Tacos have given me everything in my life: My career, my wife, my home, and they remain my daily muse. But last week, my voracious pursuit to find the next best taco in L.A. nearly cost me my life.
Whenever I see a new regional taco style unlocked in our beautiful city of tacos that has never been covered before, I become possessed with a burning desire to cover it immediately.
Nixtamal attracts me like one of those cartoon characters floating through the air, following the scent of food, and I will stop at nothing to go and try any place going through the effort to make handmade corn tortillas: driving, walking, taking the bus, biking, running, however I get there, but as long as I get there.
In this case, it was Los Trompos Taquería in downtown Long Beach, the first taco shop to open in L.A., specializing in all-beef trompos such as arrachera (skirt steak), picanha, and the first to offer “gaonera” tacos in L.A., which is now the famed cut of thinly sliced, pounded beef tenderloin, seared with lard on a plancha, served in Mexico City’s famous 1-Michelin-star taquería, El Califa De León.
New York got their beef trompo in May of last year via Santo Taco’s New York Strip steak trompo, and I can 100% objectively vouch that it is equally as delicious as the best I’ve had in Mexico City. Los Trompos is not even a month old, and they already have lines of up to 45 minutes on weeknights. Before Los Trompos, I knew that Distrito Catorce in Boyle Heights had recently started offering beef trompo tacos for dinner as well.
Beef trompos are rare, even in Mexico, since pork al pastor is the king of trompos around the country. The first all-skirt steak trompo I tasted was at Los Parados more than a decade ago, where the meat was served medium-rare and still pink in the slices.
In today’s Mexico City taco culture, beef trompos are all the rage right now. At La Once Mil, their picanha trompo is the most ordered taco and the reason people line up for more than an hour to try it. At Tacos Del Valle, people wait up to three hours on a Sunday to get a plate of all three trompos they offer: pork belly adobabada, al pastor negro (with Yucatán recado negro used as base), and their “carne asada” beef trompo.
Last Tuesday, as soon as I wrapped up my morning duties at L.A. TACO, I unglued myself from my home desk and started to drive to try the new taquería. I usually welcome the opportunity to bike if staying local, but on this day, because I had a vet appointment for my 13-year-old dog, I drove. (You tend to hyper-obsess over these details when you have a near-death experience, by the way.)
I’ve done this drive hundreds of times in my life. Quick, easy dashes for lunch that anyone with a vehicle can make without a second thought. This was that same damn drive on the same street I’ve driven through hundreds of times ... until it wasn’t.
The traffic light was off. And as I proceeded with caution after stopping, a V8 Dodge Durango was coming from the cross street. I was lucky that I had cleared 75% of the intersection and that the brunt of the truck’s full-frontal impact went towards the rear driver-side passenger seat, though it still caught a good chunk of my door.
The driver hit me hard enough that my vehicle did a complete 180. I had no idea what was even happening since I’ve been lucky enough to be born and raised in Los Angeles and never been in a car accident before, since I got my driver’s license at 16.
However, shoutout to my brain for having the power to slow down time. I found out instantly that the “it all happened in slow motion” cliché is absolutely true.” If you grew up in the 90s playing through Rockstar’s Max Payne’s revolutionary “bullet time” gameplay, this was exactly that, but with two vehicles colliding rather than bullets.
The other driver hit me so hard that I rear-ended a utility truck parked in front of the bus stop. The impact was strong enough for my glasses to fly off my head, landing in the furthest corner of the backseat.
Sooner than I knew it, I was pushing the stuck driver’s side door with my shoulder and getting out of the car, under my own strength. The smell of burnt plastic began to reek, and everything in my body told me to get the fuck out of my car.
After I realized my car wasn’t going to explode, I crawled back into it two different times to look for my glasses and couldn’t find them for the life of me. The third time I pulled a Velma, once I crawled into the backseat, I found them in the no man’s land known as under the passenger seat.
I was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, taking photos and registering what had just happened. Checking in with the other driver and asking him in Spanish if he was okay. He was shaken up, but fortunately not visibly hurt.
A lady came up to me and told me, “Hey, if I were you, I would sit down, your accident looks pretty bad.”
Within minutes, police arrived, took down my information and everyone else's. My wife assembled a team in minutes, and one of my closest friends and neighbors arrived to help me collect myself shortly after, and then two other friends. The adrenaline was slowly exiting my body, and the whiplash started to hit me ... like a dropkick to my spine. Stiffness and spasms across my lower back, neck, and hips. It all felt like a hangover from the cask strength dose of reality I just took to the dome.
Everyone insisted I go to urgent care to get checked out, so I did. The doctor cleared me to go and advised against “getting radiated” because I appeared to have no broken bones or fractures.
When I was waiting at urgent care, I got a sudden urge to cry, and I kind of tried, but old machismo habits die hard, and I couldn’t get the waterworks to activate, so I just focused on the positives instead of the shoulda, woulda, couldas of it all.
I got some muscle relaxants prescribed in case I needed them that night, as all the adrenaline left my body and just left me alone with the “soft animal” of my body. I never heard so many neck and back cracks in my body that night as I tossed and turned trying to get some sleep.
But funnily enough, I still mourned not making it to the tacos that day. Again, it’s funny; the things you obsess over during these critical moments.
