If you spend any time in the Howard County Eats and Hickory Ridge neighborhood Facebook group, you may already know the question. Where did the taco truck at the Hickory Ridge Village Center go?
For three years, EL SABOR CHAPIN sat in the corner of the Sunoco lot on Freetown Road, at the Hickory Ridge Village Center. Before that, it was at the Harper’s Choice Village Center. It’s a one-man operation. Wilde Lake resident Carlos Estevez takes the order, cooks the food, and then hands you a generous portion of what many considered the best tacos (or burritos, quesadillas, the occasional Shuco) in Howard County. If you knew, you knew.
And a lot of people knew.
The reviews read like testimonials. A near-perfect 4.9 google score with people raving about it being the “best food truck in Maryland”, “a hidden gem", and “I never thought anything could taste as good as their steak tacos until I tried their burritos”. The recurring theme was devotion — the sense that people had found something real, tucked next to a gas pump, and spreading the word to make sure it was getting enough business to stick around.
But then, in late March, it was gone.
No sign. No announcement. No goodbye post. One day, there were steak tacos, and the next day, there were none.
So the neighborhood did what neighborhoods do now. It went to Facebook and started guessing.
So where did it go?
This is the easy question. El Sabor Chapin is now on Route 1 in Elkridge. If you take Washington Boulevard north, past Blue Crabs Unlimited - my go-to crabfeast takeaway, the Elkridge library branch, and Cheesesteak & Co, you’ll find El Sabor Chapin in the parking lot of the Marathon gas station at 6315 Washington Blvd, where it has been since June.
I called Carlos to introduce myself and ask what happened, and to ask if he’d mind me writing about it. He was happy to tell me his story and thrilled for the coverage. I also drove out to see the truck for myself, talk in person, and because well, sometimes you just gotta eat steak tacos to make sure you get the story right. It’s part of the beat.
Here's what I learned. Carlos didn't want to leave Hickory Ridge, and he'd love to come back. He just needs permission. He didn't pick up and move to Elkridge because he found a better spot — he moved because he was asked to, and he did it immediately, no fuss, the moment he was asked. But he'd come back to Hickory Ridge tomorrow if he could.
Carlos Estevez lives in Wilde Lake. His kids go to school here. When you talk to him, the first thing that comes through is how much he means it when he talks about his food and his customers — this is a guy who built a following one order at a time, by hand, for three years, and he’s proud of it. The mural of his native Guatemala, painted in loving detail down the side of the truck, is evidence of that pride. El Sabor Chapin = The Guatemalan Flavor.
That’s the part that turns a “where did the taco truck go” question into an actual story. Because Carlos didn’t just decide to up and relocate, and the reasons he is now gone involve a gas station, a national real estate company, and a rumor that had been quietly poisoning the well before I ever started making calls.
Let’s clear it all up.
What actually happened
Here’s the chain of events, as best I can reconstruct it from talking to everyone involved.
For three years, Carlos operated out of the Sunoco lot. He wasn’t a tenant of the village center itself — his arrangement was with the gas station. And that, it turns out, is where the problem lived.
The Hickory Ridge Village Center is owned by Kimco Realty, the national real estate investment trust that owns and operates six of Columbia’s Village Centers as part of their national portfolio of hundreds of shopping centers. The Sunoco, like every other business in the center, leases its space from Kimco. And that lease — according to Kimco — doesn’t permit a food truck to operate on the property.
At some point this spring, that got noticed. Kimco flagged it to the Sunoco that they are not permitted under the terms of their lease to have a food truck on their site. The Sunoco, now on the wrong side of its own lease, had no choice but to ask Carlos to go.
I reached out to Kimco to confirm. Jennifer Maisch, the company’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, responded directly. Here’s what she said:
“The food truck had been operating in an area of the property covered by an existing tenant’s lease that doesn’t permit food truck use. Once that was identified, the operator was notified by the tenant that they couldn’t continue there.”
So that’s the mechanism. Carlos wasn’t evicted by Kimco — he was never Kimco’s tenant. He was asked to leave by the Sunoco, which was itself responding to Kimco.
I asked Maisch whether there was any path for the food truck to return, and we discussed two options: the Sunoco could revise its lease with Kimco to permit a food truck, or Carlos could lease a spot directly from Kimco. When I asked if she’d be willing to put that on the record, she added it to her statement:
“We’d be glad to work with the operator to explore whether there’s a spot at the center where a food truck would be permitted without conflicting with existing tenant leases.”
She also pointed me to Kimco’s Senior Director of Specialty Leasing, as the person Carlos would need to talk to. I’ll take that at face value. It’s a real offer, with a real name and a real phone number attached, which I’ve passed on to Carlos.
And for the record: I stopped into the Sunoco too. The employees were able to get me on the phone with the manager, who confirmed the story that Kimco told me, and when I asked the obvious question — if they could have Carlos back, would they want him? The answer was a resounding yes, with absolutely no hesitation.
Why now?
