The golden yellow food truck that sits in a Shell gas station along Rockville Pike was nearly surrounded by ice on a recent Sunday morning. Temperatures had hovered in the teens for days. But business had never been better.

Saul Zelaya was trying to stay warm inside that cozy, parked kitchen. He has cooked across the Washington, D.C., region. The Rockville resident has stayed closer to home with time at Summer House Santa Monica and Cava Mezze. He has also spent stints honing his craft at D.C.’s Boogy and Peel and Michelin-starred restaurants Kinship and Rose’s Luxury.

But Zelaya, a 34-year-old El Salvador native who moved to Maryland when he was 10, got the itch to own something of his own. One thing kept popping up in his mind: corn.

“I wanted to find something that I could identify myself with. Corn was something that I had grown up around,” Zelaya said. “Back in El Salvador, you eat corn tortillas with everything. My grandpa used to cultivate it and I used to help him do that. So, I was all around it. Then when I came here, there was none of that.”

So, Hijos del Maíz, cheekily translated from “Children of the Corn,” was born.

Zelaya opened the truck’s permanent home at 12151 Rockville Pike on Jan. 10 after popping up sporadically across the region since 2021. He has launched with a lean menu of five items that will soon grow, highlighted by tacos that can be filled with beef barbacoa or carnitas and a torta the size of your face.

A hard grind

While taco trucks dot gas stations across Montgomery County, Zelaya sets himself apart by making his own corn tortillas. He buys bolita amarillo, an heirloom yellow corn grown in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and prepares it for use in nearly all the dishes using nixtamalization. This time-intensive process sees Zelaya heating corn with water and calcium hydroxide, typically in a D.C. commercial kitchen, to make nixtamal. He grinds this down and presses out tortillas in the truck to order.

Zelaya is no stranger to the weird hours of kitchen work, but even he visibly exhaled and chuckled when I asked him when his day started that morning: “At two,” he said. “I got an hour and a half of sleep.”

But this kind of sacrifice, Zelaya believes, will get him closer to the life he envisions for himself and his family. He wanted to spend more time with his nearly 7-year-old daughter and 18-month-old son. His wife, Yadira Torres, handles behind-the-scenes truck operations with Zelaya —they met working as servers at Silver in Bethesda — and they’ve both made bargains with time to write a new chapter of their lives.

“None of this happens without her,” Zelaya said. “This is a hard grind and we’ve taken several, several losses. And there’s been times where you almost want to give up but she’s been there pushing me.”

Tortilla magnifica

Diners have flocked to Hijos del Maíz in just under a month since opening. In the two days before this Sunday visit, Zelaya had his first two sellouts. He credits some of the spike in traffic from a couple of social media influencers, as well as word-of-mouth from Saturday regulars at a D.C. farmers market.

I opted for some of Zelaya’s favorites on the menu. An order of tacos comes with three, and you can mix and match meats or refried pinto beans.

I understood immediately on first bite why his favorite was the barbacoa, which is a chuck roast and short rib mix that Zelaya cooks for around eight hours and punches with the fruity heat of guajillo and ancho chiles among a medley of other spices. The beef gets torn by hand, on this day by Zelaya’s friend Oscar Mendieta, 35, a chef called in to help with the surge in traffic.

The carnitas, which lean on pork shoulder and ribs, are given a simpler seasoning of salt and lard and cooked down for two hours before he sears them to yield a nice crust.

But Zelaya’s work shines through with the tortilla. After grinding them down and pressing them out, he finishes them off on the flat-top where they puff up ever so slightly before deflating. The tortillas provide a light current of bright sweetness to the richness from the meat. Zelaya says they often sell out when he offers them by the pack at the farmers market. He wants to crank out more in the future to sell at the truck — a development I eagerly await.

Torres, who arrived a few hours later to take orders, steered me toward the torta, which she said has been a very popular dish. I initially resisted its decadence but went for the most indulgent option with the milanesa. A breaded and fried chicken breast was topped with Oaxaca cheese, housemade escabeche (here, pickled onions and carrots), lettuce, tomato, refried beans, avocado and Duke’s mayonnaise, which Zelaya quipped was one of the only non-Mexican ingredients in his truck. It’s all sandwiched in telera bread from Wheaton’s El Sabor Latino Bakery.

I inhaled half and took it as a lesson that sometimes peer pressure can be useful in leading you where your heart desires. Delicious.

Trade in the truck?

Just after 1 p.m., Zelaya was still cooking away and filling walk-up and online orders. It was his last day before the truck’s regularly scheduled closure on Mondays. He was looking forward to seeing his kids, he said, and more grateful that school was getting delayed two hours so his family could sleep in.

Later, Zelaya would sell out ahead of the typical 8 p.m. closing. He’d have to think about preparing more food to bring to the truck and hope some of the shipping delays caused by the recent winter storm would normalize.

Zelaya hopes this will be the springboard to a brick-and-mortar location, maybe in Gaithersburg, where he grew up and graduated from Watkins Mill High School.

But until then, he’d lock up his yellow truck and start the grind all over again Tuesday.