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No listings this week. One story, and it starts with people fainting in a parking lot.

July 25, 2015. Fountain Valley, California. A 1,500 square foot test kitchen opens its doors to the public for the first time. The line stretches for hours. People drive in from out of state. The Los Angeles Times later reports that fans fainted from the wait and the excitement.

Here is the strange part: the restaurant they were lining up for had been dead for twenty years.

How does a fast food brand stay alive for two decades with zero restaurants, zero marketing, and zero product? That question is the story of this issue: a 24-hour taco stand that became a 225-location empire, the corporate merger that erased it, and the food blogger with no restaurant experience who took the trademark back from a national chain and brought it home.

In 1970, a former Del Taco partner named Dick Naugle opened a restaurant on the southwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Brockton Avenue in Riverside, California. It had a 24-hour drive-thru, which in 1970 was close to a radical idea, and it ran on a three-line operating philosophy Naugle drilled into every employee:

"Prepare food fresh. Serve customer fast. Keep place clean."

That is the entire playbook. No consultants, no brand deck. Fifty-six years later the company still quotes it as its operating standard, and the site of that first restaurant is a Del Taco today, which tells you most of the story before we get to the rest of it.

By 1979 Naugles had grown to three locations when Harold Butler bought the chain. Butler was an operator, and he ran the playbook hard. Seven years later, in 1986, Naugles had 225 restaurants across the western United States.

This was the peak of the Cal-Mex fast food wars. Naugles went head to head with Taco Bell and Del Taco on their own turf, and for a stretch of the 1970s and 80s it was the one Southern Californians actually got sentimental about. Butler sold to Collins Foods International in 1986.

In 1988, businessman Aniwar Soliman purchased both Naugles and Del Taco at nearly the same time, and the two companies merged. A handful of Naugles menu items survived the transition, notably anything carrying the "Macho" designation, which quietly migrated onto the Del Taco menu and stayed there.

Everything else went. Location by location, Naugles restaurants were converted into Del Tacos. The last surviving Naugles, in Carson City, Nevada, closed in 1995.

The erasure was total. No restaurants, no menu, no company. Just a trademark sitting unused in a filing cabinet at Del Taco, and a few hundred thousand people in Southern California who could still describe the food from memory.

In late 2005, a web developer named Christian Ziebarth started a blog reviewing Mexican restaurants in Orange County. It caught on fast and landed at the front of the county's food blogging surge, drawing profiles from the Orange County Register and OC Weekly and a blogging partnership with OC Metro.

Then he noticed something in his traffic data that nobody else was looking at.

Every time he mentioned Naugles, the numbers spiked. Not politely. People who had not eaten the food in fifteen or twenty years were still searching for it, still arguing about the bun taco in comment threads, still asking whether it was ever coming back. Ziebarth was watching, in raw analytics, a market that had no product.

Most people would have written another post about it. He decided to go get the trademark.

In May 2010, Ziebarth filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for NAUGLES in International Class 43, covering cafeteria and restaurant services. The USPTO came back with two obstacles.

First, Del Taco already held a registration on the mark for restaurant services. Second, the examining attorney argued that "Naugles" is primarily merely a surname, which carries its own registration hurdle.

So he went after the first one directly. He petitioned to cancel Del Taco's registration on the grounds that the company had done nothing with the mark for two decades and had therefore abandoned it. This is not a small thing to attempt. A food blogger asked a federal tribunal to strip a national restaurant chain of a brand it had bought and buried.

On March 31, 2015, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board issued its opinion in his favor. On July 29, 2015, the Trademark Commissioner ordered Del Taco's registration cancelled.

Five years of legal work. One blogger. He won.

Winning the mark was the easy half. Then he had to rebuild food that had not been made in twenty years.

Ziebarth tracked down former Naugles employees and associates who had worked under Dick Naugle and reverse-engineered the recipes with them, item by item. He ran pop-up dinners around Orange County to test the food and build a following before there was a restaurant to put it in.

Which brings us back to July 25, 2015, and that line in the Fountain Valley parking lot.

The fainting was real. The Los Angeles Times covered it. That is not a marketing line. That is a newspaper describing a fast food opening.

The demand did not fade. As late as May 2019, a pop-up at Euryale Brewing Company in Riverside drew more than 700 people against 200 online reservations. The company's own summary of the feedback afterward: "It's been so long since we've had Naugles, so gotta stock up."

The food is intentionally not innovative, and that is the entire point. This is 1970s Cal-Mex served without apology or reinvention.

The Bun Taco. A hard-shell taco built inside a hamburger bun. Ground beef, shredded lettuce, grated cheddar, white sauce. It won Best Non-Traditional Burger in Orange County.

