After operating out of a ghost kitchen since 2020, acai bowl company Vida Bowls has moved to its first permanent brick-and-mortar location. The health-focused restaurant now resides in a former Taco Bell building at 10325 Garland Rd., starting with drive-thru-only service and then opening for dine-in in April.

Vida Bowls is from Garland native Elijah Ruiz, who has big plans on how to expand healthy food options in underprivileged neighborhoods and food deserts.

The concept was born during the pandemic, about six years after Ruiz’s father Robert Ruiz, a lifelong diabetic, died after being on dialysis for years. Elijah's second inspiration came from working at a nonprofit, where he served meals to residents of low-income apartment complexes. Both events "broke his heart" and inspired him to help others become healthier.

“That really stirred in me a desire to provide healthier food, and my goal is to go into food deserts — like south Dallas eventually — that just need better food,” Ruiz says. “That’s our long-term mission, to go into underserved communities and bring life to them.”

The restaurant’s menu is simple, with health and efficiency top of mind. It offers three organic, dairy-free sorbet flavors: acai, coconut, and dragon fruit. Customers can choose from a variety of fixings, including fruit, banana chips, chia seeds, almonds, coconut, hemp hearts, agave nectar, and granola supplied by Dallas-based White Rock Granola.

Specialty toppings like nutella, almond butter, chia pudding, bee pollen, and sea moss are available for an extra charge. Fruit offerings will be dependent on what’s in season.

“Our goal is to be the Chipotle of acai bowls,” Ruiz says.

Those who don’t want to customize their own bowl can choose from signature bowls such as:

• Vida Bowl: acai sorbet with strawberries, blueberries, banana, strawberry vanilla hemp granola, peanut butter, and agave nectar
• Coco Blanco: white coconut sorbet with strawberries, blueberries, banana, strawberry vanilla hemp granola, peanut butter, and agave nectar
• Tres Baese: acai, pitaya (dragon fruit) and white coconut sorbet, with strawberries, blueberries, banana, strawberry vanilla hemp granola, peanut butter, and agave nectar

After the restaurant opens in April, customers will be able to build their own bowl like at a frozen yogurt shop.

Ruiz partners with local after-school program After School All Stars North Texas with an initiative called Bowl4Bowl, which provides an acai bowl to the after-school program at Hector P. Garcia Middle School in Oak Cliff for each four-pack of bowls purchased from Vida Bowls.

“We’re very mission-based, very community-based,” Ruiz says. “And we want to grow in scale.”

In the future, Ruiz wants to franchise Vida Bowls. For now, he has a ghost kitchen at 17811 Davenport Rd. in far north Dallas already on the way. It'll be a collaboration with De La Vecina, an agua frescas company based out of Mexico.