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Los Chingones
Los Chingones is chef Troy Guard's take on Mexican food, built around a self-described "badass" sensibility — sassy, spicy, and deliberately irreverent rather than a strictly traditional taquería. Guard, a well-known figure in Denver's restaurant scene through his broader TAG Restaurant Group, opened the RiNo location as a bi-level space with a 90-seat rooftop bar looking out over the neighborhood, a genuinely different physical footprint than most of the city's taco spots. The food leans into creative reworkings of familiar formats — handmade tacos and bold, sometimes unexpected flavor combinations built to keep the soul of classic Mexican cooking while pushing past strict tradition — served alongside a serious tapas-style small-plates menu and a cocktail program built specifically around margaritas. That combination of rooftop bar, tapas format, and inventive tacos has made Los Chingones as much a destination for the scene as for any single dish. RiNo itself has become one of Denver's most concentrated dining and nightlife districts over the past decade, and Los Chingones' rooftop has become one of the more recognizable gathering spots in that stretch — the kind of place regulars go as much for the view and the margaritas as for a specific order off the menu. The concept has since expanded to a second location in the Denver Tech Center, extending Guard's format beyond its original RiNo home. For a Denver taco list, Los Chingones is the essential "tacos as part of a bigger scene" entry — a chef-driven, rooftop-bar taquería in the heart of RiNo, proof that Denver's taco scene has real room for kitchens built around spectacle and creativity rather than strict tradition.
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El Taco de Mexico
El Taco de Mexico opened in November 1985, when Maria Luisa Zanabria — who'd emigrated from Mexico City — and Felipe Juarez began serving food from a trailer parked on Denver's Santa Fe Drive, in what's now the city's Art District. Four decades later, the family-owned restaurant is still operating on that same stretch of Santa Fe, one of the longest continuous runs of any taquería in the city. The menu covers a broad range of Mexico City-style cooking — tacos, enchiladas, chile rellenos, burritos, tamales, and gorditas — but it's the green chile that's become the restaurant's defining dish, a slow-built, well-balanced preparation that regulars order over nearly everything on the menu, tacos included. That green chile is as much a reason to visit as any single taco filling, a rare case of a side condiment becoming a restaurant's actual signature. The recognition that's followed has been serious and specific: in 2020, El Taco de Mexico received the James Beard Foundation's America's Classics Award, the first time a Colorado restaurant had received that honor. That's a meaningfully different level of validation than most neighborhood taquerías ever get, awarded specifically for restaurants that have become community fixtures over decades rather than won recent critical buzz. For a Denver taco list, El Taco de Mexico is the essential "40 years, one family, national recognition" entry — a Mexico City-style taquería that started out of a trailer on Santa Fe Drive in 1985 and has since become the only Colorado restaurant to win a James Beard America's Classics Award, still run by the same family that founded it.
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