‘Tacos forever’: 101 reasons to love Los Angeles

101 tacos for Jonathan Gold’s birthday, plus pizza box mysteries, Star Leaf mysteries and the mystery of who is buying Erewhon’s “raw animal smoothie.” Also a new restaurant from the Hundreds, San Diego eating and drinking, defending the street vendor defenders and the unexpected Little Armenia store for the best water selection in L.A. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

‘Tacos forever’

Jonathan Gold at Tacos Los Güichos in 2016.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

“The first time I came to L.A.,” chef René Redzepi said about Jonathan Gold during a Los Angeles screening event for the new Apple TV+ series “Omnivore,” “he picked me up in his pickup truck. And we ate tacos for like seven hours.”

“I have a similar J. Gold story,” said author and “Omnivore” co-creator Matt Goulding. “He came in his pickup truck and we ate tacos for six hours.”

Tacos frequently work their way into the narrative of the stories people tell about Jonathan Gold — whose professional history with this paper before he became a restaurant critic, began in the 1980s with phone calls he made under a pseudonym to cajole then-L.A. Times music critic Robert Hilburn into seeing one of the punk shows he’d booked at Hollywood’s old Anti-Club (and where he sometimes played a cello through a Marshall stack with his band Tank Burial while wearing an eyepatch).

Get to know Los Angeles through the tacos that bring it to life. From restaurants to trucks to carts and more, here’s 101 of the city’s best.

Read the guide

Last Saturday night, at downtown L.A.’s Zipper Concert Hall, during the Q&A following the “Omnivore” screening, the evening’s host, Ken Concepcion of the cookbook store Now Serving, asked Redzepi, Goulding and on-stage interviewer Evan Kleiman of KCRW’s “Good Food,” if they could share any stories about what Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan loved about Los Angeles. Both died in 2018 and, as Concepcion pointed out, the next day would be the six-year anniversary of Jonathan’s death. (Tomorrow, by the way, would have been Jonathan’s birthday.)

“Omnivore’s” Redzepi and Goulding — who were recently interviewed by The Times’ Karen Kaplan about the big ideas in their “Planet Earth“-inspired series and about eating insects — had less to say about Los Angeles and Bourdain, the world traveler who made his name in New York. Their meaningful encounters with him were in other places. But Jonathan, in the appreciation he wrote just after Bourdain’s death, said this about the first time he met the chef-turned-author in New York: “He interrogated me about an L.A. Times review I’d written of Oki Dog a few years earlier, and why I was sending him to an iffy Los Angeles neighborhood to eat pastrami burritos and whether the hot dog wrapped into a tortilla with fried cabbage said more about L.A.’s changing demographics or about my dubious taste.” I’ll note that Oki Dog endures today.

Much easier for Redzepi and Goulding, were stories about Jonathan and Los Angeles ... and tacos.

“He saw that the care and the dedication is the same whether you’re doing tacos or fine dining,” Redzepi said. “If they had the dedication, he’d find them and put them forward.”

From left, chef René Redzepi, author and producer Matt Goulding and radio host and author Evan Kleiman attend a talk and screening for the Apple TV+ series “Omnivore” at L.A.’s Zipper Concert Hall.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Jonathan loved tacos so much that when his weekly reviews weren’t enough to contain L.A.’s ever-growing taquero landscape, he started a Taco Tuesday column. Many of my memories of riding in Jonathan’s pickup truck with our two children involve stopping for tacos.

In 2018, L.A. Taco’s Erick Galindo collected some of Jonathan’s essential taco quotes.

The most memorable, from the “City of Gold” documentary directed by Laura Gabbert: “Taco should be a verb.”

The most emotional: “A taco, it could be argued, is the basic unit of consumption in Southern California. ... When we move to New York or Paris, it is tacos that haunt our dreams; when we are hungry after a night of dancing, it is the taqueros who nourish us, who appear precisely where and when we need them the most.”

And when he’d give an autograph or dedicate a copy of his “Counter Intelligence” book for fans, he usually signed off with two words: “Tacos forever.”

Forever is a big wish, but six years after Jonathan’s death, the taco scene in Southern California has grown exponentially. We’ve seen a profusion of regional styles from all over Mexico appearing at sidewalk stands across the city plus new variations coming from other cultures. Food editor Daniel Hernandez, in his essay that leads our just-published online guide to the 101 best tacos in Los Angeles (and in a special print section in tomorrow’s Sunday paper for subscribers and on sale at our L.A. Times store), argues that Los Angeles is the most taco-diverse city in the world.

He pinpoints “the modern period of L.A.’s taco obsession” to “the arrival of the taco truck in Los Angeles in 1974.” That’s when the late King Taco founder Raul Martinez Sr. “parked a converted ice cream van next to an East L.A. bar and sold $70 worth of tacos.”

