The Taco Museum Promised Exhibitions and All-You-Can-Eat Tacos, None of It Happened

A few weeks ago, we published a story about three upcoming taco festivals all set to hit North Texas in the coming months. Two of them, the Patron Irving Taco & Margarita Festival and the Tacos and Tequila Festival in Fort Worth, by all accounts, are still set to take place.

The third one was called The Taco Museum, billed as a touring taco and art festival celebrating the history of the food with an all-you-can-eat hook. The advertised elaborate immersive rooms included 6-foot-tall Cholula bottles and a mechanical bull contraption but with a hard-shell taco instead of a bull. This circus was supposed to hit San Antonio and Austin as well on its Texas stop.

The Fort Worth date was scheduled for Saturday, March 1. On Monday night, a reader, Jennifer Jones, sent us an email linking the article explaining she had purchased five $50 VIP tickets for Saturday’s event.

“You might be interested to know of all the people who were scammed out of money,” Jones wrote.

With Jones’ VIP ticket, admission to the event should’ve opened at 1 p.m. at the Fort Worth Stockyards Station. At around 4 a.m., Jones received an email that the event was being postponed to March 22, citing “logistical reasons.” The email makes no mention of ticketholders getting a refund.

We contacted the Stockyards Station, and a representative confirmed that the event was never scheduled.

Jones did some further research and found that the dates in San Antonio and Austin never happened either. In San Antonio, ticketholders began showing up to the River North Icehouse, where The Taco Museum was set to take place. They were greeted with a different event, “Booty, Brunch and Bubbly,” a hybrid fitness and food pop-up. When management was asked, they said they had never even been in contact with the Taco Museum organizers.

Owner Trip Watson told local news that staff had to turn away 30-40 people at the door and ward off social media DMs all day. “It’s a scam,” Watson said bluntly. “A nationwide scam.”

The Taco Museum announced that the San Antonio date and venue would be moved to the Buckhorn Saloon & Museum on March 15, but the venue responded to a Facebook message from Jones confirming that it isn’t hosting any event and has never had contact with the organizers.
We attempted to contact The Taco Museum, but the organization’s website has been shut down, although a third-party ticket link remains online for new dates in Austin and San Antonio.

Some events for The Taco Museum have actually happened, though, including one in San Diego a few months back.

A user on Reddit took to r/tacos to document their experience. u/ThanksTedBell said that the “all you can eat” taco bar was really just two vendors serving basic street tacos in a parking lot, with a third supposedly not able to make it.

As for the “museum,” the user says it was “a bunch of faux neon signs clearly purchased from Etsy,” next to basic taco facts printed on foam core signs. The user had a VIP ticket as well and was promised a T-shirt and swag bag along with admission that never came.

As of today, there are no tickets on sale for a rescheduled Fort Worth date, and The Taco Museum’s last Instagram post was on October 25, 2024.

We have removed all mentions of the event in previously published Dallas Observer articles. We reached out to Taco Museum via their Instagram account. If we hear back, we'll update this article.