L.A. TACO is co-publishing this guide with FT Globetrotter, the Financial Times' travel guides to the world's great cities. They cover the art, food, and culture of 20 cities around the world and have just expanded to Los Angeles.
Photos by Maggie Shannon
Olympic Boulevard’s “Taco Row” in Boyle Heights is one of the greatest strips in the world to eat tacos, even by Mexico’s standards. Within a four-block radius lined with drought-stricken trees, dense government housing and the city’s best Latino-owned liquor warehouse, you can easily achieve food euphoria. Every truck and restaurant window has its own regional speciality, and every taco hits those intangible qualities on first bite, over and over and over. The “flavour memory” of these tacos is still fresh, not too far removed from their counterparts in Mexico: the fiery yet tamed heat of a salsa, the tenderness of the meat or freshness of the seafood, and the quality of the tortilla.
This thrill of the hunt is what keeps me going as the editor-in-chief of L.A. Taco, a hyperlocal taco, food culture and investigative news site. I have spent the better part of the past two decades chasing the best taco and writing about it for a living (I’ve co-authored two cookbooks on food eaten with tortillas, and was the scout and associate producer for Netflix’s Taco Chronicles). Tacos are the most direct way to experience Los Angeles and its vast, sometimes overwhelmingly sprawling communities, like a local. It’s the street food that unifies everybody in this city. Los Angeles is home to 30 per cent of Mexican restaurants in the US, and no matter where you’re from, how much this city changes or how much money you make, the one constant will always be our tacos — and the desire to know where to find the best ones.
Chicano Angelenos like myself, who navigate the biculturality of being Mexican but born here in Los Angeles (with the privilege of travelling to Mexico often), know what a good taco should taste and look like. And every year, we watch the taco life in Los Angeles become more robust and specific, leaving all other taco-fuelled US cities in the dust. That flavour memory that I feel on Taco Row is what makes LA the best place to explore Mexico’s tacos: because we are about a two-hour drive from the world’s busiest international border crossing, in Tijuana, many Mexican immigrants end up in Los Angeles, and they have the freshest flavour memory of their state’s regional style. Their urgent need to survive financially in this city (where the cost of living is notoriously high) has propelled Los Angeles further and further into offering tacos that taste like the real deal in Mexico.