Which brings us to the part that doesn’t quite add up.
Carlos was at the Sunoco for three years. Three years. If his setup violated the terms of the Sunoco’s lease, that was just as true in 2023 as it was this spring. So why did it suddenly become a problem in March of 2026? That’s the question I don’t have a clear answer to.
The Hickory Ridge Village Center is on a roll, and I've been chronicling it. The fountain was repaired this spring. The Giant got renovated. The center has been leasing up after years of vacancies — Ranazul, Celia's, and ROCO provide a triple-punch of great new local independent restaurants to add to long-time favorites Meadows Frozen Custard, Koto Sake, and Grille Chick n Pollo. A macaron-and-cookie bakery called Savorists is aiming for a late-summer opening, and Strong Pilates is coming soon to the old Gritty Goblin Games storefront. The place is always buzzing — just last night, Kimco had a four-piece live band, a caricature artist, and a woman on stilts entertaining a good-sized crowd amid a lively outdoor dining scene. Back in April, I gave Kimco credit for exactly this — for leasing the place up, energizing it, and freshening it after a loooong tired stretch.
Which is what makes this one call so puzzling.
Here’s my read, and I’ll label it as exactly that — a read, not a fact. It’s entirely possible that somewhere in that repositioning, a food truck parked next to the gas pumps started to look like something that didn’t fit the new image. A loose end. Something to tidy up.
If that’s what happened, it’s a genuine misread of what that truck was. Because El Sabor Chapin wasn’t a loose end. It had become one of the many beloved things in the entire center that people went out of their way to discover — a destination people drove across county lines to find. You don’t tidy that away. You put it on the marquee.
The rumor, which as rumors tend to be, is FALSE
Now, about that rumor.
If you followed the Facebook threads, you saw it too. The theory went like this: ROCO Kitchen + Coffee, the new breakfast-and-lunch spot that opened in the village center this spring, had complained to Kimco about the competition and gotten the taco truck pushed out.
It’s easy to see why the theory caught on. ROCO opened in the same center, and just after it opened, Carlos disappeared. The timing lined up a little too neatly, and a story where the shiny new place elbows out the beloved taco truck is a story people are primed to believe.
There’s just one problem with it. It isn’t true. Not a single person I talked to said as such.
I called Brad Canfield, who owns ROCO with his wife, Samantha Rocco-Canfield. I asked him directly. His answer was unequivocal: it was definitely not us. ROCO had nothing to do with Carlos leaving, made no complaint, and — this is the part that should end the conversation — found out the truck was gone the same day everyone else did, by noticing it wasn’t there anymore.
And in fact, during the many months while ROCO was building out its space, Brad and Samantha were Carlos’s regulars. They’d order from the truck two or three times a week. He wasn’t scheming to get rid of El Sabor Chapin. He was a customer. He’d love to see Carlos come back — and he made a point of telling me that a concentration and variety of restaurants, including food trucks, at the Hickory Ridge Village Center is exactly what turns it into a food destination, which helps everybody.
So let me say this plainly, because rumors don’t correct themselves: ROCO did not push out the taco truck. If you’ve been avoiding the place on that basis, you’ve been punishing the wrong people.
While we’re here: ROCO is good, and you should go
And you’d be punishing a genuinely great addition to the neighborhood. ROCO isn’t a corporate franchise that parachuted in. It’s a husband-and-wife operation doing something distinct: scratch-made breakfast, buttery waffles, handmade buttermilk-glazed doughnuts, breakfast tacos, and a lunch menu of sandwiches and salads worth the trip. It’s not fast-food chicken or corporate coffee. It’s the kind of unique, independent restaurant everybody claims they want. It’s the perfect neighborhood spot to meet a friend over coffee or lunch, and if you’d rather not dine in, they’ve built a frictionless setup that’s hard not to appreciate: submit a mobile-order ahead on their app (iPhone and Android), then swing through the drive-thru and grab it through the window without leaving your car.
And Celia’s and Ranazul, too
I also talked to Ed Reynoso, the chef and owner of Celia’s Cuban Cuisine, another one of the village center’s new independent operators. He told me essentially the same thing everyone else did: he liked the truck, he’d be glad to see Carlos come back, and a food truck in the lot was never a threat. Both Ed and Brad independently made the same point — that the new restaurateurs in the village center look out for each other and see a mutual benefit in each other’s success, and that included El Sabor Chapin. Celia’s is worth your time in its own right: real Cuban cooking from an owner who’s in the kitchen, and a lively outdoor terrace pumping salsa beats — exactly the kind of independent, chef-driven spot that gives a village center a real community feel.
And while I didn't get a chance to speak with Ranazul, which has been open now for over two years, the tapas and wine bar has great specials, regular prix-fixe theme dinners, and a celebrated bartender also named Jeremy — making it a great spot for a date night, and clearly not the source of any sudden complaint about a food truck that operated on the other side of the center the entire time it’s been open.
