We ate hundreds of tacos to find the 101 best. Here's how the whole process went (2024)

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 you can’t just try one or two tacos,” Breijo said. “If you’re going to test the menu, you have to try basically the entire breadth of what they offer. It’s not just going to one place and trying one taco. It’s going to one place and trying like seven tacos.”

In other words, this team was dedicated. Altogether, the nine editors and writers who worked on the guide tried hundreds of tacos across almost every L.A. neighborhood and as far as Antelope Valley and the southern end of Orange County. We visited Michelin-nodded taquerias and humble puestos with equal exuberance, tapping colleagues, friends, family, local chefs and celebrities for recommendations along the way.

It’s been a wild ride, and we’ve decided to raise the curtain a bit and lay out how we did it.

The first inklings of this project began to crystallize 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 instantly on board.

The idea was raised again at the end of last year. There was no denying that tacos are a core feature of our coverage: They appear throughout restaurant critic Bill Addison’s annual ranked list of the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles and in his reviews; in columnist Jenn Harris’ food crawls with local celebrities and her weekly “Best Things I Ate” column. Breijo unveils new taquerias in her “Quick Bites” column, and reporter Cindy Carcamo regularly speaks to the workers who supply ingredients for and prepare tacos in her behind-the-scenes food industry coverage.

As it turned out, this team is replete with taco knowledge.

Ochoa has a decades-long history of covering the city’s taco scene, once alongside The Times’ late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. Hernandez previously relaunched the local taco-centric site L.A. Taco and spent nearly a decade eating tacos full-time in Mexico City. Tacos are a frequent feature in the mapped guides that I helm, and deputy editor Betty Hallock, who co-authored “Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen,” is often the one pointing us to new taco trends and stories. Additionally, Times O.C. reporter Sarah Mosqueda, a former restaurant proprietor herself, came on board for the project and offered invaluable insight to the thriving taco scene in Orange County.

Inspired by the 101 Best Restaurants guide, we accepted the challenge of highlighting the 101 best tacos in the region. Rather than rank them as a team, we invited Addison to separately share his highlights as critic’s choices — the best of the best. But first, we had to agree on the parameters of what could be considered a taco.

It’s true that the basic components include a tortilla topped with protein and optional veggies, herbs and salsas, but there are seemingly infinite 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 “tiny taco”?

Our first in-person meeting was held in February at Bee Taqueria in West Adams, where we began to ideate the list. We puzzled over whether to include mariscos or dessert tacos (yes to the former, no to the latter). We were divided over the inclusion of unconventional and fusion taco takes. Gradually, a more traditionalist approach would win over, with the list largely emphasizing the strengths of the classic styles of tacos in L.A.

“It’s a point worth repeating: We’re not talking about enchiladas or burritos here,” said Hernandez. “Early in our research, we decided that all taco- or tortilla-based varieties of the dish including mulitas and sopes would prove too chaotic a spread to tackle. So while in many eyes ‘tacos’ and ‘Mexican food’ are synonymous, our journalists zeroed in on the core 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 Sinaloan-style chorreada with a fried tostada. Only a handful of more innovative, cross-cultural options skirted through, as all of them felt essential to describing the city’s modern taco scene.

We pitched the obvious heavy hitters, many of them from Addison’s 101 Best Restaurants and Hall of Fame lists: Mariscos Jalisco, Holbox, El Ruso, Sonoratown. Every proposed entry was assigned to a writer to verify the quality and taste. Those of us who had prior experience with or knowledge of a particular taqueria volunteered for those entries. The writers combed through past Food reviews and coverage. We proposed our favorite neighborhood taco stands and little-known spots overdue for wider recognition.

With a tentative list that already exceeded 101, we set about eating. Nearly every entry on the list was vetted by at least two writers, and often three or four. Sometimes we disagreed on which taco to feature, so we’d ask another person on the team to eat them and give their opinion. As is standard practice at The Times, we paid for every single taco we consumed.

