Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Empellón
Empellón was founded by chef Alex Stupak, whose background is genuinely unusual for someone who'd go on to define a chef-driven approach to Mexican food in New York — Stupak trained as a pastry chef, working in some of the country's most technically demanding dessert programs before pivoting entirely to savory Mexican cooking, a leap that surprised a food world used to chefs staying in their specific lane. That pastry-trained precision shows up in Empellón's approach to a format most New York restaurants treat casually — tortillas made in-house with real technical attention, fillings built with the same layered, deliberate thinking Stupak brought to plated desserts, applied instead to a menu built around tacos and salsas rather than tasting-menu courses. The restaurant helped establish a genuine category in New York dining: chef-driven Mexican food treated with the same seriousness as any other fine-dining cuisine, rather than as an inherently casual format. That distinction mattered in a city where Mexican food had historically been categorized as either quick-service or nothing, with little room in between for a kitchen applying real technique to the format. Stupak's willingness to walk away from pastry entirely, at a real cost to an already-established career, to build something in a cuisine he had to learn from scratch is part of what gives Empellón's version of a taco menu its specific, considered character — not a chef slumming in a "simpler" cuisine, but one who treated the format as worth the same rigor as anything else in his training.
VS
Tacombi
Tacombi's origin story starts with an actual Volkswagen bus in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where the founders ran a taco stand out of the vehicle before deciding to bring the same format to New York. That beach-cart-turned-taqueria origin has stayed part of the brand's identity ever since — the Nolita location still leans into a bright, beachy, unmistakably Mexican-resort-town aesthetic that stands out against the more austere design language most New York restaurants default to. The menu sticks to a genuinely traditional Mexican taco format — small corn tortillas, simple, well-executed fillings, fresh salsas — built around the philosophy that a taco doesn't need reinvention if the fundamentals are done properly. That restraint has helped Tacombi build a following well beyond the novelty of its origin story, since the food itself has had to hold up on its own merits for well over a decade now. Nolita's density of well-regarded, design-forward restaurants makes it a genuinely competitive spot to sustain a following, and Tacombi has done it by staying recognizable — the same VW-bus-inspired identity, the same commitment to a traditional taco format — rather than chasing whatever trend happens to be dominating New York food media in a given year. From that original Nolita location, Tacombi has expanded to multiple New York locations and beyond, but it's the original that still carries the clearest thread back to that first taco stand on a Mexican beach.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Empellón
About Tacombi
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
