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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.
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Yuca's
Cochinita pibil — slow-roasted, citrus-marinated pork, one of the signature dishes of Yucatán, a Mexican regional cuisine that was genuinely rare in Los Angeles when Yuca's opened — is still the dish most closely associated with the restaurant. Socorro "Mama" Herrera started serving it out of a small hut behind a Los Feliz laundromat in April 1976, and the family has since opened a second branch in Pasadena, run by Herrera's daughter Dora, but the original Los Feliz hut has stayed the one most identified with the name. The physical setup has stayed almost defiantly modest — a walk-up counter with a handful of outdoor seats, no real dining room to speak of, the kind of place that looks, from the street, like exactly the small family operation it's always been rather than a destination restaurant. That modesty is part of the story, not a limitation the family has tried to outgrow. Yuca's received the James Beard Foundation's America's Classics award, a national honor specifically created to recognize small, beloved, community-rooted restaurants rather than fine-dining destinations — validation that matched what Los Feliz regulars had already known for years about a laundromat-adjacent hut serving some of the city's best Yucatecan cooking. That combination — a tiny physical footprint, a specific regional Mexican cuisine most Angelenos hadn't encountered before Yuca's introduced it to the neighborhood, and a national award recognizing exactly that kind of small, unglamorous excellence — is what makes Yuca's such a distinct entry on any Los Angeles taco list. The James Beard Foundation doesn't hand out America's Classics awards to hide a restaurant's modesty; it hands them out because of it.
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