YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Rypka

lines on the record: 83
first: 2025-07-28
most recent: 2025-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, it got the fuck. What did you do? I did not want to get in a fight with him. And so I had to kind of like close up shop that day. And we ended up for a week literally cooking out of Bill's driveway. We took the trailer and we hooked up the power to the trailer at his house, which was totally illegal at the time. You know, we were trying to stay in business and, you know, keep some cash coming.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we talk about South first because that was really kind of where we found our home. So before that, we were on a little spot on Fifth Street. And the landlord there, he never gave us a contract for what he wanted for rent. Like we'd kept coming to him and asking him, hey, we need to figure something out. We don't want to stay here for free. We got to pay you something. Help us out, and he gave us some crazy like $10,000 or $15,000 bill that we had no clue that was even coming. And he's like, well, you got two days to pay it or you're out of here. Wow.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I remember my friends going, what the hell are you doing opening a food truck? How is that even going to work? You know, Don't know why, I just, and I guess I think when you know folks that are entrepreneurs or that have passion about a business, like you just won't hear no. And I can remember people sort of challenging me and I just like, look, this is what I can afford. And this is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to figure it out.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, see, you definitely need a permit. They did have mobile vending permits back then, and we needed to have a commissary kitchen, so we figured that out. And I got a buddy who I knew owned a restaurant to help us use their kitchen to start. So yeah, we opened on South First, just south of downtown. undeveloped lot. There was a guy that was selling snow cones there before that went out of business, who I had asked originally and he didn't want to share the spot with me. And then I came back a month later and the poor guy was packing his stuff up and he gave me the landlord's number and I called him. And came to find out that whole spot was in a floodplain. So you can't build on it. And so having a food truck there is actually like the perfect use. For it.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he was a co owner. So I ended up taking a loan on my house and using that to help kind of get the trailer painted and get our logo on there and buy some of the equipment. And then he used some of his money to kind of help set up our first spot and do some of the landscaping and things like that.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and it wasn't, and that was the other thing, like I never wanted a place that had my name on it because I always felt like the place needed to be bigger than me.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Memory until literally that night or that morning when he came and he said, I've got the name and when he said it we both looked at each other and like that's it. That's the name. That should be Torchies. Torchies just felt like very right, very inspired and like, no, this is it”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that actually came from Bill. We were struggling with the name and he woke up one morning, called me super excited. He's like, dude, I got the name. Like, we got to meet. Let's go get coffee. And he had remembered something that happened in the 90s where he probably had a little too much to drink one night and was at a late night taco place that was here in Austin called Rosie's El Pastor. They were famous for their El Pastor tacos. And he sort of had this vision of this old airstream trailer with neon torchies with flames coming out of the Y. And he hadn't remembered that.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's nothing wrong with that. That's awesome. And I think, you know, that was like the opposite of what I wanted to do. I wanted to take tacos and put fried chicken in them and fried shrimp and blackened salmon and brisket and, you know, all these different flavors that like, let's go have some fun. And that's sort of the idea behind Torchies and where it was born is just these gourmet street tacos.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, like these are history old recipes that these folks have been doing that have been handed down by grandma and cousins and aunts and everyone else's not try and compete with them. Let's go do our own thing like take this vessel called the tortilla and let's go have fun with it”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to do a breakfast concept, and they all pretty much laughed at me, you know, wrote big business plans. And yeah, I didn't have any money. I didn't know people with money. And that's really kind of almost how you have to start a restaurant. You know, a bank's not going to just take a bet on you and give you 600 grand to go open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. And so he had this trailer and he's like, hey, what do you think about opening a taco stand? I thought he was nuts at first because, you know, there's tacos on every corner just about in Austin. And so I sort of did this taco tour all around Texas and around the border towns. And what I realized was like, man, there's some great tacos, but they're all kind of the same. They're all these sort of street style tacos, all great, but they're very similar. And I was like, well, I don't want to go replicate that.