Taquerías in the US: Where the 241 in Our Directory Are

A taquería is a specific kind of business, not a small restaurant. Where they cluster across the US, what the price tiers look like, and what the data shows.

Of the 630 active Mexican restaurants in our US directory, 241 are typed as taquerías — 38 percent of the total, and the largest single category we record. That proportion is worth pausing on, because it says something about how Mexican food actually exists in the United States: not mainly as sit-down restaurants, but as counters.

We use the taquería type for a business built around tacos from a griddle, a spit or a pot, ordered at a counter, with a salsa bar and minimal table service. It is a format, not a quality judgment. The directory is mapped, not reviewed — we have not eaten at these places, and every rating on this page is Google's, reported as Google reports it.

Where they are, by state

State	Taquerías	All Mexican restaurants we list	Taquería share
Florida	40	87	46%
Texas	36	111	32%
California	29	62	47%
Georgia	24	59	41%
Washington	21	53	40%
Illinois	20	56	36%
New York	19	42	45%
Nevada	19	55	35%
Arizona	13	56	23%
North Carolina	12	33	36%
Colorado	8	15	53%

Florida and Texas lead on raw count, which is not surprising. The more interesting number is the share: in some states most of what we list is a taquería, and in others the Mexican restaurant scene we have mapped is mostly full-service. Washington State is the clearest example of a taquería-heavy market relative to its size, with 21 of 53.

The cities

City	Taquerías	In Google's "$" tier	Open Sunday
Chicago	16	13	13
Dallas	14	8	11
Las Vegas	12	11	11
New York	10	5	10
Miami	10	5	9
Los Angeles	9	4	9
Austin	9	7	9
Denver	8	5	7
San Francisco	7	5	7
Atlanta	7	4	6
Houston	7	5	5
Phoenix	7	5	7
Seattle	7	5	7
San Diego	6	2	5
Orlando	6	4	3
Tampa	6	5	5

What the price tier tells you, and what it does not

Google assigns each business a price level from one to four dollar signs. Across the taquerías in our directory, 167 sit at one dollar sign and 67 at two, with 6 carrying no price level at all. That is a much flatter distribution than the rest of the directory, and it matches the format: a counter selling tacos by the piece does not have much room to be expensive.

What the tier does not tell you is anything about the cooking. Several of the highest Google-rated taquerías we list are at one dollar sign, and the correlation between price level and rating across the whole set is essentially flat.

The ones with the most reviews

Sorted by Google rating among taquerías with more than a thousand Google reviews — a volume filter, so that a 5.0 from nine people does not outrank a 4.6 from four thousand. Again: this is Google's rating, not our opinion.

Taquería	City	Google rating	Reviews	Price tier
Tacos My Guey	Orlando	4.9	4,920	$
Rreal Tacos	Atlanta	4.8	15,815	$$
Tacotarian	Las Vegas	4.8	1,738	$$
Space City Birria	Houston	4.8	1,737	$$
Autentica Taqueria	Miami	4.8	1,671	$$
Tacos El Franc	San Diego	4.8	1,157	$$
Los Tacos No. 1	New York	4.7	5,604	$
Tacos Chukis	Seattle	4.7	3,437	$
Sr de los Tacos	Doral	4.7	2,834	$
Las Trancas Taco Stand	Austin	4.7	2,771	$
Birria-Landia	Queens	4.7	2,554	$
Tacos Calafia	Phoenix	4.7	2,487	$
Taqueria Ramirez	Brooklyn	4.7	2,072	$$
The Taco Stand	Miami	4.7	1,276	$$

What a taquería serves

The board is short and the vocabulary is specific: asada, al pastor, carnitas, chorizo, suadero, lengua, cabeza, tripa, buche, birria. Most places run six to ten of those, plus a weekend meat. Sides are limited on purpose — rice, beans, a consomé with the birria, grilled green onions, maybe an order of nopal.

Two structural things follow from the format. First, you dress your own tacos, which means the salsa bar is where a taquería shows what it can do. Second, the hours are unusual: in our data the taquerías skew later than the rest of the directory, which is why a taco is what you eat at eleven at night in a city where everything else has closed.

Of the taquerías we list with recorded hours, 100 close at 11 p.m. or later on at least one night of the week, and 59 run past midnight.

A third pattern in the data is worth naming: taquerías cluster along corridors rather than spreading evenly through a city. In Chicago they run down 26th Street and 18th Street; in Atlanta along Buford Highway and South Cobb Drive; in Charlotte down South Boulevard. That is a consequence of how the groceries, the bakeries and the restaurants grew up together around the same streets, and it is the reason a visitor who picks one address and walks is better served than one who drives between four pins on a map.

What the directory does not cover

Two honest gaps. Trucks and carts are under-represented: we list some, but a mobile business with no fixed address is hard to verify and harder to keep current, and a directory that lists a truck at a corner it left a year ago is worse than one that lists nothing. And our coverage is metro-weighted, so a rural taquería in the Yakima Valley or the Rio Grande Valley is less likely to be in our data than one in Chicago, even though both exist.

We also record no price level for 6 of these taquerías and no Google rating for 72 of them, which is why both columns above say what they say rather than guessing. A blank is a blank.

Using the directory

The full list, filterable by city, is in our US restaurant directory; our store directory covers the 536 Mexican and Latin groceries alongside them. If you want to know what to say at the counter before you go, we have a glossary of the meats on a taquería board.

And if you want to build the same thing at home: Tacos al Pastor, Suadero Tacos and Beef Tongue Tacos are the three that most reward the effort.