Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Nick Kilrogan, and I'm the owner of Rikshaw Tacos here at town. Rikshaw Tacos is an Asian street food restaurant that seeks to bring authentic Asian street food recipes mainly from Southeast Asia back to the United States. And we served in a Western fashion, meaning we decided to take sort of a mix of Asian street food and Latin street food and serve authentic Asian street food dishes in Latin interpretation. So we served it through tacos and rice bowls. My great-grandfather and my uncles, they owned restaurants back in Southeast Asia, throughout Philippines, Malaysia, India, Thailand. But growing up, I was certainly knew that was a different generation than mine. When my family came to the States, we became focused sort of on medicine, studying that, and my father was actually the first to buck that trend. He was considered quote unquote the black sheep for going to business school, and then I decided to be even further, and I wanted to be a philosophy major at going to college. When I went, I knew something was missing. I didn't fall in love with it, I wasn't passionate, and I sort of reflected on what I grew up with, and the three main pillars of me growing up were family food and travel. And I realized that's what I loved, and that's how I found what I wanted to do. In terms of who inspires me, we called them the circle, the Rikshaw Circle, that's the staff and everyone, working with them every day, it's just amazing. We want to help teach you things, we want to help you learn about new flavors, we want to help you learn about Vietnam, Thailand, coming in and ask us like how do I travel there? I'd love that, that'd be so cool. We want to be seen as not just a part of the community, but a pillar, and someone that wants to help build Tallahassee to a place that really, really is unique. One of the things I'm most excited about for my future is the fact that I am 22 years old and I'm working on my first concept. My name is Nikhil Rajan, and I own Rikshaw Taco's Asian Street food here in town. You're listening to Voices That Inspire.