By Thane Grauel

WESTPORT — It’s been six months since a proposal to transform the old AJ’s Farmstand into a taco restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating was vetted by various town bodies.

Work now appears under way to strip down the old cinder block building at 1680 Post Road East, originally a gas station built in 1955, and to hire top management.

A crew last week was removing wooden cladding and other elements from outside and inside the structure, and loading a large construction dumpster with debris.

In addition to the demo work, the small but high-end chain of taco shops also has been advertising on several job websites, including Linkedin.com and Indeed.com, for a managing partner to run the operations of the Westport store.

Restaurant work can be intense, and the labor supply is notoriously short. The managing partner gig in Westport is advertised at $90,000 a year.

Tacombi couldn’t be reached last week for an update on progress for the Westport location.

The chain started as a taqueria in a VW microbus on the Yucatan peninsula. Its name is a mashup of a mashup of taco and combi, as VW microbuses were known back in the day.

It now has brick-and-mortar locations in Manhattan and other boroughs of New York City, as well as in New Jersey, Florida, Maryland and Virginia. Like Westport, more locations are in the works.

Thane Grauel, the Westport Journal executive editor, grew up in Westport and has been a journalist in Fairfield County and beyond more than three decades. Learn more about us here.