Broke Boy Taco founder Sean Yarbrough on fame, burnout and big dreams

How the Kentucky-born hospo boss built a food empire, fast.

Broke Boy Taco owner Sean Yarbrough has been outside his Mt Albert shop for only five minutes when two kids recognise him.

“Hey Sean,” they call out. He says, “Hey” back. But he feels weird about it. Sometimes fans want photos.

“It’s tight that people know me and want to have a picture with me ... but it’s definitely like, what f***ing planet am I on?”

Yarbrough, 39, isn’t used to the surge in fame. Few hospo workers are. Born and raised in Kentucky, for much of his life he believed he mattered very little to anyone. He drank Mountain Dew instead of water for 18 years. Every day, “I swear to God”.

The huge red lettering of Broke Boy Taco is impossible to look past on New North Rd. That sign, that taco shop, has been there for about three and a half years. But its essence appeared before the building carried its name.

Yarbrough was working at Auckland burger joint Ralph’s when his boss let him set up a temporary pop-up selling his now-famous birria tacos. He sold out on his first day. By June 2022, he was asking other restaurants to use their kitchens to make tacos.

Four months later, workers were painting walls and sanding floors of the Mt Albert restaurant. It was a transformation that Aucklanders found difficult to resist.

When we spoke last February, Yarbrough was celebrating the opening of his second shop in Birkenhead. He already had financial backing from investors including UFC champion Israel Adesanya and his brother David. Since then, he has set up in Papakura and Hamilton and has nearly 100 employees.

Sitting in a staff-only section of the shop, he’s wearing a T-shirt for the 49ers, the NFL team based in San Francisco, where he lived for 11 years before moving to Auckland in 2021, and where, for a short time, he was homeless.

Now he says he plans to franchise his business.

“It’s f***ing fast,” he says, flashing his brace-free smile; he had them removed only about two months ago after finally being able to afford them at 37. He’s made a lot of mistakes and admits he lost a lot of money. But he doesn’t care. “I never had money in the first place – what difference does it make?”

In business, rapid growth can be risky. Yarbrough admits it may “not be the best idea in this economy”. What he has learned, however, is that Broke Boy Taco is a destination restaurant.

“It’s somewhere people want to travel to go to,” he says. “[For example, burger joint] Fergburger wouldn’t be Fergburger if they were everywhere – it’s just in Queenstown, so that’s why you always go there when you’re in Queenstown.”

He plans to franchise in Hamilton first, then Mount Maunganui and other major cities, with the “big dream” being to have a Broke Boy Taco in Queenstown.

But there’s another, bigger dream. If he can prove the franchise business model works, which he thinks it will, he wants to set up Broke Boy Taco in Australia.

“My dream was never to have one shop,” he says. “My dream is to have 20, 30, 40 of them all over the world.”

At this point, Yarbrough is wearing many hats. He has difficulty describing himself as a chef, though. It’s a job title that, he says, makes it sound like he knows what he’s doing.

“I know how to cook tacos and Mexican food really, really well. But if you asked me to fillet a fish, I’d look at you like you’re speaking French.”

The counterculture culinary figure is in his prime. With more than 127,000 Instagram followers, he surpasses Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s 10,000. He’s got a hunch on why “people f*** with it”. Aside from his heavily tattooed look and southern drawl grabbing people’s attention, Yarbrough thinks people like him “because I keep it real and I’m just like everybody else”.

Last month, a video he posted online about the soaring food costs impacting small businesses racked up more than 500,000 views and led to a lot of media coverage. In the video, he said there had never been a worse time to own a restaurant.

He doesn’t mince his words when asked to elaborate.

“The cost of goods is crazy, drinking has gone down quite a lot … the internet is in full force, so people can socialise online rather than having to rely on socialising in person, which they used to … regulation is through the roof.”

He thinks less regulation will help the industry.