We considered the pliability of the tortillas, whether they were hand formed, sourced from a local vendor, or made with corn or flour. We reviewed the taco fillings and how they were prepared. Were meats sliced from a towering trompo, grilled on a plancha, braised in a stew or marinated for hours or days beforehand? We graded the salsa selection and the freshness of chopped onion, cilantro and radish toppings.

Once or twice a month, Food writers met over tacos and discussed our progress. At Balam in Lynwood, Mercado La Paloma in Historic South-Central and Grand Central Market downtown, we campaigned for our favorites and debated the merits of those we were unsure about.

As we moved to confirm the second half of the list, other factors increased in importance. We considered whether the guide was geographically inclusive and if we were generally representing the full scope of the city’s scene.

Were there enough Baja-style fish tacos on the list? Were al pastor options overrepresented? Did we have enough coverage in San Fernando Valley?

“For so many of us our favorite tacos and our go-to tacos are the ones closest to us,” said Hallock. “For me, the closest was Avenue 26 on Alameda. I knew I didn’t want to cover that; I let someone else do it. I think what was important to me was to explore other parts of L.A. that were not my neighborhood. I felt like I had some sort of inner compass that led me south.”

Assistant Food editor Danielle Dorsey sits in a taco trance.

As project manager, I kept us focused on our end goal. Occasionally someone would suggest somewhere that felt integral to a neighborhood or that they had a special connection to but that perhaps excelled more at, say, chilaquiles or burritos than tacos.

“Is this one of the 101 best tacos in L.A.?” I’d press.

On a group spreadsheet, I created a color-coded tab to visually track the range of tacos. This illuminated an unintentional oversight: many of our favorite tacos had meat fillings. To satisfy vegan and vegetarian readers, we created a bonus guide with plant-based tacos culled from the taquerias on the larger list.

We encountered more obstacles along the way.

A handful of taquerias closed before our list was published. Other spots delivered a good first impression only to prove inconsistent on second or third tastings. Nearly all of us suffered indigestion while researching this list. (“My stomach hasn’t been right for months,” said Harris.) There was at least one confirmed case of food poisoning.

“I really got my hopes up for potato tacos and they should be hard to mess them up, but three places I went to had really disappointing potato tacos,” said Harris, on her biggest letdown while researching the list.

The taco troves unearthed were worth these minor disappointments. We revisited taquerias first reviewed in Gold’s “Counter Intelligence” column and found them just as dependable decades later. We waited in line at viral street stands to affirm the hype was well earned. Our own assumptions changed as we tried and came to love unusual combinations, like a crispy taco with ground beef and dill pickle.

“My favorite thing was rediscovering places that I had kind of forgotten about,” Carcamo said. “Lola Gaspar is a really great example of that. It’s in my neighborhood and I hadn’t been in years. I think sometimes you get in the pattern of going to the same places.”

Addison, who estimates he ate over 80% of the tacos on the list, refined and reworked his critic’s picks until the last possible moment.

“Even as succinct as it is, I would love for readers who run through this list to finish and be like, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ You’ll never be able to taste every possible expression of what it means to eat tacos in L.A., but you’ve got a good working idea with this list,” he said.

For a brief, scary moment, it looked like we wouldn’t have enough tacos that rose to the bar we had set, so writers set out again for a final push of taco research to get us to the finish line. We reconvened after the Fourth of July weekend only to discover that we now had the opposite problem. We had more than 101 tacos we absolutely loved.

With the fervor of a high school debate match, we argued our final selections. We made a few last-minute swaps.

At some point we realized that there will always be a new taquero or taquera to discover, another one closing up shop, or an unfamiliar taco truck lighting up the corner of a major thoroughfare. Consider this list an introduction to our city’s most beloved dish — a 101 course, if you will — at this point in time.

Ultimately, we learned that to define L.A.’s taco scene is to attempt to bottle lightning. As Ochoa said: “That’s just the nature of tacos in Los Angeles.”