(Dania Maxwell, Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times; Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)
They’re everywhere.
Tortillas with fillings and garnishes, three or four per paper plate, chomped down at thousands of taquerias or tarp-covered stands that tumble along the landscape like cells in blood. On any given day, thousands of tacos — tens of thousands? — are being lifted and eaten, hand to hungry mouth, in our Greater Los Angeles metropolis of 18 million.
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.
Other cities have taco addictions, but in Los Angeles — with far more Mexican restaurants than any other county in the U.S. — taco culture is on perpetual overdrive. There’s a soft-shell crab taco for $26 at the clubby Arts District roof bar Cha Cha Cha and a $24 caviar taco at Nobu Los Angeles, but also $2 paper-plate tacos just outside your favorite neighborhood gay bar, and everything in between. The city has given birth to Korean tacos, Black tacos, vegan tacos, halal tacos, kosher tacos, alongside an explosion in regional tacos from the farthest corners of Mexico, making L.A. arguably the most taco-diverse city in the world.
In Los Angeles, the taco is our avatar. It is who we are. How did we get here?
Birrieria Barajas.
Tacos La Carreta. (Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)
Rise of the taco king
The modern period of L.A.’s taco obsession arguably begins in earnest with the arrival of the taco truck in Los Angeles in 1974.
Of course, there is a full history of taco-eating in L.A. before this moment. Tacos have been eaten since Indigenous Mexicans domesticated corn, but tacos didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until after World War II. In 1962, Glen W. Bell Jr. founded Taco Bell — the first U.S. taco chain to go national — in Downey, after copying the hard-shelled taco he loved by Lucia Rodriguez from Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino.
Then, an L.A. immigrant decided to enter the chat. In my view, Raul Martinez Sr. is the history-shaping Californian whose invention of the taco truck was the first step in the citywide quest to achieve taco nirvana.
Less than a year after the night he parked a converted ice cream van next to an East L.A. bar and sold $70 worth of tacos, Martinez and his family opened King Taco No. 1 in a funky building in Cypress Park. More locations quickly spread across Southern California. The late critic and foremost taco chronicler of his era, Jonathan Gold, told John Rabe of local radio show “Off-Ramp” that King Taco permanently changed the city’s sensibility for tacos.
“Suddenly, almost all at the same time, everybody in the city realized that a taco was not this sort of crunchy, pre-fried thing with orange cheese and lettuce that they’d grown up eating,” Gold said during a King Taco visit with Rabe in 2013, shortly after Martinez’s death. “But it was something else that was made with a fresh tortilla, that was soft, that had been rolled and filled with spicy meat and cilantro and onions.” Indeed, Martinez is credited with bringing the smaller “two-bite” corn tortilla from Mexico, now ubiquitous in U.S. taquerias.
King Taco, along with El Taurino in Pico-Union (started by Martinez’s younger brother, Adolfo Martinez) and Yuca’s in Los Feliz by Socorro Herrera, were all places founded by Mexicans who moved here after the 1950s. Collectively, they and many others in the region set Los Angeles on a search for ever more satisfying, ever more refined tacos.
Taquerias of this wave were beacons to Mexican Americans who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Natalia Molina, author of “A Place at the Nayarit,” about her family’s Echo Park restaurant, remembers the distances she’d drive as a teenager for a good taco.
“I was in high school in Hollywood, and if we had a free period we would drive from Hollywood to Lincoln Heights for King Taco,” she says. “There wasn’t that variety in between, if you wanted that kind of taco.”
A plaque at King Taco commemorates Raul Martinez, Sr., inventor of the taco truck and founder of King Taco No. 1 in Cypress Park.
A plate of tacos at King Taco. (Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
The theme of the taco hunt remains in the culture. Many will drive around searching for that “one taco” they had some other night, or from that trip to the family’s rancho. Or that trip to Puerto Vallarta. Someone might stumble into love on a first date at a taco stand.
The taco eating experience can help us manifest previous times or interlocking episodes in our lives.
“It’s not just what I’m craving, but what I’m nostalgic for,” Molina says. “It might be a kind of mariscos because I’m missing Nayarit, or more like Alta California, because I might be missing not just Tijuana but San Diego.”
Today, King Taco No. 1 is a time capsule in the best possible way, with taqueras and taqueros in paper caps behind a window, and orange swivel chairs bolted to tables. A wall plaque shows Martinez in relief and calls him a “maker of the American Dream.”
On a recent bright noontime, workers in long sleeves and boots and senior ladies from the neighborhood were coming in for their orders. I wanted to taste what some might call the standard Los Angeles taco — the taco de carne asada, plus one al pastor and one tinga. (With an agua fresca de melon.)
The King Taco carne asada taco, 50 years later, is still satisfying. Seasoned asada meat and a light dusting of chopped cilantro and onion over two small, stacked tortillas. Al pastor and tinga also did the job. Add red or green salsa if you like. That’s it. All for only $10.97. They are, as Gold put it that day, “very good, solid B+ tacos.”
The Alta California taquero
If you have this hunch in your belly that tells you tacos in L.A. somehow taste better on the street, you’re not alone. I’m also a believer, yet I’ve found no one able to explain the science of it.
After the 1990s, NAFTA and globalization, another sweep of immigrants from Mexico brought culinary traditions from states like Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz. Many of the newer immigrants began cooking on the street, drawing people in with newer, more specific forms of tacos.