“I’m not saying that regulation doesn’t need to exist. But for me to put a table outside [the Mt Albert shop], I had to wait six to eight weeks of going back and forth with paperwork.” That table cost him between $700 and $800, he says.

It’s no secret that Yarbrough has lived on the edge. He’s been open about it since the beginning of Broke Boy, from being poor and hungry to losing his mother to liver failure after an opioid addiction and battling drug addiction himself.

Considering his traumas, you wonder if Yarbrough has healed. He says he has tried therapy, but it was when he went sober in 2021 that he “confronted all of that s***”.

What also helped him escape was finding work in kitchens. But his refuge has its own stains.

If you’re not working fast and working hard in a busy kitchen, “the whole ship sinks”. Yarbrough used to have to cook a menu of more than 20 dishes. He had to keep track. And he hated that.

“It’s really difficult ... if you’re busy, it’s punishing physically and mentally. You have people yelling at you – if you miss an order, now everything is back five minutes.”

Today, he manages the kitchen stress, for himself and his workers, by obsessing over one thing: efficiency. Whether that’s by having only five things on the menu or by showing a worker how to mix food faster. Rest isn’t on his mind.

“I’m almost 40. Time’s not going any slower … Rest when you die.”

But underneath the bad-boy aesthetic, there is a vulnerability. Burger Burger went into receivership last month, he points out. It had a team. Broke Boy Taco has only Yarbrough.

“If a team like Burger Burger can go backwards with a group of people that have been in this industry for a long time, and I’m just starting out by myself, and I didn’t graduate high school, you could probably understand how hard I’m working and how much I’m doing.”

So he doesn’t sleep. Not properly, anyway. He goes to bed around midnight or 1am, then wakes at 5.30am. He says 90% of his life is looking at spreadsheets. He manages the restaurants’ schedules, inventory and social media. Right now, he’s tired. “But you got to move your ass.”

It means he doesn’t spend that much time at home with his fiancée Amy, who is from Auckland. They met when Yarbrough was living in San Francisco and have been together for more than 10 years.

When he proposed on one knee at her grandparents’ bach in Leigh a few years ago, he said to her: “I don’t ever want to be without you; you’re the only person that ever cared about me.”

But he hasn’t had time to plan the wedding.

“She barely sees me and, when she does see me, I’m stuck on a spreadsheet, or I’m stuck talking to somebody on the phone.

“I tell her, ‘I’m going to get you a house one day, just please let me do this’ … I’ll make it up to her pretty soon.”

He says he’s had offers to buy his company but refused because Broke Boy gives him purpose.

“I feel like for the first 35 years of my life, I sat around and did nothing … just accepted my position in the world for what it was.

“But when you can change it, and it actually does change, I’m like, I need to tell my story. I need to tell somebody that you can go from being homeless to having four or five restaurants.”

His inspiration came from an unlikely, relatively uncool source: British chef Gordon Ramsay.

“Genuinely, without Gordon Ramsay, I don’t think I would be cooking at all,” he says. “And if that’s the case, I’d probably be dead or in prison or something if I never started.”

It began with an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. Yarbrough was 18 and didn’t know what to do with his life. Enter Chef Ramsay.

“I was captivated by how he would come in, teach people and really care about it and turn things around.

“There was a real social worker vibe to it … he was helping people that didn’t know what to do, and there was just something about it that I was like, ‘I would love to do something like that’.”

And he is in his own way.

Last year, he went back to Kentucky for his 20-year high school reunion. He says he used to be one of the poorest kids at school. That day, he paid for the whole event.

“I’m sure it mattered more to me than it did to them,” he says. “But it was really cool to be able to do that.”

He saw his past. All the bullies were there. When they went up to him, they said they were sorry.

They were kids who didn’t know what they were doing. But they were really happy for him “doing well and s***”.

“[It was] just one of the coolest f***ing nights of my life.”

Varsha Anjali is a journalist in the lifestyle team at the Herald. She is based in Auckland.