Twenty-one. That's the most tacos food reporter Stephanie Breijo ate in a single day while researching our latest team guide, the 101 Best Tacos in Los Angeles.
“The hardest thing about this is that you can’t just try one or two tacos,” Breijo said. “If you’re going to try the menu, you have to try basically everything they offer. It’s not about going to one place and trying one taco. It’s about going to one place and trying, like, seven tacos.”
Get to know Los Angeles through the tacos that bring it to life. From restaurants to trucks, carts and more, here are 101 of the best in town.
In other words, this team was dedicated. In all, the nine editors and writers who worked on the guide sampled hundreds of tacos in nearly every neighborhood in Los Angeles and as far south as the Antelope Valley and Orange County. We visited Michelin-starred taco shops and humble stands with equal enthusiasm, asking colleagues, friends, family, local chefs and celebrities for recommendations along the way.
It's been a wild ride and we decided to lift the curtain a bit and explain how we did it.
The first inklings of this project began to take shape in 2022, following the publication of the Food team’s guide to 38 of the best classic Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles. Section editor Daniel Hernandez wanted us to dig deeper and offer an ambitious, in-depth exploration of the city’s unofficial culinary symbol: the taco. Our general manager, Laurie Ochoa, was on board immediately.
The idea was brought up again late last year. There was no denying that tacos are a centerpiece of our coverage: They appear on restaurant critic Bill Addison’s annual list of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles and in his reviews; on columnist Jenn Harris’s food tours with local celebrities; and in her weekly “Best Things I Ate” column. Breijo features new taco shops in his “Quick Bites” column, and journalist Cindy Carcamo regularly talks to the workers who supply the ingredients and prepare the tacos in her behind-the-scenes coverage of the food industry.
As it turned out, this team was packed with taco knowledge.
Ochoa has a long history of covering the city’s taco scene, once alongside the late Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. Previously, Hernandez relaunched the local taco-focused site LA Taco and spent nearly a decade eating tacos full-time in Mexico City. Tacos are a frequent fixture in the map guides I run, and deputy editor Betty Hallock, co-author of “Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen,” is often the one to point us to new taco trends and stories. Additionally, Times OC reporter Sarah Mosqueda, a former restaurant owner, joined the project and offered invaluable insight into Orange County’s thriving taco scene.
Inspired by the 101 Best Restaurants guide, we took on the challenge of highlighting the region’s 101 best tacos. Rather than ranking them as a team, we invited Addison to separately share his highlights as critics’ picks—the best of the best. But first, we had to agree on the parameters of what could be considered a taco.
Sure, the basic components include a tortilla topped with protein and vegetables, herbs, and optional sauces, but there are endless ways to adapt each of those ingredients. Is it still a taco if it’s folded in half and fried? What if it’s rolled into a tight cylinder? Isn’t a taquito, by definition, a “small taco”?
Our first in-person meeting took place in February at Bee Taqueria in West Adams, where we began brainstorming the list. We were hesitant about whether to include seafood or dessert tacos (yes to the former, no to the latter). We were torn about including unconventional, fusion versions of tacos. Slowly, a more traditionalist approach would gain ground, and the list would heavily emphasize the strengths of classic L.A. taco styles.
“It’s a point worth repeating: We’re not talking about enchiladas or burritos here,” Hernandez said. “Early in our research, we decided that all the taco- or tortilla-based varieties of the dish, including mulitas and sopes, would prove too chaotic a combination to tackle. So while for many ‘tacos’ and ‘Mexican food’ are synonymous, our journalists focused on the main dish, the basic unit: the taco.”
Even with these guidelines, there were exceptions. On the final list you'll find a few flautas, tacos dorados, taquitos, and a Sinaloa-style chorreada with a fried tostada. Only a handful of more innovative and cross-cultural options were chosen, as all of them seemed essential to describing the city's modern taco scene.
We featured standout dishes, many from the 101 Best Restaurants and Addison Hall of Fame lists: Mariscos Jalisco, Holbox, El Ruso, Sonoratown. Each entry was assigned to a writer to check for quality and flavor. Those of us who had prior experience or knowledge of a particular taco shop volunteered for those entries. The writers reviewed previous reviews and food coverage. We proposed our favorite neighborhood taco stands and little-known spots that should receive wider recognition.
