The breakfast taco is a Texan form - a soft flour tortilla around eggs and one or two fillings, sold from six in the morning, eaten on the way to work. It spread across the country over the past fifteen years and it reached San Francisco, where it ran into a city that had already solved the same problem in a different shape. This is a burrito town, at every meal including the first one, and the breakfast burrito is so entrenched that the taco version has never really taken hold. Knowing that before you go looking saves a morning.
The Mission taquerias open early and the good ones are busiest before nine. Tell Karpo where you are and when you will be up.
Why the burrito won
The Mission burrito is a specific and locally invented form: a large flour tortilla, steamed to make it pliable, wrapped tightly in foil around rice, beans, meat, salsa and usually cheese and sour cream, sold as a complete meal for one person. The engineering matters - foil-wrapped means portable, structurally sound and heat-retaining for twenty minutes, which is exactly what a breakfast on the move requires.
The breakfast version substitutes eggs and potato for the rice and adds bacon, chorizo or sausage, and it is enormous. One is a full breakfast for most people and half of one plus a coffee is a reasonable morning. Because taquerias here are built around an assembly line optimised for producing burritos in about ninety seconds, adding a breakfast burrito to the menu is trivial and adding a distinct breakfast taco service is not. The format followed the equipment.
Where the tacos actually are
They exist, in two places. First, at the Mission and Excelsior taquerias, where breakfast tacos are usually available on request even when they are not on the board - eggs with chorizo, potato or beans in a soft tortilla, three to five dollars each. This is the genuine article arrived by the obvious route, and asking rather than reading the menu is how you get it.
Second, at the newer, more designed cafés and brunch rooms across the eastern half of the city that have adopted the Austin framing, complete with Austin pricing. Those are perfectly good and cost three or four times the first category. If breakfast tacos specifically are what you want, ask at a taqueria; if you want them with a flat white and a table, the brunch rooms will oblige and charge for it.
How to order well at a taqueria in the morning
The same rules apply as at any other hour. The meats are mostly cooked in advance and held, which is fine inside a burrito and shows immediately in a taco - so at breakfast, order the things that are cooked to order, which means anything with eggs. Eggs with chorizo is the strongest default; eggs with potato is the cheapest and most filling.
Take salsa from the bar yourself rather than asking for it inside, and take a little of both the red and the green. The pickled carrots and jalapeños on the salsa bar are a Bay Area signature and worth having. And if you are ordering a burrito, ask for it dorado - griddled after wrapping so the tortilla crisps - which costs nothing and makes it substantially better.
The rest of the San Francisco morning
Two other categories compete for the same hour and both are strong. Chinese bakeries in Chinatown, the Richmond and the Sunset sell egg tarts, pineapple buns, cocktail buns and baked pork buns for one to three dollars each, and three items is a genuine breakfast. They open early, they are everywhere, and they are the cheapest good calories in the city.
And the pastry-and-coffee layer, which San Francisco does about as well as anywhere in the United States. Tartine on Guerrero has a permanent queue for a reason. The trade-off is price and time: a pastry and a filter coffee is ten to fourteen dollars and involves a queue, against a breakfast burrito at eleven to fifteen that is a whole meal, or three bakery items for under eight.
Timing, which matters more than usual
Taquerias in the Mission open early - several from seven or eight - and are at their best before nine, when everything on the steam table has just been made. Chinese bakeries are best in the morning and the popular items sell out. Speciality coffee shops mostly open at seven or eight but many close by four or five in the afternoon, which surprises visitors more than the morning hours do.
The brunch economy, by contrast, starts at ten or eleven and runs to about three, and at weekends it generates the longest queues of any meal in this city. If you want to eat well and quickly on a Saturday morning, being at a taqueria or a bakery at half past eight rather than at a brunch room at eleven is the difference between fifteen minutes and an hour.
Practical notes
Prices: breakfast burrito eleven to fifteen dollars, breakfast tacos three to five each at a taqueria and far more at a brunch room, bakery items one to three, pastry and coffee ten to fourteen. Ask for breakfast tacos even if they are not on the board. Ask for a burrito dorado - griddled after wrapping. Take both salsas and the pickled carrots. BART at 16th Street and 24th Street brackets the Mission, twelve minutes from downtown. Taquerias are best before nine; brunch rooms start at ten or eleven with long weekend queues; speciality coffee closes early in the afternoon. And half a breakfast burrito is a normal amount of food - they are larger than they look.
Tags: #BreakfastTacosNearMe #SanFrancisco #BreakfastBurrito #MissionDistrict #Taqueria #Excelsior #Chinatown #Bakeries #SFBreakfast #CheapEatsSF #Brunch #Tartine #BART #SFEats
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Ask Karpo first
In a burrito town the useful question is which counter will make you the thing you actually asked for. Ask Karpo which taquerias near you are open at the hour you are up, which will do breakfast tacos off-menu, and whether the bakery on the way is a better use of eight dollars.
