La Tejana co-owner Ana-Maria Jaramillo wants patrons to show her videos of their cats. She wants to know how all their pets are doing, fish included. Jaramillo and her partner in business and in life, Gus May, are not just selling Tex-Mex breakfast tacos from their new restaurant in Mount Pleasant, but hoping to create a sense of community once they open Saturday.

After all, the couple lives in Mount Pleasant and the tacos are something special — they’re based on ones Jaramillo grew up eating in her home state of Texas. Those tacos have also already built a loyal following: Jaramillo and May have been selling them at pop-ups since late 2019, including Room 11, 3 Stars Brewing, and even from their own stoop, and then, during the pandemic, at Nido Wine Shop + Market.

At La Tejana’s last pop-up, in late February, they sold 750 tacos within two hours. On opening day, they expect to make over 1,200.

“We would love to give people a feeling of nostalgia,” says Jaramillo. “There were a lot of folks that ate our tacos during the height of the pandemic. I’m talking July 2020. No vaccine. … People could not go home to eat their abuelita’s or their mom’s or their tia’s food. And they would try our tacos and say, ‘This is exactly what I grew up eating. This is an emotional experience for me.‘”

The brick-and-mortar will have the same tacos their fans devoured at the pop-ups, plus drip coffee and cold brew sourced by Lost Sock Roasters as well as Topo Chico and Mexican Coke. Over time, the owners will add to the menu, including with baked goods like conchas. They have bigger hopes for the fall: a liquor license (so they could sell margaritas and micheladas), a dinner menu (featuring quesadillas, nachos, and cheesy gordita crunches), and indoor dining upstairs to contrast the counter service below at the coffeeshop/taqueria. (At first, there will just be limited outdoor seating and a counter inside for people to stand at and eat their tacos on site.)

“We’re going to start off with what we know how to do. Then it’s only gonna get better,” says May. “Don’t come the first weekend asking for the conchas and nachos and everything else but trust, we’ll getchu. … We want to make sure that we can do the volume that we need to be able to do to sustain the brick-and-mortar. People’s livelihoods are on the line.”

La Tejana will offer five different breakfast tacos to start, including their best-seller “The 956.” Named after Jaramillo’s hometown area code of McAllen, Texas, it features a house-made flour tortilla, cilantro, bacon, fried potatoes, refried beans, scrambled eggs, and queso drizzle. They offer a vegetarian option too: “Super Migas,” which is made with the house-made flour tortilla, cilantro, diced poblano, onion, scrambled eggs, tomato, queso drizzle, and crunchy tortilla strips. Salsas that are automatically on the side include cilantro crema and charred tomato, but patrons can request a new addition, spicy habanero.

Those flour tortillas are the thing that started it all: The couple perfected them in their apartment roughly four years ago and eventually started selling them by the dozen for $7 to Instagram followers.

The next challenge? Adding corn tortillas to the menu, which is a “priority,” says Jaramillo. They are currently weighing whether to make them in-house or buy them from a vendor who’s perfected the recipe. The corn tortilla, May says, “is such a labor of love that requires a lot. Not only time, but space, and we have very limited space.”

May is La Tejana’s chef — interestingly, his first gig in the back of the house after working front-of-house at Ellē and in the catering business — but relies on Jaramillo for her palate. “She knows what’s legit,” May says. The couple first talked about starting a business when Jaramillo introduced May to breakfast tacos when he visited her in Austin in 2017.

Jaramillo, who’s first generation Colombian, has lived all over Texas, from Dallas to the border town of McAllen. La Tejana is an homage to her home state, evident in the name and décor, including the candle with the likeness of San Antonio Spurs President Gregg Popovich, a sign depicting Selena’s signature, and mural inspired by the song “Texas Sun” by Khruangbin and Leon Bridges and created by the couple’s friend, artist Nate Mann.

May’s background is also reflected at the store. The wood shelves and counter are made from wood salvaged from a red oak at his family’s home in Takoma Park. (A business on the block, Suns Cinema, also used some of that wood to make their new bar.) The furniture made from the May family red oak is almost as old as La Tejana’s building, which May says was constructed at the turn of the century.

The couple hopes that their business has a long, good run too, though they are realistic about the challenges of the restaurant business. The price of eggs doubled since their last pop-up, for example, and some of the businesses that hosted their pop-ups have since closed.

“It’s by far the most ambitious and scariest thing we’ve ever done,” says May. “It’s still objectively like a very scary time to open up a restaurant, but we feel that we popped up for long enough to build enough of a client base of supporters to kind of help propel us forward.”

The couple believes they’ll find success in Mount Pleasant, where their pop-up business had been the most popular and where they have a support system — be they loyal customers or nearby businesses like Ellē or a street vendor that sells tamales. They are also situated in a neighborhood known for Latinx food, be it pupusas from Ercilia’s Restaurant, enchiladas at Don Juan Restaurant, or, yes, tacos at neighboring Taqueria Nacional, which slings Mexican street-style tacos.

But May and Jaramillo think there’s enough taco love to go around.

“White people can mistake different styles of Latino food or Hispanic food as being the same thing. And people might think, ‘Oh, La Tejana opening up. Aren’t there are a million taco shops on Mount Pleasant?’ Actually, no. Mt. Pleasant is a Latino neighborhood that is largely Salvadoran,” May says.

“Latinos are not just one thing and we don’t eat just one thing,” adds Jaramillo. “Tacos are extremely diverse. … It’s great that in Mount Pleasant, you can have two taquerias next to each other and walk out of there with completely different fillings, different tortillas, even different experiences and menus.”

La Tejana is located at 3211 Mt Pleasant St. NW Washington, D.C. 20010. It opens Wednesday to Sunday from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.