The Cheese Burrito. A large flour tortilla and melted cheddar. Nothing else. Described by the LA Times as Cal-Mex bliss.

The Ortega Burger and the Naugleburger. The American side of the menu, held over from the original.

The Chicken Club Salad Burrito. Reintroduced after Ziebarth discovered it had been an off-menu favorite at a Fullerton branch in the 1980s. That is the level of archaeology being applied here.

Add the fries, the milkshakes, and the orange sherbet drink, and you have a menu that cannot be copied by a competitor, because the moat is not the recipe. It is the twenty-year memory attached to it.

Christian Ziebarth, Co-Founder and President. The web developer and food blogger who spotted the demand in his traffic data, spent five years taking the trademark back from Del Taco, and rebuilt the recipes with Dick Naugle's former employees. The revival does not exist without him, and there is a reason the LA Times argued his story deserves its own film.

Joshua Maxwell, Chief Product Officer and Director. An operator and entrepreneur who built and ran CacheIT Solutions, an IT and managed services firm serving small and mid-sized businesses, after five years at Net Minded Technologies. He founded CacheIT after seeing that smaller companies needed real IT infrastructure but could not carry a full-time department. Beyond systems work, he ran growth for his clients through search placement, social media, and email and web platforms. He leads business strategy and the expansion plan.

Daniel Dvorak, Chief Marketing Officer and Director. More than a decade taking brands from concept to market as a conceptual designer, with direct work for Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Walmart, Target, and Amtrak. He pairs 3D CAD rendering with graphic design and runs the mobile app, publishing, print, radio, and television channels. He is also a veteran of the war on terrorism, having served in the United States Marine Corps as a K-9 explosive dog handler and Special Reaction Team member, on security missions including bomb threat response, IED work, and presidential protection, rising to Kennel Master, Training NCO, and the rank of Sergeant.

Frank Ferrini, Secretary, VP of Investor Relations and Director. Raising capital since 1986. He founded Financial Hall Eclectic Enterprises in 1992 and spent nearly two decades raising capital across a wide range of projects and organizations, building and leading sales teams along the way. He has run investor relations for Naugles since September 2015.

The useful thing about this group is what it is not. It is not four restaurant lifers. It is a brand archaeologist, a systems operator, a Fortune 500 designer, and a capital markets veteran, which is a fairly rational team composition for a company whose central asset is a brand rather than a building.

Reopening one restaurant takes months. The past ten years went somewhere else entirely.

Management used the decade to build the infrastructure a multi-unit rollout requires. Original recipes were recreated and then refined. Operating systems and written procedures were developed. Vendor relationships were established. Quality standards were implemented and tested in live service, not on paper. Financial controls and operational discipline were run against real restaurant conditions.

The Fountain Valley site functions as the corporate test kitchen for menu development and customer product testing, with executive, marketing, and finance operations run separately. The company has built toward a full HACCP food safety program, guest satisfaction surveys tied to register receipts, and a mystery guest program, which are the unglamorous systems you need in place before you franchise, not after.

Then COVID arrived and stress-tested all of it. The pandemic permanently closed a staggering number of restaurants. Naugles held its operations together, protected the customer base, and came out with the expansion plan intact.

• Named the #1 dish in OC Weekly's 100 Favorite Dishes countdown, beating every restaurant in Orange County that year

• Best Non-Traditional Burger in Orange County for the Bun Taco

• Featured by CNN Money, The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, the Los Angeles Times, KTLA, and Netflix's Taco Chronicles

• Multiple industry awards for food quality and customer experience

Most emerging restaurant brands spend years and millions of dollars manufacturing this kind of recognition. Naugles earned it through the product and the story, without an advertising budget.

The stated strategy is deliberately unglamorous: build enterprise value one successful restaurant at a time rather than chasing unit count. Each new location validates the operating model, strengthens corporate infrastructure, improves purchasing efficiency, and sharpens the systems needed to scale.

Once a portfolio of company-owned restaurants is proven, the plan moves to franchising, targeting initial franchise fees of $30,000 to $50,000 per restaurant on roughly 20-year terms, royalties around 6% of gross sales, and marketing fees of 2%. Franchising is where a restaurant company's margin structure changes, because royalty and licensing income arrives without the capital cost of building the unit. Merchandise and brand licensing sit on top of that.

Ziebarth has said publicly he wants to see more than 100 Naugles locations across the country. The capital being raised now is aimed at the next several, not the hundredth.

Acquire Weekly is featuring this opportunity editorially. We are not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or placement agent, we receive no commission on this raise, and nothing here is investment advice or an offer to sell securities. Any offer is made solely by the company through its official offering documents to verified accredited investors. Securities offered under Rule 506(c) are unregistered, restricted, and involve a high degree of risk, including total loss of principal. Consult your own legal, tax, and financial advisors.

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