Notice the pattern. The gas station wants Carlos back. The coffee shop wants Carlos back. The Cuban restaurant wants Carlos back. Every single business I talked to — including the ones supposedly threatened by him — wants the taco truck back. So if a complaint to Kimco did in fact prompt the lease enforcement, it didn't come from any of the businesses I talked to. And it seems Kimco is willing to have him back too — provided the paperwork gets sorted.
Why this matters more than one taco truck
I want to zoom out, because there is more to this story than just one taco truck, even if El Sabor Chapin is reason enough.
Food trucks are incubators. They are one of the only low-overhead ways a talented cook can go into business for themselves without a quarter-million dollars in build-out and a decade of debt. A truck lets a chef test a menu, build a following, sharpen the operation, and prove there’s demand — all before signing a lease that could sink them.
That’s the pipeline. It’s how a community grows its own chefs instead of importing another franchise. Every El Sabor Chapin that finds a home and a following is a future restaurant that might not exist otherwise — an independent, owner-operated place with actual roots here, run by someone whose kids go to the local schools. That is worth something. It’s worth more, frankly, than another national chain with a corporate playbook, private-equity money, and a logo focus-grouped in another state.
But the pipeline only works if trucks have somewhere to be. And that’s where a lot of well-meaning places quietly fail their food trucks.
A truck needs a few basic things. It needs a place to park — ideally a fixed, reliable spot where regulars know where to find it day after day. That's exactly what Carlos had in Hickory Ridge, and exactly what he lost in the move to Elkridge, where he now has to rebuild a customer base from scratch. It needs somewhere to park overnight. And it needs access to electricity, so the operator isn't burning money and diesel running a generator just to keep the lights on. None of this is exotic. A shopping center with acres of parking and a fully wired electrical grid has every one of these things sitting unused.
A food truck is just one model; a small food hall is another. Think Common Kitchen at Clarksville Commons — a cluster of small stalls with a variety of options sharing a common dining space, each one drawing customers the others get to borrow. It's the same incubator logic, under one roof: a legitimate, low-risk runway for emerging local businesses. An incubator food hall is even planned as part of The Source, if that project ever actually gets built. And the incubator model works. Look no further than Howard County's own Blowfish Poke, which started as a stall in Clarksville Commons and now has four brick-and-mortar locations in the region, and is now franchising more. Feel free to fill in the comments with other examples.
Here’s the part that Brad Canfield put better than I could, and Ed Reynoso agreed with completely: a food destination is good for everybody.
When a place becomes somewhere people seek out for the food — not one restaurant, but a cluster of them — every operator benefits. Someone drives in for ROCO’s doughnuts, notices the taco truck, and comes back next week for that. Someone comes for happy hour at Celia’s, sees Ranazul, and files it away for date night. The tide lifts every boat in the lot. A village center that becomes known as a place you go to eat is worth more to every tenant — and every landlord — than the sum of its individual leases. A top-rated food truck run with devotion from a Columbia local. 100% fits.
That’s the vision. Hickory Ridge is closer to it than it’s been in years. Losing the taco truck moved it in the wrong direction.
IN CONCLUSION, BRING TACOS BACK
So, how do we solve it? How do we get our taco truck back?
Everyone in this story wants the same thing. Carlos wants to come back to Columbia. The Sunoco wants him back. ROCO wants him back. Celia’s wants him back. The neighborhood has been asking where he went for months. And Kimco — the one party with the actual power to make it happen — has said, on the record, that they’re willing to find him a spot.
So this shouldn’t be hard.
If the Sunoco lot can't work (and I’m still somewhat baffled that they can’t just easily revise the lease!), there's an obvious alternative sitting right there. The old drive-through ATM spot in the center has been vacant for as long as anyone can remember — a little island of asphalt doing nothing for nobody. Put a beloved taco truck on it and it becomes a destination. Carlos wouldn't need to go through the gas station at all; he could lease it directly from Kimco. So, hi Kimco! Here's a chance at a real community win: lease an otherwise unused patch of pavement and an electrical outlet to a beloved taco truck.
The mechanism exists. The demand exists. The willingness — from Carlos, from the tenants, from the landlord — exists. What’s missing is an agreement that turns “we’d be glad to explore it” into a truck back in the lot — permanently, and with an actual contract that permits it to be there.
In the meantime, El Sabor Chapin is on Route 1 in Elkridge, in the Marathon lot at 6315 Washington Blvd, Monday through Saturday, 10 AM to 8 PM. The steak tacos are worth the drive. And sorry, Elkridge — Columbia privilege means we’d like our taco truck back.
About The Merriweather Post
I’m Jeremy Dommu — a Columbia resident who writes about development, land use, and the entities operating in Howard County as an independent hobby. I have a real job and a family. This is what I do in my spare time.
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Thank you for this! Real local journalism - exactly what we need!!
Thank you!! I just emailed two people from Kimco to encourage them to reach out to him. I think it would go a long way with the community. https://www.kimcorealty.com/properties/contacts/12488/list