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a kitchen the whole nine yards. And so, you know, he couldn't sell it. And at that point, there wasn't really a food truck slash food trailer culture that you see nowadays in different cities. And definitely not in Austin. And I had, you know, had gone to some banks before that for.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was like a food trailer, you know, kind of what you see at like, you know, carnivals or now what you see out there, you know, out in.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“12 different cafes and different buildings. And we also had a huge catering department that did tons of catering. So it was a big, big job and a lot of responsibility. I mean, I was in charge of about, you know, 10 to $15 million a year in food business. So a lot, especially at 25 years old. And then after I'd been there about two, two, two, two, two, two, two and a half years, they really started making a lot of changes and taking a lot of the liberties away and they really wanted things to be a lot more sort of the same across the board. And that's where sort of the taste of, hey, why did I get in this business in the first place? It's because I love food. I love being creative. And so that's when I started getting back to thinking about maybe different restaurant concepts or something that I could do that could be really fun.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, you got to remember late 90s, early 2000s, Dell was, you know, rocking and rolling. I ran all the food service over both campuses and there was about...”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was a super challenging time. You know, I'd only been in Houston like four months at that point. I'd moved everything and moved to Texas. And, you know, I'm watching this company just crumble by the day, basically. They had their stock ticker on the escalator to the elevators. And every day the...”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rolling and dough, the stock price was through the roof, jobs getting created left and right. And I got hired to open this new state-of-the-art cafe that was going to have a full bake shop, homemade pasta, sushi station, cook to order food in front of everybody. And so they were kind of using my expertise and skills from what I had already gained in all the different places I'd worked to be able to kind of create this very innovative fun menu to life in Houston, Texas for their folks. And so I got there. I started hiring people. And then I guess it was about a month and a half, two months after that. That's when all the news broke about Enron.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, not in those first three, four months for sure. I can remember them, you know, setting up things to like for stuff to fall and, you know, making messes and just sabotage. Yeah, it did sabotage me. And so I learned, I was like, okay, this is hard. I need to figure this out. And so the one advice I got was like really work beside your folks. And so I'd go in, I'd be there earlier than everyone, and I'd leave later than everyone. So I had that going for me. And I would come in and I would set people's stations up for them so that when they got to work, like their cutting board was there, their knives were there, their aprons were there, their towels were there. And over time, this built this real sort of confidence like, hey, Mike's really got our back. And he actually does what he says he's going to do. And if I'm in the weeds, like he jumps in and really helps us. And so I started to really gain their respect. And then we really...”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I showed up every day in a suit and a tie and kind of learning the ropes. And we fed three to four thousand people a day from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. So that's a lot of bodies moving through in that time frame. It was a huge cafe set up kind of like a food court. There was about 12 or 13 stations and each station represented a different area of the world. I mean, anything you can think of, we had it on our menu. And two months into me being there, the chef left and they came to Littlewell Me at 22 and said, hey, do you want to be the executive chef here? And I choked a little bit. And I said, hell yeah, I'll do it. And it was not easy in the beginning. I mean, I literally would get. Laughed at when I'd walk in the kitchen just because, you know, they're like, who's this young kid? What the hell does he know?”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started as an assistant manager and my mom's now ex-boyfriend at the time helped me get the job. He got me an introduction to someone at Marriott who ran all the food service there. So I got hired.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was rough. Actually, while I was still in school when I worked at Mark's Place, it was before I graduated. Super rough. I can remember dodging many a saute pans flying at my head. And hot spatulas of pasta water getting thrown at you too. Yeah, it was rough. Lots of yelling, lots of screaming. There was a lot of, you know, getting your ass handed to you, if you will, in the kitchen. And just super intense, but it was a great learning experience. Our menu changed every single day. And we were using ingredients from all over Latin America and the world. And I can just, you know, remember like, holy cow, like, I didn't know you could do this stuff with truffles or salsafi root or real hearts of palm or just different things we did. So it was pretty, pretty impressive menu we had there.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not horribly, I didn't know sort of exactly what direction I was going to take, but I knew I wanted to be in kitchens. I loved cooking. I loved being a chef. And I also knew that like... At some point, I'd love to start my own thing. And I knew even at that age, like I never wanted to do something that was like super fine dining. I wanted to do something that was more kind of for the masses affordable, you know, sort of street food type something. So I had that early on inkling that, you know, at some point.