King Taco

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• Top 6 Tacos in Los Angeles

  Currently #4 · score 0

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• Guisados

  "Guisados" means "stews" in Spanish, and that's exactly what fills the small, hand-pressed corn tortillas at the restaurant of the same name — a format more common on home stoves in Mexico than on American taco menus, built around braised meat and vegetable fillings rather than anything grilled. Armando De La Torre Sr. opened the original Boyle Heights location in 2010 around that idea, encouraging customers to order several small tacos instead of committing to just one — a built-in tasting-menu structure most taquerias don't offer. The fillings rotate through a wide range — cochinita pibil, mole, chicharrón, and vegetarian options like squash blossom all show up regularly — each one built around a slow-cooked stew rather than a quickly grilled protein, which gives the kitchen a very different rhythm than a griddle-and-trompo taco stand. That format rewards ordering a mixed plate rather than committing to a single filling. From the original Boyle Heights location, Guisados has expanded to multiple Los Angeles neighborhoods, including Echo Park, downtown, and Highland Park, while keeping the same small-tortilla, stew-based format at every location — a rare instance of a concept scaling without diluting what made the original distinctive. Late Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold was among the writers who championed Guisados early, recognition that helped establish the small-tortilla stewed-taco format as a legitimate Los Angeles taco tradition in its own right, alongside the more familiar street-cart and truck styles. That the format has held up across multiple locations, rather than being a one-off Boyle Heights specialty, speaks to how well-suited the stew approach is to consistent, replicable execution. Order five different fillings across five tiny tortillas instead of committing to one — that's the built-in advantage of a menu organized around braises instead of a single grilled protein.

• Mariscos Jalisco

  Mariscos Jalisco is a taco truck parked in Boyle Heights, founded and still run by Raul Ortega, built around Sinaloa- and Jalisco-style seafood rather than the grilled meats most Los Angeles taco trucks specialize in. The truck has spent years building a reputation almost entirely through word of mouth and food-writer attention rather than any deliberate marketing push. The taco dorado de camarón — a whole shrimp folded into a corn tortilla and fried to a crisp golden shell, then topped with avocado, salsa, and a squeeze of lime — is the dish the truck is known for, and it's widely cited as one of the best individual tacos in Los Angeles by critics and taco obsessives alike. It's a genuinely different textural experience than a typical soft taco, closer to eating a fried shrimp wrapped in crisp tortilla than a conventional taco. Ortega's work at Mariscos Jalisco has drawn serious recognition within the professional food world, not just enthusiastic customer word of mouth — LA Weekly named it one of the city's 99 Essential Restaurants, the kind of attention that's rare for a truck operating out of a single Boyle Heights parking lot rather than a standalone restaurant. The truck's reputation has grown enough that it now draws customers driving in from as far as San Diego, well beyond the neighborhood it's parked in. That a single seafood-focused taco truck, run by one family without a brick-and-mortar expansion, has held its reputation as one of the best taco stops in the entire city for years is an outlier in a food scene that usually rewards scale. Ortega never franchised and never opened a second truck; the line still stretches down the block on a Tuesday afternoon anyway.

• Yuca's

  Cochinita pibil — slow-roasted, citrus-marinated pork, one of the signature dishes of Yucatán, a Mexican regional cuisine that was genuinely rare in Los Angeles when Yuca's opened — is still the dish most closely associated with the restaurant. Socorro "Mama" Herrera started serving it out of a small hut behind a Los Feliz laundromat in April 1976, and the family has since opened a second branch in Pasadena, run by Herrera's daughter Dora, but the original Los Feliz hut has stayed the one most identified with the name. The physical setup has stayed almost defiantly modest — a walk-up counter with a handful of outdoor seats, no real dining room to speak of, the kind of place that looks, from the street, like exactly the small family operation it's always been rather than a destination restaurant. That modesty is part of the story, not a limitation the family has tried to outgrow. Yuca's received the James Beard Foundation's America's Classics award, a national honor specifically created to recognize small, beloved, community-rooted restaurants rather than fine-dining destinations — validation that matched what Los Feliz regulars had already known for years about a laundromat-adjacent hut serving some of the city's best Yucatecan cooking. That combination — a tiny physical footprint, a specific regional Mexican cuisine most Angelenos hadn't encountered before Yuca's introduced it to the neighborhood, and a national award recognizing exactly that kind of small, unglamorous excellence — is what makes Yuca's such a distinct entry on any Los Angeles taco list. The James Beard Foundation doesn't hand out America's Classics awards to hide a restaurant's modesty; it hands them out because of it.

