Hand-painted Talavera plates shone against a wash of take-out containers at Prost! Marketplace on a recent afternoon. Most held a trio of enchiladas—rosa, verde, and a satiny black mole poblano dusted with sesame seeds—the signature of the Mississippi food cart pod’s latest tenant. “Mole Mole” read the plates, as did the papel picado flags waving in the breeze, confirming with a blaze of color that the beloved NE Alberta cart had opened a second outpost.

Owners Roberto Flores and Alejandra Rendon opened their first cart in August 2021. The couple’s 23-year-old daughter, Brenda Flores Rendon, manages the front of house and handles English-speaking reporters. She was nervous about opening during the pandemic, she says, but the business quickly found momentum: “Like a snowball, we started growing, growing, and growing.” These days, a line regularly winds through the original truck’s gravel courtyard, and crowds stick around rain or shine to eat at what feels more like an outdoor restaurant than any other cart in the city.

“The main thing is mole,” Flores Rendon says, specifically the luxuriously dark mole poblano, a specialty of her father’s hometown, Puebla, in east-central Mexico. The savory blend of nuts, seeds, and fruity chiles finished with bittersweet chocolate produces a sauce more complex than anything in the American flavor lexicon. “Before we started, he was known for his mole,” Flores Rendon says; friends and family came to expect it at parties. Other dishes from Puebla form the basis of the menu, including chile relleno and tinga de pollo, but the focus isn’t strictly regional.

Before opening Mole Mole, Flores cooked at local Mexican restaurants Tamale Boy and Cha Cha Cha, collecting recipes from other chefs and tweaking them to his own sensibilities. “My dad, he knows a lot of people,” Flores Rendon says. On the surface, the bulk of the resulting menu appears similar to your average pan-Mexican spot—tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and nachos; asada, pollo, chorizo, carnitas—but in practice, dishes have a specific nuance and attention to detail that sets them apart. The menu at the Mississippi location is almost the same as Alberta’s, except they’ve forgone the soups (pozole and sopa de tortilla, both revelatory) in favor of expanded vegan offerings, including tofu, soy curl, and soyrizo protein options.

More dramatic is the impact the cart’s presence will have on Mississippi’s food scene. The strip has been stuffed with great bars for years, and regularly morphs into an impromptu block party on weekends. But, Lovely’s Fifty Fifty aside, it’s hardly been a food destination—until now.

Mole Mole joins nearly a dozen other carts in the Prost! pod, including Burger Stevens and Matt’s BBQ, and follows a recent wave of new restaurants on the block—exciting and independent ones at that. The Italian pizza and pasta spot Tartuca opened down the street two summers ago. And earlier this year, Burmese favorite Rangoon Bistro opened its second location in a defunct Little Big Burger. The addition of one of our favorite Mexican restaurants in town, food cart or not, confirms the trend: Mississippi is getting more and more delicious.