[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]n the Santa Clarita Valley in northeast L.A. County — yes, home of Six Flags Magic Mountain and Cal-Arts — where I’ve lived since the unbearably sleepy early nineties, reliable sources of tasty pleasure have always been few and far between. My memory is dotted with the equally sudden emergences and disappearances of restaurants throughout the loose pack of neighborhoods that makes up our little city: Newhall, Valencia, Saugus, Canyon Country.
To this day, almost nothing truly great stays around here for long.
The Los Angeles Times has written that plans to build entirely new cities within the valley limits go back at least two decades. With the land here in such high demand – for developers and filmmakers, opioid addicts and award-winning chefs – it is shocking that so many family businesses have not only kept going, but have in some cases thrived. Any collective sense of identity that might have existed in a bygone version of Santa Clarita has shifted into an amorphous multicultural stew of survivor’s pride.
Nowhere is that shared spirit more clearly reflected than in our regional food culture, which, as I wrote multiple times for LA Weekly last year, is in the midst of a locally-owned, locally-made renaissance. As “Awesometown” fractured and rebuilt itself time and time again, it has also given space to a variety of new businesses, including several taquerias that challenge years of favoritism towards the stalwarts.