• Tacos 1986

  Tacos 1986 began in November 2018, when founder Victor Delgado and co-founder Jorge "Joy" Alvarez started selling Tijuana-style tacos out of carts in a Hollywood parking lot, after Delgado — unable to find the tacos he'd grown up eating — decided to bring that specific Baja California style to Los Angeles himself. The name commemorates Delgado's birth year rather than any historical date, a personal reference point for a menu built specifically around Tijuana's taco tradition rather than the more common central-Mexican styles found across most of the city. Early word of mouth grew fast enough to draw attention from chefs and food outlets like Eater and LA Taco, but the cart operation ran into real growing pains — friction with landlords and a March 2019 health department shutdown — before the team opened their first storefront in downtown Los Angeles that June. The adobada — marinated, griddle-cooked pork served on a small flour tortilla rather than the corn tortilla most Los Angeles taco spots default to — is the signature order, finished with a red and green salsa combination and shredded cabbage that mark it as distinctly Tijuana-style rather than a generalized "street taco." What began as two founders and a handful of carts has grown into a genuine multi-location presence across Los Angeles and beyond, with storefronts spread from Beverly Grove to Sherman Oaks to Northridge, plus expansion into Las Vegas and New York — rapid growth for a concept that started with a single parking-lot pop-up less than a decade ago. That rapid growth is itself part of the story — Tijuana-style tacos with flour tortillas were an underrepresented format in Los Angeles before Tacos 1986's rise, and the brand's expansion has effectively introduced a wider audience of Angelenos to a taco tradition that, despite Tijuana's proximity to the city, hadn't had a strong dedicated local presence before. A health department shutdown in March 2019 could easily have ended the whole project; instead it pushed two guys with folding carts into their first real storefront three months later.

• El Cholo

  El Cholo traces back to 1922, when Alejandro and Rosa Borquez opened a small eatery on Western Avenue originally called the Sonora Cafe. As the story goes, a customer sketched a figure on the menu in 1925 and the nickname stuck, and the restaurant was rechristened El Cholo — a name a family restaurant built for a broad Los Angeles audience, rather than a specific immigrant neighborhood, has carried for a century since. It's now run by the sixth generation of the Borquez family, one of the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurants in the city, with the Western Avenue location still its flagship. The green corn tamales are the restaurant's most specifically beloved dish — a seasonal item, made only when fresh corn is available, wrapped and steamed the traditional way, that regulars plan visits around rather than treating as just another menu item. The restaurant's margarita program has built its own separate reputation, cited for decades as among the best traditional margaritas in the city. Rather than the corn-tortilla street format that defines most of the rest of this list, El Cholo's tacos and broader menu sit closer to a classic American-Mexican and Tex-Mex tradition — flour tortillas, combination plates, and a full sit-down dining room service, the kind of format that shaped how generations of Angelenos without a personal connection to Mexican regional cooking first encountered the cuisine. El Cholo has grown into a small group of Los Angeles-area locations over its long history, but it's never abandoned the Western Avenue original or the format that built its reputation in the first place — a rare thing for a restaurant nearing its hundredth year in business. Everything else on this list is a corn tortilla eaten standing at a truck window; El Cholo is a tablecloth, a pitcher of margaritas, and a hundred years of history — pick whichever the night calls for.