Mexican restaurant to open on Phillips Avenue
Dec. 13, 2023
The mother-daughter team of Salas Salsas is opening a restaurant in downtown Sioux Falls.
BibiSol will be in the former Mrs. Murphy’s Irish Gifts space at 219 S. Phillips Ave in the Carpenter Building.
“We’re going to have a very simple but very good menu that will be centered around local focus, sustainability and really good ingredients,” said Marcella Salas, who started making and selling salsa with her mother, Patricia Burbine, in 2020.
That business expanded from farmers markets and online sales to area retail shelves. The products grew to include a variety of salsas, tamales and other take-and-bake dishes, and they started Salas Salsas food truck last year. The BibiSol partnership includes Salas’ fiance, Chris Nelson, who will work mostly behind the scenes overseeing finances and inventory, and helping manage staff.
BibiSol is a combination of Salas’ nickname in Mexico, Bibi, — what her older sister called her as a baby instead of “bebe” — and her mother’s middle name, Soledad.
“We think BibiSol is a perfect fit for the Carpenter Building,” said Anne Haber of Pendar Properties. “We love the menu, and their concept is going to bring new energy and activity to our building and provide another reason for people to discover the Carpenter and extend their time downtown.”
The BibiSol menu will focus on dishes using an ancient way of processing corn.
“Nixtamal is an ancient practice, pre-Mayan times, where you take hard corn kernels and you cook it in an alkaline solution, and that process softens the outside of the corn, and it makes it gelatinous. And when it’s ground up, that is the masa, or the dough, that is used in tortillas and tamales and other masa-based products.”
The nixtamal method makes the corn more digestible and increases its nutritional value, she said.
In addition to tamales, the menu will have other nixtamal-based offerings like sopes and tortillas for specialty tacos. The goal will be to make nixtamal in-house using non-GMO, heirloom corn varieties that are grown locally, Salas said.
The focus on South Dakota products will include meat through partnerships with Svec Farm for beef, Mayborn Acres for chicken and a local pork producer, she said.
“We’ll be doing what’s called guisados, so different kinds of meats and vegetables that are simmered in different salsas.”
BibiSol will “have a big emphasis on fresh salsas too because it’s what we do,” Salas said.
“I’m really excited because we’re going to have a touch of that elevation as well,” she said of the cooking processes and the local meats. “I went to culinary school, and so I love any kind of cuisine, but I think a lot of the times Mexican cuisine gets overlooked. People don’t think about how much work actually goes into it. And a lot of the time, people (restaurant owners) underprice themselves because everyone assumes ‘Oh, it’s a taco; it’s cheap,’ but there’s a lot that goes into it, especially if you’re making something from scratch. And so we want to challenge that narrative and show people what authentic Mexican food really is in a way that’s elevated and people will really enjoy.”
A grab-and-go section in the restaurant will feature Salas Salsas products.
At the bar, customers can enjoy Mexican beer, micheladas and wine. Salas hopes to partner with a local brewery for a Mexican lager.
Construction of the restaurant space will include the addition of a hallway to connect it with the kitchen in EightyOne Arcade, which Salas Salsas has been sharing with Sunny’s Pizzeria for the past year.
While the actual restaurant space will have limited seating, a new wider opening to the Carpenter Building’s lobby will lead to additional tables. In warm weather, customers will be able to dine outside on the patio.
As for the timing of the opening, “hopefully, if everything goes well, we’re looking at March, if not April,” Salas said.
To start, BibiSol likely will have hours of 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.
Late-night tacos would be a hit downtown, but Salas said they’ll need to get the right team in place to make that happen.
The food truck will continue to operate at the Falls Park Farmers Market, Salas said, with a menu focused on breakfast and nachos.
Opening a restaurant has always been their dream, but the food truck and the retail partnerships have been keeping them busy. The opportunity to take over the vacant space, however, sparked them to fast-forward their plans.
With that, BibiSol has started a crowdfunding campaign “to see if anybody wants to help us out and help this community initiative and amazing space come to life,” Salas said. Information is available at bibisol.square.site.
For Burbine, the chance to see her dream come true is “incredible,” she said.
“My dream is to make very good food for the people, food with love, food with passion, and make everybody happy.”
