can source it from farms whose practices he trusts, and because it connects back to the proteins eaten in the Americas before cattle and pigs arrived. Then there is the simpler reason: Rico really likes duck, and he is happy to make a case for it.

Luck: Do you have a go-to favorite, or something user-friendly for somebody who hasn’t prepared duck or rabbit?

Edgar: The duck carnitas is definitely the most user-friendly. A lot of people have this association with duck because a lot of restaurants mainly use duck breasts, so they’re like, “I don’t like eating duck because it’s kind of pink in the middle. I get weirded out by eating poultry that’s cooked like that.”

For the carnitas, the duck is seared and submerged in fat with Mexican Coke, condensed milk, bay leaves, onions, and chiles. Then “it goes in that little meat jacuzzi for about eight to 10 hours, low and slow.” Once tender, the meat is chopped, crisped on a plancha, and folded into a tortilla. People regularly assume they are eating pork.

“It’s kind of like a set-it-and-forget-it recipe,” Rico says. “You could put this, if you wanted to, in a crockpot and let it cook all night.”

Luck: You talk about how tacos are a democratic food, that they’re like a great equalizer. I would love your take on that.

Edgar: It trips me out going to Mexico City. You’ll be at a little taqueria on the street, and you’ll see dudes in full business suits crushing tacos that are $2 or $1. It just goes to show you that everybody loves a taco.

A taco can start your day or be the meal you reach for after a long night. The filling can change entirely from one order to the next, while the tortilla stays underneath it all.

“The tortilla is just the canvas for what you put on it,” Rico says. “That’s up to you, what you think is your version of delicious.”

That canvas has carried Rico– and his tacos – into rooms he never imagined entering as a young line cook. In 2015, he helped cater a Democratic fundraiser attended by President Barack Obama. Secret Service agents arrived before the meal, ran background checks, and put probes into the sauces.

“It was kind of crazy that day,” Rico says. “[It’s] very, very serious before you get to serve a meal to him.”

Rico has since visited the White House twice through the James Beard Foundation. “[To think] cooking tacos would have gotten you into a room like that – the freaking White House,” he says.

Nixta has earned national recognition of its own. Rico received the James Beard Foundation’s Emerging Chef Award in 2022, and Michelin later named him its Texas Young Chef. The restaurant has also received a Bib Gourmand and Green Star. Those honors bring new visitors through the door, but Rico is especially moved by the people who return often enough that Nixta becomes part of their routine.

Luck: What about preparing tacos for the president is still the same as the way you serve someone who wanders into your restaurant on an evening?

Edgar: Everyone that walks into the restaurant, whether it’s their first time or their 10th time, we want to serve them with the same amount of respect as [we] would President Obama. The biggest flattering thing is for someone to come back, and to come back multiple times, because they truly love your food that much that they’re willing to come back.

One family comes into Nixta twice a week with their daughter, who has been ordering the bean and cheese taco for years. She eats two each time.

The Taco Mafia also grew from the habit of returning to the same place. The Austin collective formed around Edgar and Sara at Nixta, Luis “Beto” Robledo of Cuantos Tacos, and Anthony Pratto and Xose Velasco of Discada. Their friendships and businesses later became the subject of the Austin PBS series Taco Mafia.

During Nixta’s Friends and Family Week, Rico and Anthony finished a long service and went to Cuantos on Xose's recommendation, who grew up near Mexico City. Rico remembers Xose telling them, “I haven’t been to Mexico City in a few years, but this is the first taqueria that I’ve been to that made me feel like I was back home. The feeling of the tortillas, the way that the meat was cooked – everything about it felt so Mexico City.”

At the time, Cuantos operated from a small bus in a mechanic shop parking lot and stayed open until two in the morning. Rico laughs, remembering Beto working inside it. “Beto, mind you, he’s like six foot eight,” he says. “He’s huge, and he could barely stand [inside of the bus].”

After they ate, Beto came outside and joined the conversation. Cuantos became a regular stop after work, and soon the group was spending days off visiting taquerias around Austin and in other cities.

“We just had this natural kind of bond,” Rico says. “We could all talk tacos – talk game about tacos, about what our favorite places were – and that became the spot for all of us after our shifts.”

For a while, the Taco Mafia was simply a group of friends who ate together and supported one another’s businesses. Then Winter Storm Uri hit Austin in February 2021. The city shut down, the power went out, and each restaurant was left with a week’s worth of food sitting in the refrigerator. Nixta still had gas, so Rico called the others.

“We were like, ‘Damn, we have a whole day’s worth of food ready to go. People are obviously hungry. We have all this food. We’re not going to just let it go to waste in our fridges.”

Rico told everyone to bring their food to Nixta.

“Let’s just cook it,” he remembers saying. “We’ll put it in a big pot. We’ll make a soup or something, and let’s just see if people come.”

They made around 500 portions of pozole from the meat they had on hand and announced the meal on social media. When they opened the door that afternoon, the line wrapped around the block. The food was gone in less than an hour, and messages began arriving from people asking whether meals could be brought to other neighborhoods.

The chefs called their suppliers and other restaurant friends, inviting anyone who could help into Nixta’s kitchen, and they kept cooking. By the end of the week, they had prepared more than 10,000 meals. The Taco Mafia name gained wider attention through the response, and years later, the story made its way onto PBS.

“It’s a really beautiful thing to see, through friendship and tacos, what that cultivated in creating,” Rico says. “To this day, we’re all still really great friends. As each of us is starting to branch out of our original businesses to create new businesses and new ideas, we’re all here to support each other. It’s like our brotherhood, and it all started through tacos.”

Today, two commercial refrigerators sit outside Nixta as part of the Free Fridge program, which began there as a pilot in 2020. Nixta keeps the fridges plugged in, and the food comes from all across the city. Farms bring produce left over from farmers markets. Restaurants drop off extra family meals or food from catering jobs. Grocery stores contribute prepared meals that might otherwise end up in the trash. Anyone can leave something, and anyone can take what they need.

“It’s a community fridge that’s run by literally the community,” Rico says. “All we do is plug it in.”

The refrigerators sit in a part of East Austin where small bungalows can sell for millions of dollars while Section 8 housing stands across the street. Rico knows that living near Nixta does not mean someone can afford to eat there. When the restaurant puts its own family meal in the fridge, it comes from the same kitchen and the same cooks who are preparing dinner. .

Rico would like to see more free fridges appear around Austin and throughout Texas.

“If you are able to control what you can in your own little microcosm of the world, I think if more people start to have that same idea, that’s how you can have a profound impact,” he says.

At Nixta, that microcosm is still growing. The free fridges sit out front, and twice a week, a little girl comes in and orders two bean and cheese tacos.

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