The Most Beautiful Library in Texas Used to Be a Walmart

Our daily roundup of Texas headlines.

By Becky FogelAugust 3, 2016 12:35 pm

The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.

According to Tech Insider, the McAllen Public Library is the most beautiful in the state of Texas. It’s not the first award the library has won either – it won the AIA Institute Honor Award for Interior Architecture in 2013.

“The beautified building used to be an abandoned Walmart,” said McAllen Mayor Jim Darling, as he described the entrance to Rio Grande Valley Public Radio. 

Then: When Austinite Liz Solomon moved to New York City she discovered a terrifying reality – it’s incredibly hard to get a breakfast taco in the city that seemingly wants for nothing.

“There is no option in between a bagel and the kind of catered breakfast scenario,” she says. “And breakfast tacos are delicious, and why are they not here, and why are they not nailing them?” 

Solomon decided to do something about that– she opened King David Tacos to bring the breakfast goodness to the masses. 

“My dad, 10 years ago when he was here, was like, ‘You should open up a cart in Time Square and sell breakfast tacos – you would kill,’ but at the time there weren’t trucks – this was before the truck revolution,” she says. 

Solomon didn’t go the truck route, and instead opened her own catering company to start off. One of the biggest issues was finding the right tortilla. No one she talked to in New York was willing to make a flour tortilla: it was corn or bust. Naturally, she turned to Texas.

“I need this high-performance tortilla that you can find down in Texas, so I reached out to who I knew did the tortillas for my favorite breakfast tacos in Austin…and they were like, ‘We don’t have a distribution line up to New York’…and that’s what we started doing.” 

But when word of Solomon’s breakfast tacos traveled back to Texas this week, there was some heartburn over their big city prices. San Antonians, like MySA’s Madalyn Mendoza, was amused at the thought of New Yorkers shelling out $4 for a taco.

“Here in San Antonio you can get 2-for-1 if you don’t mix and match and you can get delicious tacos here in San Antonio,” Mendoza says. “But it was just a funny story to talk about to show how much tacos are loved.” 

Solomon agrees that when it comes to breakfast tacos, all sizes and fillings are welcome.

“This is like the tip of the breakfast taco iceberg,” she says. “There are so many ways to do it.” 

Also: The TEXXXAS adult expo has finally found a place to playThe adult entertainment convention will take place at a strip club in northwest Houston. Since organizers announced the expo earlier this summer, they struggled to nail a venue.  The expo was bounced from two hotels in Houston: the Hilton and the Holiday Inn.

Organizer John Gray told the Chronicle, “The expo will be a lot tamer than an episode of ‘Game of Thrones,’ I can assure you.”