With a tentative list already at over 101, we got down to eating. Nearly every entry on the list was reviewed by at least two writers, and often by three or four. Sometimes we disagreed about which taco to include, so we asked someone else on the team to eat them and give feedback. As is standard practice at The Times, we paid for every taco we consumed.
We looked at the flexibility of the tortillas, whether they were handmade, sourced from a local vendor, or made from corn or flour. We looked at the taco fillings and how they were prepared. Were the meats sliced from a huge trompo, grilled, braised in a stew, or marinated for hours or days beforehand? We rated the selection of salsas and the freshness of the chopped onion, cilantro, and radish toppings.
Once or twice a month, we food writers would gather for tacos and chat about our progress. At Balam in Lynwood, Mercado La Paloma in historic South-Central, and Grand Central Market downtown, we would campaign for our favorites and debate the merits of those we weren’t sure about.
As we moved to confirm the second half of the list, other factors became more important. We looked at whether the guide was geographically inclusive and whether we were broadly representative of the city’s scene.
Were there enough Baja-style fish tacos on the list? Were there too many al pastor options? Did we have enough coverage in the San Fernando Valley?
“For a lot of us, our favorite tacos and the ones we like the most are the ones that are closest to us,” Hallock said. “For me, the closest one was the one on Avenue 26 in Alameda. I knew I didn’t want to cover that; I let someone else do that. I think the important thing for me was to explore other parts of Los Angeles that weren’t my neighborhood. I felt like I had some sort of inner compass that guided me south.”
Assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey sits in a taco trance.
As project manager, I focused on our end goal. Every now and then, someone would suggest a place that felt like an integral part of a neighborhood or that they had a special connection to, but that was perhaps more notable for, say, chilaquiles or burritos than tacos.
“Is this one of the 101 best tacos in Los Angeles?” I persisted.
In a group spreadsheet, I created a color-coded tab to visually track the variety of tacos. This highlighted an unintentional oversight: Many of our favorite tacos had meat fillings. To satisfy vegan and vegetarian readers, we created an additional guide featuring plant-based tacos selected from the taco shops on the larger list.
We encountered more obstacles along the way.
A handful of taco shops closed before our list was published. Other places made a good first impression but proved inconsistent on the second or third tasting. Nearly all of us suffered indigestion while researching this list. (“My stomach hasn’t been right for months,” Harris said.) There was at least one confirmed case of food poisoning.
“I had high hopes for the potato tacos and it should be hard to mess them up, but at three places I went, the potato tacos were really disappointing,” Harris said of her biggest disappointment when researching the list.
The taco treasures we unearthed were worth these minor disappointments. We revisited the taco joints we first profiled in Gold’s “Counter Intelligence” column and found them just as reliable decades later. We stood in line at viral street stands to confirm that the hype was well-deserved. Our own assumptions changed as we sampled and fell in love with unusual combinations, like a crunchy taco with ground beef and pickles.
“What I liked most was rediscovering places I had forgotten,” Cárcamo said. “Lola Gaspar is a great example of that. It’s in my neighborhood and I hadn’t been there for years. I think sometimes you get into a routine of going to the same places.”
Addison, who estimates he ate more than 80 percent of the tacos on the list, refined and reworked his critics' recommendations until the last possible moment.
“Even though it’s so concise, I would love for readers who read this list to finish it and say, ‘Okay, I got it.’ You’ll never be able to try every possible expression of what it means to eat tacos in Los Angeles, but with this list you get a good idea,” she said.
For a brief, terrifying moment, it seemed like we wouldn't have… enough Tacos that lived up to the expectations we had set for ourselves, so the writers again undertook one last taco research effort to get to the finish line. We met again after the 4th of July weekend and discovered that we now had the opposite problem. We had over 101 tacos that we loved.
With the fervor of a high school debate, we discussed our final selections. We made a few last-minute changes.
At some point we realized that there will always be a new taquero or taquera to discover, another one that closes their shop, or an unknown taco stand that lights up the corner of a major avenue. Consider this list as an introduction to our city's most beloved dish (a staple dish, if you will) right now.
In the end, we learned that to define the L.A. taco scene is to try to avoid it. As Ochoa said, “That’s the nature of tacos in L.A.”