The next innovation came with the California-born or -bred taqueros, many of them Mexican American chefs trained in high-level kitchens — think of Carlos Salgado of the Orange County fine-dining spot Taco María that evolved from a taco truck or Wes Avila of Guerrilla Tacos, which started as a stand, then a truck, then an Arts District restaurant. These chefs combined their family traditions and regional lines with the bounty of California or Baja-styled ingredients. (An even earlier beacon for modern Mexican cuisine in Los Angeles was Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s original Border Grill, which opened on Melrose in 1985.)
These ventures set the stage for the rise of what became known as Alta California cuisine. Quality maize tortillas became a central goal of this movement.
Most recently, a veritable fourth wave is layered on top of it all. Regional masters are tapping into updated taco styles from Tijuana, Mexico City, Guadalajara. Sometimes, an outstanding new taquero lands in the L.A. taco market and quickly sparks attention. Think of Teddy’s Red Tacos in 2017, or Tacos Los Cholos in 2019.
The range is dizzying.
The rise of Alta California tacos and regional migrant specialists have combined in a way that marks a crucial moment for taco lovers, especially those who are Mexican, Chicano, pocho, or mixed-Latino.
“They’re using the taco as an assertion of their identity,” says Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, author of “Taco USA.” “They know that Americans, the world, really cannot get enough of tacos, [even as] they reduce us, many times, just to our cuisine.
“Our food and the people who make it, who make our tacos, they need to assert themselves at a time when Mexicans are being demonized right now as we speak,” Arellano says, “and at a time when Mexican food is more popular than ever.”
Diners at Cocina Mi Tierra, serving traditional Oaxacan food. Seared tomatoes for salsa at Carnitas Los Chingones. A taquero cuts carne al pastor at Tacos Los 2 Poblanos. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Broader challenges
So where are we right now? In chaotic abundance, you might say. Tacos in L.A. are key to the whole strata of daily life, with all its sociocultural and historical layers, contradictions and idiosyncrasies.
“There’s just the explosion of al pastor places everywhere,” says USC professor Sarah Portnoy, creator and producer of the documentary “Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories.” “Especially since the pandemic.”
Two factors converged here.
First, the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration after 2016 forced many local governments, including Los Angeles, to liberalize street vending rules, an effort to protect undocumented residents from threatened deportation sweeps. Then the pandemic hit. Its closures and layoffs in the service sector forced many workers to seek a living selling food on the street and food made in home kitchens via social media.
There is no known figure for how many street taqueros work in the region today. The last estimate of street vendors in L.A. County was made pre-pandemic and held at 50,000, about 10,000 of which were estimated to be food vendors, according to Doug Smith of the nonprofit Inclusive Action for the City. The actual current figure is likely higher.
In 2023, street vending became legal in California. But as local jurisdictions were left to make their own rules interpreting the state law, taqueros and all street food vendors have been left in a precarious legal gray zone. The permitting process in Los Angeles County has so far proved too costly and archaic to work for most, several taqueros told me.
“It’s rooted in a history of animus toward street vending and efforts to exclude street vendors,” says Smith. “There’s also a history of racist exclusion of street vendors and their communities, and that’s deep-seated.”
In recent years, taco vendors have more frequently appeared in news stories documenting incidents of violence, intimidation, theft, harassment and even fatal attacks, frequently with a racial tinge. In addition, competition between taqueros on public streets sometimes escalates to confrontations.
But these stories, though distressing, do not reflect the greater L.A. vibe when it comes to street tacos.
“Just in my neighborhood there’s like, I don’t know, five, six big al pastor places with the lights every night, all the time, and lines,” Portnoy says of changes she’s witnessed since the pandemic and the legalization of street vendors. “People who probably would have been much more hesitant to eat street tacos before, it’s part of their culinary landscape.”
Jose Robles, 23, has been working at Los 2 Poblanos since he was 18.
A heavy dollop of guacamole is key at this Tijuana-style spot. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
How taqueros are born
It is a cool Sunday evening in July and Jose Robles is at the grill making tacos on a Compton sidewalk for the stand Tacos Los 2 Poblanos. He’s 23, a second-generation Angeleno, and has been a taquero for five years — since he was 18.
Meeting him on this night, I am struck that he is one of hundreds of taqueros working in the city at this exact same moment. Each, I think, had to start somewhere.
“I dropped out of college because of some problems at home, and I needed to pay bills,” he says. “It was just me and my mom. A friend hooked me up with this job right here. This is my first job ever.”
It’s one of two jobs the Lynwood native now maintains plus his own taquero business. At Los 2 Poblanos, where he works some weekend nights, two ladies next to him hand-press tortillas, and at least one person handles cash and aguas frescas. There’s al pastor and asada. Smoke sizzles in the air as Robles goes, loading tortillas and slapping the formed tacos with a heavy dollop of pure guacamole — the signal that this is a Tijuana-style spot.
The taquero says he started out taking down orders, then moved onto chopping cilantro and onion. One day, the stand was extra busy. Robles says he picked up the knife and got to it.
“I make the tacos the way I would eat them, the way I would prepare them,” he says with a proud smile. “That’s how I do it for the people.”
And another L.A. taquero was born.
Eat your way across L.A.
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