Broke Boy Taco sets up second store in Auckland: ‘Wouldn’t be where I am today without New Zealand’

Broke Boy Taco is the brainchild of Kentucky-born Sean Yarbrough.

• Popular birria taco eatery Broke Boy Taco is the brainchild of Kentucky-born Sean Yarbrough, who has lived in New Zealand since 2021.
• Its Auckland Mt Albert store often has long queues spilling out the door.
• A second store is to open in the North Shore around ‘late March or early April’.

Sean Yarbrough was 35 when he bought his first car. It was a 2000 BMW he got for $6000 - cash he saved up from cooking tacos on the road after leaving the United States, where he experienced a brief period of homelessness.

That was three years ago.

Since then, Yarbrough has launched wildly popular pop-up eateries in Auckland selling birria tacos, and established his own restaurant, Broke Boy Taco.

He has also cultivated a devoted following as a culinary sensation - ultimately catching the eye of one of the country’s (and the world’s) biggest sports stars, Israel Adesanya, who recently invested in the Mt Albert branch.

Broke Boy Taco is now expanding in Auckland with a second store set to open in North Shore’s Birkenhead. And Yarbrough is being recognised by strangers on the street.

If the moment had to be a song, Drake’s Started From The Bottom would make a good fit.

Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, the 38-year-old moved to Auckland in 2021 with his fiancee, Amy, an Auckland native, and his partner of nine years. According to Instagram, the pair met in California.

Sean with his fiancee Amy.

It was there, in San Francisco, where he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction - before getting sober more than three years ago.

In a previous interview with George FM, Yarbrough explained that he started his new life in Auckland flipping burgers at a Mount Eden burger joint - complaining to his then-boss that he couldn’t find a decent taco in the city.

Said boss suggested Yarbrough establish his own pop-up taqueria in the burger bar, which quickly became a success.

And just like that, the origins of Broke Boy began.

Reflecting on where he is now, nobody is more surprised than Yarbrough. “And I still kind of find myself pinching myself sometimes,” he told the Herald.

According to the chef, he’s a “pretty normal dude” who just happens to make tacos people enjoy eating.

“And that’s really the only difference.”

The restaurant initially teased the launch of the new shop on its social media account @brokeboytaco, which boasts more than 72,000 followers on Instagram alone. On February 14 it posted a photo of its shop doors with an “opening soon” sign. The caption read: “Guess where?”.

Two-time UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya has bought into the Broke Boy Taco eatery in Mt Albert.

But fans quickly figured it out. “RIP to that coffee shop but this is birria good news,” one user posted to the public Birkenhead and Northcote Community Facebook group, referring to the Coffee Time cafe previously on 32 Birkenhead Avenue.

Nearly 1000 people reacted to the post, with more than a hundred expressing excitement in the comments. One remarked how the taco joint “slaps big time”.

Yarbrough confirmed it in a reply: “Hello you guys! This is Sean and I am super excited about coming to Birkenhead! LETS GOOOOOO”.

While the exact opening date hasn’t been decided yet, Yarbrough can tell us it will be “late March or early April”.

Of all places, why Birkenhead? Same reason as Mt Albert - it fits the Broke Boy vibe. Over the past six months, Yarbrough said he’s been scouting locations for the new Auckland restaurant around places like the North Shore, Takanini, Botany and Manukau city. Takapuna was looked at - but it was “too polished”.

“The reason why I went to Mt Albert is because it’s quite neighbourhoody ... it just seems like a realistic place like where people live and it’s good to just support local.

How it started in Auckland.

“Birkenhead really, kind of fulfilled that, that same type of feeling that we had with Mt Albert.

“We were really excited about Birkenhead.”

An expansion would have seemed obvious to many Broke Boy Taco customers. The Mt Albert store and pop-up locations of the restaurant’s food truck often draw in long queues.

But what makes Kiwis so crazy about Broke Boy Taco? Is it the taste, the allure of Yarbrough himself - or something more?

Yarbrough has a few theories.

“My social media presence is one thing,” he said. Yarbrough not only posts about his food - he also shares his story.

“Obviously, I’m not from here, so that’s interesting to people that are from here,” he said.

“I’m a guy from Kentucky that’s in New Zealand that’s making Mexican food ... It’s not every day that you hear that,” he said, adding he thinks that people gravitate towards something “new and exciting”.

Of course, food is still a big part of it. Yarbrough knows how to cook and he knows how to make “really good tacos”.

“If you’re a chef, you’re an artist,” he said.

“To me, looking at food is the first step, you know, it has to look good ... If you look at the food and you say, damn, that looks really good. I think half the battle is over.

“All it has to do then is taste good, which is generally really easy to do because Mother Nature just does that for you,” he said.

Sean dreams of there being a Broke Boy Taco all over New Zealand.

But it’s more than just the taste.

Yarbrough sets himself apart with his confidence and resilience. He has a vision and has the audacity to fight for it.

He “did it all on my own” despite many telling him to take different routes. When Yarbrough decided he was going to only make beef tacos because that was what he was in love with, he said everybody told him not to.

“They were like, ‘Don’t do that, you’re gonna alienate these people ... you’re not gonna have any customers, blah blah blah'. And I’m like, no, I think I will. I’d rather be the best at one thing.”

“I‘m a bit of a megalomaniac ... I know exactly how it should be done,” he added.

That’s not to say that he is rigid about his recipes. “I still obsess over it, I still taste it every day and make adjustments every day”.

Yarbrough believes that the fact that he didn’t do it for money stands out for people, especially in New Zealand.

“[When] I moved here, I noticed that a lot of the places were kind of just like restaurants that were owned by businessmen, not necessarily owned by chefs or young people,” he explained.

“I think when you do something that’s just out of the love and the passion and the art of it ... everything else falls into place. I think that’s exactly what’s happened.”

Fast food was always a big part of the story of Yarbrough’s life, but he never truly understood why until he moved to New Zealand.

He explained how getting fast food when he was young was like an “event”: “It’s like, if you’re good, you can get a happy meal ... even going through those tough times in San Francisco, all you need is like $1.50 to get a cheeseburger from Burger King or something.

“I didn’t really realise how important fast food was to me until I ... started doing my own fast food and I was like, why am I so obsessed with this?

“It all kind of made sense when I moved to New Zealand,” Yarbrough said.

“My dream would be to have a Broke Boy all over the place in New Zealand ... that would be sick.

“Without Kiwis and without this country, I would be just a normal person. Potentially, I’d still be just flipping burgers ... which is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t be here where I am today without New Zealand.”

Varsha Anjali is a multimedia journalist at the Herald. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, travel and more.