With such a rich taco scene, it only made sense for us to try to map out 101 of the best places to eat tacos in Southern California. The process, undertaken by Bill Addison, Stephanie Breijo, Jenn Harris, Cindy Carcamo, Sarah Mosqueda, Danielle Dorsey, Betty Hallock, Hernandez and me — was far from simple. Assistant food editor Dorsey explains how the project came together, starting with the initial idea in 2022:

“Altogether, the nine editors and writers who worked on the guide tried hundreds of tacos across almost every L.A. neighborhood and as far as Antelope Valley and the southern end of Orange County,” Dorsey writes. “We visited Michelin-nodded taquerias and humble puestos with equal exuberance, tapping colleagues, friends, family, local chefs and celebrities for recommendations along the way.”

Many of those recommendations — from Tyler the Creator, chef José Andrés, L.A. Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh, musician Aaron Frazer, actor Ty Burrell, Dodgers pitcher Anthony Banda, real chef and fictional Fak brother Matty Matheson and more — were assembled by our summer intern Bryan A’Hearn into one article in the series.

(Jennifer Dahbura / For The Times)

We also mapped L.A.’s 18 best places to get vegetarian and vegan tacos and provided a glossary of taco lingo. Plus, Addison, in his role as restaurant critic, went through the 101 taco list and chose his 10 favorite tacos in L.A. — among them are last year’s Restaurant of the Year, Holbox, and this year’s Gold Award winner, Mariscos Jalisco. (Side note: Tickets are now on sale for this year’s Restaurant of the Year [Baroo] and Gold Award presentations at Food Bowl on Sept. 20 at the Paramount Pictures Studio Backlot.)

Addison also choose Tacos Los Güichos, which serves the al pastor taco he “loves most in Los Angeles.” It happens to be the site of one of my favorite pictures of Jonathan and tacos (see above).

I can’t say that Jonathan would agree with the 101 tacos list that emerged from the process. And with new taco stands opening each month our list could look very different in a year’s time. We’re already collecting reader recommendations for further taco research — add your favorite place in the form linked here. But I do know that he would be please to find that the taco scene in Los Angeles is thriving.

As Hernandez wrote in his essay: “In Los Angeles, the taco is our avatar. It is who we are.”

Also...

Pizza of Venice co-owner Jamie Woolner at his Altadena restaurant, surrounded by the Restaurant Depot pizza boxes that have led many to ask of its design, “What’s the ... deal?”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Enjoy your delicious moments ... or else! Times reporter Daniel Miller — never one to ignore life’s mysteries big and small — wanted to know more about the pizza box that has intrigued and often disturbed pizza customers for years. “What’s the ... deal with this pizza box? Who designed it? ... Are there other pizza boxes that even come close to being this weird?” A fascinating read.

• Meanwhile, Jenn Harris tries to unravel the mysteries, myth making and online drama surrounding the newest location in Pasadena of the Asian chain Star Leaf.
• And Deborah Vankin investigates the mystery of who is buying Erewhon‘s “raw animal smoothie.”
• Even in summer, cabbage is on Harris’ mind. She explores two new takes on the brassica at Tsubaki in Echo Park and at Pasadena’s Agnes Restaurant & Cheesery. She also tries out the app To Good to Go, designed to reduce restaurant food waste.
• Stephanie Breijo talks with the Hundreds’ Ben Shenassafar about his transition from streetwear pro to restaurateur and the opening of the Benjamin on Melrose.
• Comic-Con is underway in San Diego, a good occasion for critic Bill Addison to guide you to 23 of the best restaurants and bars for a weekend getaway any time of year.
• Stephanie Breijo details the six L.A. restaurants added last week to Michelin’s California guide in the run-up to its Aug. 5 announcement of which restaurants in the state will get coveted star recognition. They are Barra Santos in Cypress Park, Leopardo on La Brea, Danbi in Koreatown, Mae Malai House of Noodles in Thai Town, Grá in Echo Park and Stella in West Hollywood.
• One more from Miller, who profiles Fred Bush, the man who sells used restaurant equipment that often comes from Southern California’s failed restaurants.
• Patt Morrison looks at the locally grown food being fed to Olympic athletes in Paris and asks if L.A. can do the same when the Olympics come here.
• Gustavo Arellano meets with lawyer Damon Alimouri — a.k.a. Rico Suave — about representing members of “the so-called Justice 8, internet-famous for confronting people they accused of harassing street vendors, videotaping the loud aftermath, then calling on followers to support the vendors.” The case involving the group’s most high-profile member, Edin Alex Enamorado, has yet to be decided. “I’ve had clients charged with murder, rape, child molestation — they got bail,” Alimouri said, the intensity in his voice ratcheting up with every crime he uttered. “[The prosecutors] say they’re trying to protect Enamorado’s alleged victims. No, they want to make a point.”
• And Alana Hope Levinson writes that the best water in L.A. is not at Erewhon, but at a “secret oasis ... in Little Armenia.”