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Taco Mix
Taco Mix operates out of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a neighborhood with one of New York's most significant concentrations of Mexican immigrant-run food businesses, and it's built its specific reputation around a genuine vertical trompo — the spinning, vertically stacked spit of marinated pork that defines proper al pastor, char and pineapple caramelizing against an open flame rather than a griddle shortcut. That commitment to the trompo format puts Taco Mix in a genuinely small category of New York taco operations willing to run the format the traditional way, requiring both the physical setup and the ongoing labor of tending an open spit through a full service — a level of commitment most quick-service taco counters skip in favor of pre-cooked, griddle-reheated versions of the same dish. Sunset Park's own food scene has built a reputation among serious eaters specifically because it's less mediated by food media than Manhattan's more heavily covered neighborhoods — the kind of place where a truck or storefront's reputation spreads almost entirely through word of mouth and repeat local business rather than a single viral write-up. For a New York taco list, Taco Mix is the essential "the real trompo, done right in an underappreciated neighborhood" entry — proof that some of the city's most technically serious al pastor is happening in Sunset Park rather than the more heavily reviewed taco spots in Manhattan.
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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.
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