Authentic Mexican Tacos Near Me

A Mexican eatery that specialises in tacos and a short list of related items: quesadillas, tortas, sometimes birria, menudo or aguas frescas. It is usually independent and counter-service, as opposed to a full-menu Mexican restaurant or a chain.

A Mexican restaurant serves a broad menu (enchiladas, fajitas, combo plates) often with table service, chips and a bar. A taqueria is narrower and faster: tacos are the point, the menu fits on a board, and you usually order at a counter.

"Taco shop", literally a place where tacos are made and sold. It is pronounced tah-keh-REE-ah.

Generally more so than chain or Tex-Mex tacos. Taqueria tacos are small, on corn, with grilled or braised meat and fresh onion, cilantro and salsa. No shredded cheese, sour cream or fried shell. Two or three are a reasonable meal.

In Mexican Spanish, "taco" means a light meal or snack of a filling folded into a tortilla. One widely cited theory traces the food name to 18th-century Mexican silver miners, who used "taco" for the paper-wrapped gunpowder charges they packed into rock.

By most everyday definitions, no: a sandwich has two separate slices of bread, a taco has one tortilla folded around the filling. Legally it has been argued both ways (a 2006 Indiana zoning case treated a taco as "Mexican-style sandwich"). Cladistically, some argue a taco is a "single-slice" sandwich. In practice, people treat them as different things.

It depends entirely on the build. Two or three street tacos (corn tortillas, grilled meat, onion, cilantro, salsa) are a balanced, moderate-calorie meal with good protein. Large flour-tortilla or hard-shell tacos loaded with cheese, sour cream, and fried fillings are much higher in calories, saturated fat and sodium.

In Mexico, well before Spanish contact: people were folding tortillas around fillings for thousands of years. The word and the modern street taco date from the 18th-19th centuries. The hard-shell taco and the Tex-Mex versions were developed later in the United States.