Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz · Guy Raz | Luminary

The Way Up, Episode 6 - Nixta Taqueria

August 13, 2025·23 min·1 clip

Chef Edgar Rico pulls back a corn stalk in Mexico and sees purple corn for the first time, changing his career forever.

1. Wisdom From The Top host Guy Raz interviews Chef Edgar Rico and co-founder Sarah Martin-Biggy of Nixta Taqueria, an award-winning East Austin taco restaurant built around ancestral nixtamalized corn tortilla techniques. 2. Edgar is the culinary lead, a chef who has been cooking since age 10; Sarah describes herself as an 'expert generalist' who brings a background spanning finance, event management, South by Southwest production, and HR to the operations side. 3. The episode traces how a planned short family trip Edgar took to San Luis Potosi, Mexico in 2016 turned into a six-month journey that became the founding vision for the restaurant. 4. A visit to a corn research site with his uncle led Edgar to see purple, black, red, and cross-pollinated corn varieties for the first time, and a subsequent meal featuring hand-made tortillas from those corns produced what he describes as a definitive moment: 'this is now what I want to focus my attention on.' 5. Edgar then did a stage at Pujol, one of Mexico's most renowned restaurants, to deepen his understanding of nixtamalization — the process of alkalinizing corn to make masa — before returning to Austin. 6. Edgar and Sarah met on Edgar's first day and Sarah's last day at a catering job, with Sarah later sliding into his DMs from a nine-hour drive to Arkansas, landing jokes, and getting the date — beginning both a romantic and business partnership. 7. Their combined backgrounds created a strong operational division: Edgar handled the menu and kitchen, while Sarah brought event management and financial experience to the business side. 8. Nixta opened with no outside investors; without a business credit history, banks turned them away, so they used personal loans, found a nearly turnkey former-restaurant space, and relied on handy friends for construction, targeting a launch budget of $50,000-$75,000. 9. The restaurant opened in October 2019 in a 600-square-foot space in East Austin; a customer arrived three hours early to sit in a lawn chair, and by opening time the line had wrapped around the corner. 10. A Texas Monthly review by Pat Sharp praised Nixta as serving some of the best tacos in Austin, accelerating early momentum. 11. COVID interrupted the early success; the founders pivoted to a smash-burger drive-through format, with Edgar describing a car line a mile long down the street during one early pandemic day. 12. During the 2021 Texas winter ice storm, when the restaurant lost power, Edgar and Sarah made and distributed free food to community members who needed it — a decision that would later define how the community responded when Nixta itself needed help. 13. In 2023, a summer power shutoff that the team initially expected to last one or two days extended to seven months when the building was found to need full electrical, structural, and plumbing upgrades to meet code. 14. Sarah describes the realization as 'a death sentence for our restaurant,' but they launched a crowdfunding campaign targeting $50,000 and raised $120,000 in two days, with Sarah saying 'I bawled my eyes out.' 15. A community member's post on the crowdfunding page read: 'y'all fed us when we were frozen, figured out how to make curbside happen when people were sick, you feed the community with the fridge and pantry — it's the least we could do.' 16. The episode discusses how the restaurant uses Square for point-of-sale and mobile payment, with Edgar citing Square's handheld device as a game changer for table service and noting he once used only his phone to take payments at a pop-up in Marfa. 17. The hosts distinguish between two modes of growth: preservation of the core nixtamalization identity versus evolution through new pop-up formats and concepts. 18. The episode is warm and conversational, with Guy Raz asking open-ended questions and Edgar and Sarah frequently speaking over each other with complementary stories — the format feels like a joint job interview and a celebration simultaneously. 19. Aspiring food entrepreneurs, people interested in community-funded business recovery stories, and listeners curious about Mexican culinary traditions and nixtamalization will find this episode most rewarding. 20. Listeners expecting a fast-paced business tactics episode or detailed financial breakdowns will likely find the narrative arc and personal storytelling format too anecdote-heavy.

As heard by us

A taco story about risk, momentum, and the grind behind early attention.

Edgar Rico and Sarah Martin-Biggy anchor a story that moves from a six-month family trip to a risky East Austin opening, with Mixta Taqueria taking shape through inheritance and surprise.

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Why you'd press play

Listen if you want a taco-shop origin story that starts with a six-month family trip to Mexico.

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