Los Angeles takes tacos seriously enough that any list titled best tacos is really an argument, and the eastside version of the argument is unusually easy to settle because you can walk it. Between the Sunset Junction and the bottom of Glendale Boulevard there are enough good and genuinely different tacos within about a mile that four stops in ninety minutes is a realistic evening, and the total cost lands somewhere around what one entrée costs on Abbot Kinney.
The stands and the trucks run on different clocks, and the best stop changes depending on the hour you start. Ask Karpo which of these are open near you right now.
Start on Sunset, early
Tacos Delta on West Sunset is the natural opening stop — a long-standing neighbourhood taqueria that has been feeding this stretch since well before Silver Lake became a destination, and the sort of place that gets judged by the people who eat there weekly rather than by anyone with a camera. Order two, not four. The whole discipline of a crawl is arriving at the fourth stop still hungry, and the most common way it fails is enthusiasm at the first.
What to order at a first stop: something grilled and straightforward — carne asada or al pastor — because it gives you a baseline. Every subsequent stop is then a comparison rather than an isolated impression, which is the actual pleasure of doing this in sequence rather than picking one place and going there always.
The seafood detour
El Siete Mares, at the Silver Lake and Echo Park boundary on Sunset, is the stop that makes the crawl worth structuring rather than just eating twice at the same place. Fish and shrimp tacos are a completely different proposition from the grilled meat that dominates the rest of this walk — lighter, sharper, built around the salsa and the cabbage rather than the char — and they reset your palate for the second half.
This is also the stop where the salsa bar matters most. Eastside taquerias generally put out three or four salsas of escalating heat, and the correct method is a small amount of the green one on the first taco to calibrate before committing. A fish taco under too much of the hot red one is a waste of a fish taco.
Guisados, and the case for stews
Guisados in Echo Park does something distinct enough that it functions as the crawl's third act: braised stews rather than grilled meat, served on thick handmade corn tortillas, with a sampler plate of six small tacos that exists precisely for the person who cannot decide. Chicharrón in salsa verde and the cochinita are the ones that convert sceptics, and the tortillas are the actual reason to go — they are made to a thickness that would not survive a grilled filling and is perfect under a wet one.
It is the busiest stop on this route at peak hours and the queue moves quickly. If the line is out of the door, that is information rather than a deterrent; at a counter operation, the queue is the freshness guarantee.
Finish at a truck
The last stop should be mobile, because that is where eastside taco culture actually lives after ten at night. Trucks and stands set up along Alvarado, Glendale Boulevard and the cross streets around Echo Park on a schedule that tracks the bars rather than a posted opening time, and the al pastor coming off a vertical trompo at a good truck at eleven at night is the best single taco on this entire route.
The complication is that you cannot check a truck's hours, because it does not have hours in the sense a map understands. What you can do is know the corners, which stay consistent even when the timings do not, and read the queue. A truck with eight people around it at half past eleven is the most reliable food signal on the eastside, and it is worth walking three blocks for.
How to pace it
Two tacos per stop, four stops, one drink somewhere in the middle. That is roughly eight tacos across ninety minutes, which sounds like a great deal and is a normal dinner spread over a walk. Start around seven if you want everything open including the sit-down places, or start at ten if the trucks are the point and you are happy to skip the earliest stop.
Bring cash. Several of the best stops on this route are cash-first, the trucks almost universally so, and hunting for an ATM at eleven at night on Alvarado is a poor use of the evening. Small bills, specifically — a truck taking a fifty for a nine-dollar order is doing you a favour it should not have to do.
Practical notes
The route runs about a mile end to end and is walkable, mostly flat along Sunset with a drop towards Glendale Boulevard. Parking once at the Junction and walking is far better than moving the car between stops. Salsa heat at eastside taquerias is real rather than decorative, so calibrate before committing. Most sit-down stops close between nine and eleven while trucks run past midnight, which is why the order in this article goes indoor to outdoor. Weekend nights are busiest between ten and midnight.
One more note worth having: the quality signal at any of these places is the tortilla, not the filling. A good filling on a bad tortilla is a disappointing taco, and a taqueria that makes its own tortillas will tell you so without being asked, because it is the thing they are proudest of.
Tags: #BestTacos #SilverLake #EchoPark #LosAngeles #TacoCrawl #TacosLA #HiddenGems #EastsideLA #SunsetBoulevard #LAEats #StreetFood #TacoTrucks #LAFood #WhereToEatLA
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which of these are open right now and whether the trucks are out on Alvarado tonight? Ask Karpo before you start walking.
