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Tacos 1986
Tacos 1986 began in November 2018, when founder Victor Delgado and co-founder Jorge "Joy" Alvarez started selling Tijuana-style tacos out of carts in a Hollywood parking lot, after Delgado — unable to find the tacos he'd grown up eating — decided to bring that specific Baja California style to Los Angeles himself. The name commemorates Delgado's birth year rather than any historical date, a personal reference point for a menu built specifically around Tijuana's taco tradition rather than the more common central-Mexican styles found across most of the city. Early word of mouth grew fast enough to draw attention from chefs and food outlets like Eater and LA Taco, but the cart operation ran into real growing pains — friction with landlords and a March 2019 health department shutdown — before the team opened their first storefront in downtown Los Angeles that June. The adobada — marinated, griddle-cooked pork served on a small flour tortilla rather than the corn tortilla most Los Angeles taco spots default to — is the signature order, finished with a red and green salsa combination and shredded cabbage that mark it as distinctly Tijuana-style rather than a generalized "street taco." What began as two founders and a handful of carts has grown into a genuine multi-location presence across Los Angeles and beyond, with storefronts spread from Beverly Grove to Sherman Oaks to Northridge, plus expansion into Las Vegas and New York — rapid growth for a concept that started with a single parking-lot pop-up less than a decade ago. That rapid growth is itself part of the story — Tijuana-style tacos with flour tortillas were an underrepresented format in Los Angeles before Tacos 1986's rise, and the brand's expansion has effectively introduced a wider audience of Angelenos to a taco tradition that, despite Tijuana's proximity to the city, hadn't had a strong dedicated local presence before. A health department shutdown in March 2019 could easily have ended the whole project; instead it pushed two guys with folding carts into their first real storefront three months later.
VS
King Taco
A converted ice cream truck, repurposed as a mobile taco lunch wagon and driven around Los Angeles by Raul Martínez Sr. — that's how King Taco started in 1974. Within six months the operation had grown enough to open its first permanent location in Cypress Park, the address that's remained the chain's original storefront ever since, even as the business around it expanded into one of the largest Mexican restaurant chains to come out of Los Angeles. The menu sticks to a straightforward, high-volume taqueria format built around small corn tortillas piled with carne asada, al pastor, and other classic fillings, plus horchata and other traditional sides — nothing experimental, just a well-run version of the format executed at real scale across dozens of kitchens rather than one. Martínez grew the business steadily rather than explosively: by 1995 King Taco had reached fourteen restaurants generating more than $21 million a year, and by the mid-2010s the chain had expanded to more than twenty locations spread across Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, reaching well beyond the Eastside neighborhoods where it started. Martínez continued running the business until his death in 2013, having built the chain from a single ice cream truck into a genuine Los Angeles institution over four decades. That arc — one immigrant entrepreneur's converted ice cream truck growing into a multi-generational, multi-county taqueria chain without ever losing the original Cypress Park location — is a distinctly Los Angeles success story, and it's a different kind of entry than the single-truck and single-storefront spots that make up most of the rest of this list. Two dozen locations later, the Cypress Park original is still the one longtime regulars mean when they just say "King's."
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