The State of the British Taco Address

What the UK's biggest taco festival tells us about our tastes

When I put together my inaugural guide to London earlier this month, I was as shocked as anyone to realise I was recommending not one, not two, but somehow three separate spots on the basis of their tacos - some feat for a city, and country, famously bad for its Mexican food.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not here to launch a vigorous defence of the UK’s taco credentials. Mexican food here is, by and large, still impressively poor. It’s the one cuisine where I really won’t bother trying a new opening without a recommendation, and ideally at least two to cross-reference, because my default position is to expect the worst.

Well, no, not the worst. The midst.

Because the country has progressed. Anyone who claims Brits don’t know what a quesadilla is or how to pronounce ‘chipotle’ should get their stereotypes looked at, they’re clearly past expiry. But while we’re enjoying a wave of openings that have bothered to source corn tortillas and Jarritos, know their Tex-Mex from their Mex, and occasionally even gesture broadly at regionality, the actual quality of those tacos still falls short. The average UK taco is, well, average.

So it was with a little trepidation that I headed up to ‘The Tacover’, a two-day taco festival at Walthamstow’s Signature Brew taproom that claims to be the UK’s biggest, with 14 taquerias setting up shop this year.

But I am nothing if not a diligent researcher, and so several hours, two pints, and a dozen tacos later, I feel like I’ve learnt a little about the state of the British taco.

1. Birria or bust

If one type of taco dominated The Tacover, it was undoubtedly the birria. Whether made with beef, lamb, or mutton, at least half of the stalls brought a birria with them. 

In reality, ‘birria’ can mean a few different things, but British taco joints have mostly followed the US in taking it to mean stewed meat with a side of consommé, or broth, to dip it into. 

The birria was a relative unknown even in London just a few years ago, and we probably have Stoke Newington’s Bake Street to blame for bringing it over in 2020. You’d be forgiven for thinking birria had been around here longer by how ubiquitous it now is though - you’d have to work harder to find a taqueria that doesn’t serve some variant than one that does.

The birria’s success makes some sense. Historically it’s made with goat, meaning most Brits do it with lamb or beef, so it’s halal-friendly from the off. The dip makes it different, novel, exotic, but is ultimately also just stew, which is an easy sell. It’s also supremely Instagram-friendly, all dripping broth and pull-apart meat, usually adorned with a crispy cheese crust, the perfect recipe for an extended viral moment.

I would be more annoyed by the birria barrage if I didn’t manage to try one that turned out to be among the city’s best. I hadn’t heard of Nopalito, a roving stall which seems to flit around London’s food markets, but they brought a trio of tacos crowned by a beef birria. This was, frustratingly, both the first and best taco I ate all day, setting expectations unreasonably high. It cropped up again somewhere in the middle, and we saw the festival off with one final rendition, just to be sure. A crisp, folded corn tortilla sheltered achingly tender shreds of beef, flanked by a pot of a rich, brown broth that I’d really like to secure for my next Sunday roast.

We may not be able to get away from birria right now, but if they were all this good we wouldn’t want to.

2. Not all tortillas are created equal

If there was a recurrent refrain of our afternoon eating tacos, it must have been this: “Great taco, rubbish tortilla.”

Like British tacos themselves, most of the tortillas on show this weekend seemed content to settle into the middle of the bell curve.

The worst of the bunch seemed to have settled for the fact that as long as their tortillas are corn, that’s good enough, serving dry, flavourless discs with a drab chew. Some were even cold, a surefire way to make a bad tortilla taste a whole lot worse.

Not every taqueria was an offender in this regard, but even the best corn tortillas we ate on the day got there by virtue of being mostly forgettable, simple vehicles to carry meat to our mouths.

There was exactly one exception: the only taco we ate that eschewed corn altogether. The heavy metal-inflected Death By Tacos pressed their own flour tortillas for their birria - silky, fatty numbers that could almost give Sonora a run for its money. 

This was more than just a requisite cheap carb. The tortilla was treated as an ingredient in its own right, one bringing a distinct flavour and texture to the table, just as important as the heaped birria meat or neon pink flecks of pickled onion.