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I almost went to, well, I did. I went to a community college to start to become a counselor. And I thought maybe I'll be a substance abuse counselor because I love helping people But two months into my semester, I literally woke up in the middle of the night and I was like, I had this thought of like, what the hell are you doing? Like, you need to be a chef. You need to be in restaurants. Don't worry about it. You're going to be fine. So I trusted that and I woke up that morning and ran downstairs and I was all excited and told my mother and I said, I'm dropping out of school. And she said, the hell you're not. She made me finish my semester, but we went toward a bunch of culinary schools that next couple months, and I ended up at Johnson and Wales down in Miami.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a mentor. His name was Brian. He was the executive chef there. He kind of took me under his wing. But I don't know. I just fell in love with it. And, you know, I almost got fired because of my knife scales were just horrible. And I was kind of just anxious in the kitchen. So I was always dropping stuff and kind of not getting it together. And he finally had one last stern talk with me and I turned it around. And he started really working with me and showing me things. And I can remember him giving me a lot of advice around just, hey, if you want to do a career in this, like, you know, your first five, ten years, like don't stay anywhere more than two years. Like, learn as much as you can, like get your butt out there working everywhere you can. And, you know, learn, learn, learn. And so it was really, really helpful.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, you don't have time to think, and you're just on to the next thing, on to the next thing. And there's a rush from it. There's nothing better when you're a chef or a cook of going through a really hard Saturday or Sunday and getting your butt kicked and like actually succeeding on the other side of it.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit of both. I loved working in restaurants. What I loved about it was I didn't have to think. And anyone who struggles with alcohol and drugs like thinking's kind of your worst enemy.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, drugs and car theft and things like that. And so I don't know. Something changed and I started showing up and doing all this stuff that they were telling me to. And not because I felt I had to, because I wanted to. And within that two weeks, I said, hey, let's give this guy a second chance. I think he really wants it now. And so I got to stay at the treatment center and steadily go to jail.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I struggled some in the beginning. I'd run away from there twice, and I'd use quite a few times when I was in there. Something just changed and, you know, I found some help and decided to actually start listening to what they were saying. And really, kind of realized like, oh crap, I really do have a problem with this stuff. Like, I can't control it. My mother was coming down in the next two weeks with the sheriff to basically go take me to jail because she wasn't going to allow me to go back on the streets. And I had a bunch of charges that were still holding over my head.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was in 10th grade. I was 15. I think I had LSD, PCP, crack cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol in my system. So my mom obviously freaked out. And then they obviously knew I needed more help, and that's how I ended up in Louisiana. So I went to a place called Opportunities down there.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I still don't know today how I was able to catch him being under eighteen, but somehow I did, and I would go to this bank. And I think I went through $40,000 worth of savings bonds and, you know, probably six months and crack and drugs and everything else.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you're a kid and you're in a lot of pain, like anything that's going to help soothe that, you're going to go after more.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to feel better, you know, and I didn't really have an outlet or someone to go to to help me feel better. And so I saw people drinking and doing other things and smiles on their face. And I want some of that, you know. I can remember even at the age of five being at a party and there was a keg off to the side and I grabbed some friends and we went and ran over and stuck our head under the keg and drank from it. I used to sneak drinks from my parents' glasses of wine and beer when they'd go wash the dishes. I didn't love the taste of alcohol. I think most people don't, especially when you're young. But I think the thing I loved was that feeling of when the buzz was coming on. And that was sort of just this feeling of calmness. Hey, everything's going to be okay.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were on a little spot on Fifth Street, and the landlord there, he never gave us a contract for what he wanted for rent like we'd kept coming to him and asking him, like, hey, we need to figure something out. We don't want to stay here for free. We got to pay you something, like, help us out. And he gave us some crazy $10,000 or $15,000 bill that we had no clue that was even coming. And he's like, well, you got two days to pay it or you're out of here. Wow.”
2025-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Torchy's Tacos: Mike Rypka · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT