LA Taco Weekend Taco Madness Festival Takes Place Amid Funding Crisis

One Wednesday night in April, taquero Víctor Villa drank beer from a large gold cup. A crowd gathered to help celebrate.

Surrounded by fans and a Sierra band, the owner of Villa's Tacos in Highland Park had just taken home LA Taco's annual Taco Madness award. The independent news site awards the coveted local honor after collecting readers' votes for weeks in a tournament-style bracket. The competition is fierce and underlines the impact LA Taco has on the community.

Their influence is felt more urgently this year as LA Taco staff calls for new member subscriptions and donations amid a funding crisis.

“LA Taco is going through tough times right now and we are here to help you through those tough times,” Villa said during his acceptance speech. The trophy is normally awarded during the Taco Madness festival, but due to heavy rain and the publication's financial problems, the event was postponed until Saturday. During the impromptu trophy ceremony, held in the parking lot of Villa's restaurant, appreciation for Los Angeles tacos (and LA Taco) flowed freely.

“I hope you can support LA Taco, I hope you sign up for membership or make a donation,” Villa told the crowd. “Good journalism like LA Taco deserves to be alive forever and ever, which is why this drink is for Highland Park, this drink is for all of Los Angeles and this drink is for LA Taco.”

The James Beard Award-winning publication planned to publicly share that it had run out of money after the annual food festival, but when a rain delay caused a postponement, it forced editor-in-chief Javier Cabral. On April 11, Cabral took to social media: LA Taco had run out of money and was facing layoffs.

The local outlet dedicated to city news, cultural reviews and essays, food guides and everything related to tacos would need 5,000 new paid members, with subscriptions ranging from $5.95 to $19.95 per month, before the end of April. Meanwhile, three of its four full-time employees, not including Cabral, would be laid off.

An immediate outpouring of new subscribers and support helped shorten the team's furlough, bringing its full-time staff back for at least two weeks at a time. A boom in merchandise sales — the most the company has ever sold, Cabral said — also helped the team. But they are by no means clear, staff said.

On Thursday, an anonymous donor offered to match the cost of 15 memberships, as long as 15 new members signed up within 24 hours.

“We learn as we go,” Cabral said. “In Spanish there is a saying that says: 'You learn a lot', you only learn when they hit you and you get up. “I think that’s where we are now: resurrected and trying to work our way through it.” ‍

His tenure began with a six-month contract and a promise to extend it if he could increase website traffic and readers; He served as editor-in-chief after the departure of current LA Times Food editor Daniel Hernandez. (Hernández maintains a stake in the company but does not participate in any operations).

“Tacos have literally given me everything in my life,” Cabral said. He has served as a restaurant scout for former LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold, producer of the popular Netflix show “The Taco Chronicles” and co-author of two cookbooks with Guelaguetza owner Bricia López. Tacos also led him to his now wife, food writer and recipe developer Paola Briseño González, who is also a contributor to the LA Times; She approached Cabral after reading a 2011 article in Saveur about tracing his Mexican heritage through food.

LA Taco was founded in 2006 by editor Alex Blazedale and deputy editor Hadley Tomicki.

“We've all seen the writing on the wall for a long time,” said Memo Torres, a part-time LA Taco employee and contributor for five years. “When we found out that we had officially run out of money and would have to suspend work, it was very difficult to hear. When we finally started breaking our silence, posting it on Twitter and seeing the response from everyone in Los Angeles, it was very emotional. “The overwhelming amount of support is truly heartwarming.”

LA Taco editor-in-chief Javier Cabral, photographed in 2020.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

On Saturday, about a dozen vendors will descend on LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, near Olvera Street, with tacos, micheladas and other items for sale. Admission to Taco Madness is $10 per person, but members attend for free and vendors retain their net profits for the day.

Villa's Tacos, which is also on the list LA Times' 101 Best Restaurants, will offer asada cheese tacos and potato and cheese tacos with chorizo ​​and black beans, served on freshly pressed blue corn tortillas. Other vendors include 2023 vegan Taco Madness winner Evil Cooks; Taco Madness winner, 2023 best of show Tacos La Carreta; Ditroit; Don Cuco Tacos; Dog 110; The Russian; Simon; and more.

Mexico City's culinary tour guide, Curious Mexican, will be on hand to judge this year's festival, among others, contributing his experience as an authority in one of the world's taco capitals. This year's event will feature something completely new: LA Taco's own wine.

Victor Villa's daughter holds his restaurant's trophy high during the impromptu awards ceremony in April. Villa and his team will be present at the Taco Madness festival on Saturday.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

When Cabral posted about the call for memberships, one of the first to respond was winemaker Adam Vourvoulis of Vin de California. He and his wife, Kate, developed two natural wines, a rosé and a Pinot Noir, for the festival and will donate all proceeds to LA Taco.

LA Taco's new members are around 4,000, still below the publication's goal. In a meeting with editor Blazedale, the deadline was extended to Saturday.

New benefits are regularly implemented to attract subscriptions. Discounts and tacos have long been offered with current LA Taco membership cards or through the publication's app, but the website is frequently updated with new items, like a free café de roca from Long Beach's. James Beard Award Nominated BakeryTaste Bread.

Subscriptions, merchandise sales and donations help cover the cost of overhead for the company, which includes a small office in Chinatown and a full-time team of four with health insurance and benefits.

The team's dedication to mapping the city's ever-growing and evolving taco scene shines in dozens of neighborhood taco guides and spotlights. Almost every day, staff research and visit taquerias across the county, eyeing accessible stands along transit lines, following word of mouth to hyper-regional dishes sold in restaurants, backs of cars or kitchens of private homes. .

Torres travels the region in his truck. For a guide to the best tacos in Pomona, he ate at about a dozen taquerias in a day, timing his visits down to the minute to see the early Saturday morning vendors and then the late-night cooks.

Mariscos Simón truck will serve its taco governor at the Taco Madness festival on Saturday.

(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

“There is a lot of physical work behind the scenes before we even get down to writing,” Torres said. “It's endless. We love it and we enjoy it because we love showing people places that we love to visit, places that we think are unique and that people should know about.”

According to Torres, the publication has been facing financial difficulties for as long as he has been a contributor, characterizing the state of the business as a major loss of patronage away from the turmoil. Multiple sponsorship deals and events were canceled due to the pandemic, which he said hampered LA Taco's growth.

Big advertising deals and occasional windfalls, like a YouTube grant, which resulted in the LA Taco Live video podcast, have helped boost the medium in the past. But 2024 proved noticeably more difficult. According to Cabral, the publication's biggest advertiser said he would renew his previous contract, but then confirmed that he would renew it later than expected and for a smaller amount, which Cabral called “the bitter cherry on top” of months of stress.

Upon hearing the news, LA Taco immediately laid off its staff.

“We ran out of money and waited until the last payment cycle to sound the alarm,” Cabral said. “In retrospect, we should have done this two months, three months [earlier] simply to avoid having to reach this deep area. For now, fortunately, the community is so supportive that we got this injection of money… but we also don't want people to think, 'Okay, they're okay, they're safe,' because that's definitely not the case.”

Cabral said annual membership drives will most likely be necessary for LA Taco's financial success in the future.

Drops in advertising, as well as new practices in search engines, in which artificial intelligence collects and aggregates articles from journalists, diverting traffic, have proven to be an unstable scenario for multiple publications. “As editor-in-chief, I'm obsessed with analytics,” Cabral said, “and what you see is a decrease in views and a lot less time.” [spent] on the website.”

As the media landscape continues to change, Cabral and his team hope to mentor non-traditional writers, such as social media influencers and community voices, through a branch of the company called LA Taco Lab, which Collaborate and highlight new perspectives or personalities while instilling journalistic ethics and other practices. They envision it becoming a nonprofit arm of the publication.

They also plan to launch an LA Taco Discord channel, offering members an online forum to discuss news, upcoming events, and, of course, their favorite tacos. People distrust the media, Cabral said, so he and his team want to keep their journalists and topics accessible and community-oriented. But regardless of the skepticism of the broader media complex, local politics and The changing landscape of local news.Cabral knows something in Los Angeles that always provides common ground.

“Tacos rule this town,” he said. “Los Angeles needs LA Taco because there will always be a need to find the best and there will always be a need to talk about real things when eating the best tacos.”