The next day, I couldn’t move out of the physical and emotional exhaustion of it all, so I just doomscrolled and binged on half a pound each of mesquite-grilled carne asada and crispy tripa that Jennifer Feltham of Sonoratown was kind enough to deliver to me.
The following day, I woke up and only had one thing on my mind: I had to get to the taquería to try those tacos. As soon as I got through editorial duties at TACO for the day, I rented a car just to drive to this taquería.
The anticipation of finally trying L.A.’s first stab at a beef trompo, two days after getting into an accident and losing my car over it, was unlike the anxiety I’ve felt for any other taco I’ve covered.
In the very slow, overly cautious drive there, I felt like I was driving up to a doctor to either get some very good or very bad news. Walking up to Los Trompos, there was a line of about 25 people, which is crazy for a taquería in L.A., with the exception of Villa’s Tacos on a good day, or maybe a raging Taco Tuesday.
Influencers got to Los Trompos as soon as they opened, and raved about it like the second coming of Christ. And hey, if done well, it could have very well been in our city’s taco-fueled way of life, rising as it did among pork pastor-dominated taco life.
L.A. TACO’s OG staff photographer and IT, Erwin “Los Ojos” Recinos, stopped by first to scope it out and loved it. He verified that Los Trompos is descended from Downey’s great local Don Goyo chain of taquería.
My first impression was the huge menu, complete with possibly every single evolution of a taco available, like carne asada fries and sopes, and everything in between. This usually does not bode well when trying out a new restaurant. I usually abide by the Japanese-style “they-only-have-one-thing-on-the-menu” sect of food worship.
A case study of that in action is my favorite taquería in Mexico City: Tacos El Torito (its original location, which has been open since 1957, not the one half a block away). They only offer suadero and tripa on their menu—and that’s it. Next time you go, try a campechano there and then the same taco at Los Cocuyos, which has a wider menu, and report back.
Another thing I noticed: the business has separate prices for credit cards and cash on the menu, like a gas station. It was also immediately evident that they were working out their kitchen flow after becoming an overnight success. As I waited patiently, observing my surroundings, people had that “if looks can kill” hangry expression on their faces.
But for me, since I was here strictly for business, I stuck to tacos. Also, because ordering more layered offerings like a mulita or a torta jams up the line. I got my tacos in less than five minutes.
As a taco-obsessed person who has traveled through most of Mexico, eating different regional styles of tacos, both corn and flour tortillas, and studying each taco’s history, I realize that my highly privileged opinion is not the average take on these tacos. Furthermore, they just opened. And I’m positive they will work stuff out to be the great tacos they imagine the concept to be.
But the first red flag was the watery salsas, which lacked texture and freshness, and the absence of a taquería guacamole.
The second red flag was the handmade corn tortillas that left your hands smelling like burnt rubber, an indication that someone had added too much lime (the mineral, not the fruit) to alkalize the corn.
I don’t think Los Angeles is ready to accept that making handmade tortillas does not automatically make them superior. But in Mexico, there is actually a term for tortillas that have too much calcium hydroxide: “encalada,” which literally means “it has too much cal[cium] in it.”
The last strike was the extremely overcooked, leathery picanha trompo, which is incredibly hard to prepare on a cut of beef covered in a half-inch layer of fat. It was completely inedible, but my 13-year-old Old English Sheepdog scarfed it down when I brought the meat back to her. Mind you, I was starving, but even in my depraved ways, I couldn’t do it.
Their version of a gaonera, which is usually thinly sliced beef tenderloin, featured thinly sliced ribeye. It was a well-marbled, beautiful cut of beef, so I think it was overkill to marinate or season it with L.A.-style, bright-red carne asada seasonings. That taco came on a bed of guacamole at least, which was welcome, but again, I wish there were taquería guacamole available for the rest of the tacos. It’s a standard issue in every other L.A. taquería.
The best taco was Los Trompos’ traditional al pastor, which was well-charred and fattier than the leaner cuts of pork used in most al pastor in L.A. However, my hyper-spoiled ways wished they hadn’t finished it on the plancha, like the rest of their tacos.
With a tip, three tacos, and a Topo Chico, it came out to $25. But after insurance and without gap coverage, these tacos cost me tens of thousands of dollars, effectively making them the most expensive tacos I’ve ever had in my life.
But you live, and you lean, and you smile now and cry later, and life goes on. But in their current state, I do wonder whether some of their customers who haven’t written a story in defense of expensive tacos will judge them harshly too and deem them too expensive. I’ve already received DMs from friends who were turned off by the wait and the disorganization in the kitchen.
Were these tacos worth getting t-boned for? Absolutely not.
Los Trompos owes me absolutely nothing, and I realize that my expectations of their tacos went up so much more after my near-death experience. This is not a restaurant review; it's a personal closure statement because, as a writer, that’s all I know how to do to process heavy moments and move on with my life.
But in a few months, or even a year, once Los Trompos dial it in, they could be one of L.A.’s best taquerías for the majority of their customers. For now, I think I still prefer to save my craving for beef trompo tacos for my next trip to Mexico City or New York.
Los Trompos ~ 421 W. Broadway Suite 521, Long Beach, CA 90802
