RESTAURANT NEWS | DALLAS
At Olōyō,
the Corn
Comes First
Chef Olivia López goes from selling sidewalk tacos to a Dallas restaurant of her own.
By Rebecca Thompson
9:17 a.m. CT, Aug. 23, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs, from newspaper writer to middle-school teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed the Michelin-starred to gas station BBQ.
One day, after a particularly tough day at work, Olivia López went online and bought a corn mill.
It was a consequential bit of impulse shopping. The mill became the machinery behind Molino Olōyō, the pop-up López started with partner Jonathan Percival in 2021, selling breakfast tacos from a Dallas sidewalk. Now López and Percival have given the pop-up a permanent home: Olōyō, their 23-seat restaurant in East Dallas.
The purchase ran counter to nearly all the advice she had received. “Everyone told me no, not to do this,” López told D Magazine. “No one is going to pay for seasonal Mexican food or heirloom corn.”
López had been thinking about corn for years. She arrived in Dallas for culinary school in 2009 and worked in kitchens including Knife, Smoke, Mirador, and Billy Can Can. During a return home to Colima in western Mexico, she told her mother she wanted to cook Mexican food and build something around corn. Her mother kept asking whether she had ordered the mill yet.
López
Once it arrived, López and Percival started wherever they could. They delivered food to porches, sold tortillas and meat by the pound, cooked private dinners, and served breakfast tacos from the sidewalk outside Wayward Coffee. López ground heirloom Mexican corn and pressed the masa using a mesquite-wood tortilla press she brought from Mexico. By the time Olōyō opened in May, the pair estimated they had made about 50,000 tortillas.
The new restaurant takes its name from the Nahuatl word for corncob. López has given masa its own section on the menu, treating it much like an Italian restaurant would pasta. A tostada raspada, scraped to create a craggy surface, holds creamy requesón, grapefruit-jalapeño jam, and cherry tomatoes. Tamales come with pipián verde, while a huarache carries lamb barbacoa from Central Texas.
Colima works its way through dinner. López uses Cónico corn, coffee beans grown in the state, and salt collected from the Cuyutlán lagoon. Vermilion snapper is cooked zarandeado and served with buttered rice. Seasonal fruit joins bluefin tuna from Ensenada in an aguachile sharpened with house-made vinegars.
The menu changes as ingredients disappear. Strawberries from a farm in Poteet lasted through opening week. Then came blackberries, blueberries, and cantaloupe.
When Olōyō opened, it had no sign, leaving diners to look for a century-old building beside a Domino’s on Gaston Avenue. Inside, Mexican art and Oaxacan glassware surround an open kitchen where López stands beside the mill she finally ordered.
The restaurant may have taken 17 years to open, but its defining moment required only a few minutes and an internet connection. López bought the mill. Eventually, she built everything else around it.
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By MARIA RODRIGUEZ