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Taqueria Chingón
Taqueria Chingón built its reputation on a chef-driven, creative approach to tacos that pushes well past the traditional format — duck carnitas finished with date purée and a sunchoke-habanero salsa is the restaurant's signature move, the kind of combination that signals a kitchen treating tacos as a serious culinary format rather than a casual, fast order. The restaurant's original Bucktown location closed in November 2024 due to rising operational costs, a genuine setback for a well-regarded spot — but rather than closing for good, it reopened in May 2025 at a new Fulton Market address with a larger kitchen, indoor seating, and a patio, an upgrade in physical space that's let the kitchen expand on what it can put out. That relocation is worth knowing if you're used to the old Bucktown address. The Fulton Market neighborhood itself has become one of Chicago's most concentrated dining destinations over the past decade, filled with ambitious, chef-driven restaurants — Taqueria Chingón's move there places it directly alongside some of the city's most talked-about kitchens, a meaningfully different context than its original, more low-key Bucktown storefront. The restaurant's willingness to relocate rather than close after the original location's costs became unsustainable says something about the underlying strength of the concept — a lesser-regarded restaurant facing the same rent pressures in 2024 likely would have shut down entirely rather than reinvest in a bigger, pricier Fulton Market buildout. Taqueria Chingón's Michelin recognition and steady press coverage through that transition suggest the reopening was a genuine vote of confidence in the concept, not just a scaled-back retreat. Taqueria Chingón was founded in December 2020 by chefs Marcos Ascencio and Oliver Poilevey, opening in Bucktown in the middle of the pandemic — a genuinely risky moment to launch a new chef-driven restaurant. Poilevey brought real Chicago restaurant lineage to the project: his father ran the French bistro La Sardine for 22 years, giving Oliver a childhood spent around a working kitchen before he applied that same seriousness to Mexican street food instead. The gamble paid off quickly — Eater named it one of Chicago's best new restaurants in 2021, and Chicago Magazine gave it a Best New Restaurant nod in 2022, recognition that had already built real momentum before the original Bucktown space became financially unsustainable in 2024 and the concept relocated to its current, larger Fulton Market home. For a Chicago taco list, Taqueria Chingón is the essential "tacos as fine dining technique" entry — duck carnitas with date purée in a newly expanded Fulton Market kitchen, proof that Chicago's most ambitious chefs are willing to bring serious technique to a format usually associated with speed and simplicity.
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Velvet Taco
Velvet Taco is built around a very different premise than most of the traditional taquerias on this list: a scratch-made, globally-inspired taco chain offering more than 20 varieties at any given time, with ingredients pulled from well outside traditional Mexican cooking — Thai basil, waffle tortillas, and Nashville-style hot tofu all show up across the menu, alongside more expected options. The chain's signature format is the WTF — Weekly Taco Feature — a rotating, limited-time taco that changes every week, keeping the menu in constant motion rather than settling into a fixed lineup the way most taquerias do. Sides lean into the same fusion approach: elote corn sits next to red curry coconut queso, and the chain's red velvet cake dessert is distinctive enough to have become something of a signature on its own. Velvet Taco has scaled well beyond Chicago — more than 50 locations across Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and other states, with more opening regularly. That's a meaningfully different business than any of the independent, single-location taquerias elsewhere on this list; Velvet Taco is a genuine regional chain, and its Chicago locations (Lincoln Park and Near North Side) reflect that more polished, replicable format. Being explicit about that chain status matters for setting expectations — this isn't a spot chasing authenticity or a specific regional tradition the way most of the rest of this list is, it's a scratch-kitchen fast-casual concept built for consistency and rapid replication across markets. For anyone specifically looking for a break from traditional Mexican or Tex-Mex flavors on a taco crawl, the weekly WTF rotation and genuinely wide ingredient range make Velvet Taco a useful palate reset between more traditional stops. Velvet Taco was founded in Dallas in 2011 by restaurant entrepreneurs Randy DeWitt and Jack Gibbons, whose company FB Society opened the first location at the busy Knox-Henderson intersection with a specific idea in mind: apply scratch-kitchen, chef-driven technique to late-night, fast-casual food in a market that mostly offered fast food after hours. The WTF program has been running long enough to become an institution in its own right — 52 new rotating tacos a year, one per week, with no repeats within a given cycle — and it won a national Nation's Restaurant News MenuMasters Award in 2020 specifically for that limited-time-offer format. The chain has taken on private equity investment to fund its expansion beyond Texas, a growth-capital structure that sets it apart from the independent, family-run taquerias that make up most of the rest of Chicago's taco scene. For a Chicago taco list, Velvet Taco is the essential "taco as a global fusion canvas" entry — a fast-growing chain built on rotating weekly specials and ingredients borrowed from Thai, Nashville, and beyond, a genuinely different taco experience than the traditional Mexican and Tex-Mex spots that make up most of the rest of the city's scene.
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