You wouldn’t sing the praises of a sandwich served on a supermarket loaf, while every Italian restaurant in town promises homemade pasta, and the UK could do with holding its tacos to the same standard.

3. It’s not all grim up north

Speaking of, there was something else that made Death By Tacos stand out: they’re from Chester.

That might not sound all too notable, but it does stick out a little when the taco festival itself was being held in London, and given that I suspect many assume the country’s Mexican food scene ends at the M25. London is just one small, absurdly dense, bit of the UK. And while some mess of economic, cultural, and migratory factors mean it’s almost guaranteed to lead the way on good food from other cultures, it doesn’t have to be that way.

With its metal aesthetic and full menu of tacos accompanied by nachos and wings, it’s pretty obvious that Death By Tacos pulls more from one side of the US/Mexico border than the other, but let’s be real: the UK’s Tex-Mex, and similar, has never been any better than its “authentic” Mexican, so let’s not get churlish about it now.

Death By Tacos’ birria was the second-best bite we had all day, and the fact that I can hop on an exorbitantly priced train and grab some more in a city 200 miles away with a population of 100,000 is proof that the rest of the country has got its head round good Mexican food too, even if that one episode of Bake Off tried to do us dirty.

4. Free the fish

Alright, I’ll confess to a bias here: baja fish tacos are among my absolute favourites, and so I remain scandalised that this seems to be one of the last types of tacos to break through in the UK.

It makes no sense. It’s frankly embarrassing how much we’ve wrapped our national identity greasily around fried fish, but somehow no-one sees the appeal in throwing some in a tortilla. This is exactly the sort of taco the British should excel at, but we barely even seem to be trying.

I spotted just one at The Tacover, which was less bad than bland. The fish had sat a little long, gotten soft, and the gently pickled cabbage bed lacked the acid to cut through the fatty batter and habanero mayonnaise on top. It was fine, but we’re an island nation obsessed with deep frying - I think we can do better than fine on this one.

Maybe it’s because the baja taco runs a little too close to fish and chips, and it gets our hackles raised. Maybe it’s because tacos are still overwhelmingly marketed as dirrrty food, all oozing cheese and dripping meat, and fish just doesn’t fit the fantasy. Probably it’s much more mundane: most small taco places don’t want to run a deep fryer.

Whatever the answer, can we just all agree to find a way to move on from birria and make baja our next big obsession?

5. Keep it simple, stupid

I’ve sung the praises of two birrias so far, but there were other winners on the day. A one-two combo of cheese-crusted suadero and pork pastor from Mex Club. An unexpectedly light beer-braised brisket from Los Gordos, scattered with crisp onion shards and thick slices of pickled chilli. A return to Nopalito, not for the birria this time, but for their take on the pastor, bright chunks of soft pineapple scattered about.

The common thread? Not quite authenticity, but something closer to simplicity: a recognition that in the three bites a taco gives you to play with, it doesn’t pay to overcomplicate things.

My biggest disappointment of the day - though certainly not the worst taco we ate - came from Leytonstone’s Homies on Donkeys. I rushed to their stall early, fuelled by fond memories of an excellent meal at the restaurant in April. 

They’d done some pretty miraculous things with beef at the time, so it only made sense to go for the suadero. Unusually it used two cuts of beef, brisket and bavette, but it didn’t really matter - both were overpowered entirely by the addition of longaniza, a close sibling to chorizo, muddying the flavours for a strangely unsatisfying suadero. 

I don’t want to rag on Homies too hard. There were worse offenders elsewhere, from fusion food to outright monstrosities, and here I’ll admit to being incurious: I didn’t order Pretty Boy Tacos’ jam doughnut and fried chicken offering, because my mental health is actually in a pretty good place right now.

Far be it from me to tell chefs to avoid experimentation - least of all the Homies on Donkeys crew, who at their restaurant won me over with novel takes on both birria and bone marrow. But let’s be real with ourselves: Brits are still taking their taco baby steps, so we should skip the sprints for now.