Sonora Taquería, N16

Excellent English tacos — no, really

London doesn’t have good Mexican food.

It’s an immutable fact, a fixed point in any reckoning on London’s restaurants, acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic by anyone and everyone who recognises that Mexican cuisine extends beyond the bounds of an Old El Paso packet.

Except… it’s not really true any more, is it? (The London bit, not Old El Paso — that stuff really is dreadful).

London may be short on burritos worth eating, and ye olde pub nacho sharing plates bear only the loosest resemblance to anything you’d find in Mexico City, but it has a small Mexican fine dining scene that I’ve heard unexpectedly good things about, and better tacos than it has any right to.

La Chingada and Proper Tacos have both been slinging solid snacks for a few years now; Homies on Donkeys is driving modern reinventions that hold their own with the classics; and Peckham’s Guacamoles is rightly loved for more than just its rambunctious owner Manny. But above all of these sits Sonora Taquería, still in a league of its own.

Sonora started life as a foreign franchise of Pollo Feliz, a Mexican grilled chicken chain founded by co-owner Michelle Salazar’s uncles in the ‘70s. A lockdown pivot to tortilla delivery proved there was demand for a different business model, and so Pollo Feliz was reborn as Sonora Taquería, first in a Netil Market stall (right next to where you’ll now find last week’s write-up, Jupiter Burger) and now in a brick-and-mortar spot in Stoke Newington.

It’s no accident that Sonora was born from its tortillas. Homemade from flour and pork fat (or butter for vegetarian orders), they’re almost silken in texture, bordering on transparent outside of dark splotches from the grill, and decadent in their depth of flavour. Just as importantly, they’re not made from corn masa.

Mexican food in London is bad, remember? Tortillas here have meant floppy flour supermarket numbers for as long as I can remember. The city’s baby steps towards better Mexican food involved a reckoning with the fact that corn tortillas are really more common, and the rise of small chains like Wahaca and El Pastor cemented the idea that ‘proper’ tacos use corn, another immutable rule that isn’t so true after all.

Sonora takes its name from the northern Mexican state where Salazar is from. And in northern Mexico, flour tortillas are just as ‘authentic’ as corn, which is part of what led to their dominance in the US and abroad. By bringing flour tortillas that you’d actually want to eat to the UK, Salazar and her partner Sam Napier tapped into the tastes of know-it-alls and know-nothings all at once, and in the process brought London not only good Mexican food, but good regional Mexican food.

But if you want to sell tacos, you need more than just great tortillas. In rebranding to Sonora, Salazar and Napier didn’t only emphasise their tortillas, they also ditched chicken and led with another Sonoran staple: beef.

If London’s best tacos are found in Sonora, then the best of the best is the beef barbacoa. Slow-cooked until it’s ready to melt, this is served simply, topped only with raw onion, coriander, and a thin drizzle of their mild salsa roja. It needs nothing else, and this city knows few greater pleasures than perching on a stool at the window, sipping sharp limonada and watching Stoke Newington High St. flow by while a potent medley of beef juices and chilli drips down your fingers and you contemplate the morality of re-joining the queue for that second barbacoa you didn’t know you needed.

Things would be easier if it was the only banger on the menu. Unfortunately it has stiff competition from the even greasier cabeza, made from wobblingly soft ox tongue and cheek; the caramelo, a crisp cheese crust enveloping a tumble of grilled beef; and even the nopales, cactus leaves served spicy with a bright pico de gallo and a pinch of crumbled queso fresco.

Any of these can be ordered as a quesadilla instead, the toppings subbed out for the warming one-note ooze of melted cheese. This costs a quid or two extra, but nets you something about double the size, so the value proposition is hard to beat. Beat it they do though, with the bean taco, a dinky fold of refried beans that is a near-compulsory add-on to any and every order; I refuse to believe there is a better way to spend £1 in London right now.

Sometimes, after too long an absence, I begin to wonder if Sonora really is the best London has to offer, or if my memory is tainted by the glow of lazy lockdown summers when the only thing to do was sit in London Fields with a pint in a plastic cup after queuing for tacos along with everyone else in Hackney. I wonder if Guacamoles’ lengua might have the edge on Sonora’s cabeza, if La Chingada’s carnitas don’t out-muscle their grilled pork adobada.

But then I take one bite of barbacoa and all those doubts melt away (mostly down my chin). Sitting on that stool, slowly soaking in beef fat and watching the world go by, I know, sharply and suddenly, that there is absolutely nowhere I’d rather be.

London does have good Mexican food, and none better than here.