Fifteen Hours for a Year of Tacos

BEDFORD — Del Taco opened at 3060 John Williams Boulevard at 10 a.m. Wednesday, September 17. People started lining up around 7 the night before. Some of them stayed until the doors unlocked. That is nearly fifteen hours on a strip of pavement that, six months ago, was still a rezoning hearing.

Corporate called it what it was: the first 100 customers get a T-shirt and The Del Tacos for a year. A year is still a year. In a town this size, that is enough to put lawn chairs in a parking lot after dark.

Nobody in the local coverage named the person who took the first spot. WBIW photographed the line and left the faces as “fanatics.” That is probably a mercy. The story is not one hero. It is a hundred people who decided a California taco chain’s opening coupon was worth a night on John Williams.

How Bedford Got a Del Taco

The store is the first Del Taco in Indiana. Franchise group SLK Holdings, led by Cole Sinclair, signed a ten-unit deal that also lists Bloomington, Columbus, Greenwood, Plainfield, and Avon. Sinclair is a Marine veteran who ate the brand in California and sold his partners on bringing it here. Co-owner Eugene Kim told WBIW the kitchen sells freshness: chicken and steak cooked to order, guacamole and pico made in the morning.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Sunday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday through Saturday. Drive-thru and a dining room. Burgers and fries sit on the board next to the tacos so the kid who will not eat a shell still has a reason to get out of the car.

The Amusement

Half the county is delighted. The other half is watching the first half with the look you give a cousin who camped out for a phone.

Bedford already had Taco Bell. It already had independent Mexican kitchens that do not need a California headquarters to explain pico. What it did not have was a ribbon-cutting on the corridor that still feels like news. Culver’s went in. Rookie’s went in. Trees came down along John Williams. An apartment stack is drawn on the same map. Del Taco is the latest proof that the commercial district is scaling whether or not anyone on 16th Street asked it to.

That is the joke people are telling without telling it. Not that the food is bad. Not that the workers do not deserve the shift. The joke is the scale of the feeling. A year of free crunchy tacos is a fine coupon. It is not a civic event. Treating it like one is very Bedford in 2026: hungry for something new, a little starved for spectacle, willing to sit in a folding chair overnight because the last time anything this shiny opened on that road the whole town talked about it for a week.

The line will thin. The shirts will go in a drawer. The first 100 will learn what “tacos for a year” means in the fine print — usually a weekly code, not a blank check at the counter. John Williams will still be John Williams. The question that was already on the table before the chairs came out is still on the table: how many more of these does the corridor absorb before the town decides it has enough entry-level kitchens and not enough of everything else.

Until then, Indiana’s first Del Taco is open. If you missed the night shift, you can still buy lunch. The people who slept there already have the shirt.