Between 7 Brew and Villa Maria Cleaners sits this small insurance office. The building opened as a Taco Villa restaurant in June 1977, a chain based out of Odessa, Texas. In January 1985, it was purchased by W.R. Grace & Company (which owned other restaurants and non-chemical operations at the time) and merged its subsidiary Creative Food 'N Fun Inc., into Taco Villa, Inc.. Creative Food 'N Fun1 was a franchisee of Del Taco, based out of California; however, beyond the West Coast, Creative Food 'N Fun had the rest of the nation to develop Del Taco restaurants and had by this time, over 40 Del Taco locations in the Houston area.
The link above (as of this writing) implies that Grace wanted to change Del Taco to Taco Villa in its entirety, but that doesn't seem to be quite correct as in Bryan, Taco Villa was converted over to the Del Taco format in summer 1985, as did a Taco Villa in Temple (though a Del Taco in Houston became a Taco Villa). I believe one issue complicating this was that they weren't just the franchisee for Del Taco, they also franchised Del Taco and Taco Villa within that territory.
The demise of Del Taco/Taco Villa in the Houston area (and here) started around 1986 when Del Taco Inc. (of California) purchased Taco Villa and 120 stores from Taco Villa Inc., which meant Taco Villa Inc. no longer had any Taco Villa stores to call its own...or at least would've been the case if they got the financing. Still, W.R. Grace was losing its taste for restaurants. In the late 1980s, the Del Taco and Taco Villa restaurants began to close. (Applebee's was sold in 1988). Taco Villa moved from Atlanta to Dallas in 1989 and renamed to Del Taco Restaurants Inc. (where most of the non-West Coast Del Taco restaurants were). But by this time, many of the Houston stores had closed, with Del Taco in Bryan closed in September 1988.2
In 1990, it became portrait studio Quick as a Flash (probably the first facade update happened around this time), joining its College Station location (which also was located in an old fast food building), and like the College Station location moved from a mall...the Quick as a Flash here moved from Manor East Mall across the street. In 1999, they were purchased by Ritz Camera and starting selling cameras (but unlike the Post Oak Mall Ritz Camera location, offered portrait services. It was still branded as Ritz Camera in 2003 but seems to have discontinued the name by 2006 by the time it closed.
Shortly after, RadioShack moved from Sul-Mar Center at Briarcrest and Villa Maria (which was about to go through a major renovation) to the location. RadioShack Corporation declared bankruptcy in 2015 and most of the corporate-owned stores closed. The corporate stores that weren't closed were converted to Sprint/RadioShack co-branded stores under new company General Wireless. Unfortunately, the partnership with Sprint dissolved with the bankruptcy of General Wireless two years later, closing the Sprint/RadioShack stores (including this one). The closure of this meant that RadioShack officially exited the Bryan-College Station market. As of 2020, the closest brick-and-mortar RadioShack store was in Brenham (which is a franchised store) but numbers continued to dwindle that as of September 2025 that number is now just around half a dozen. After a few years of sitting vacant, Fred Loya Insurance moved in by February 2021, which is still there today.
UPDATE 09-30-2025: Major rewrite and more accurate dates including the Del Taco conversion and what happened to the company (2021 update integrated).
All pictures here are by the author, March 2020.
1. As a sidenote, Creative Food 'N Fun also owned Applebee's during this time, though in 1986 only had a dozen locations.
2. The story of Del Taco/Taco Villa ended a few years later. W.R. Grace & Company attempted to sell Del Taco to Taco Tico but in 1992 shut down the company, selling the remaining restaurants to Taco Bell in Atlanta (except for a few mall locations) and the rights to the non-West Coast areas back to Del Taco. Meanwhile, the demise of Taco Villa in Odessa was not for long as the rights were purchased back in the dissolution of Del Taco Restaurants Inc..
