The best food available in Los Angeles after midnight is not in a restaurant. It is in a truck, and the thing that separates a good truck from a great one has very little to do with the tacos and almost everything to do with reliability — being in the same place, at the same hours, for long enough that a city learns where you are. On the corner of Olympic Boulevard and La Brea, at 5300 West Olympic, is a truck that has done exactly that for long enough to have been rated the best in the city by LA Weekly.
The best late food in Los Angeles is parked rather than addressed, and the hours are stranger than any restaurant's. Tell Karpo where you are after midnight and get the trucks and counters actually serving, with the nights they are dark already accounted for.
The hours are counterintuitive and matter enormously
Tuesday through Thursday it runs from nine in the morning until half past one the following morning. Friday and Saturday it goes until half past three. And then — this is the part that catches people out — it is closed on Sunday and closed on Monday. Not late-starting, not reduced. Dark.
Two nights a week off is unusual for a truck in this position and it produces a very specific failure mode: the Sunday night drive. Somebody remembers the truck, gets in a car, drives across the mid-city on the assumption that a taco truck is the one thing in Los Angeles that is always there, and finds an empty kerb. If you take one thing from this, take the two dark nights rather than the two late ones.
The late nights are genuinely late, though, and half past three on a Friday and Saturday puts the truck well past last call. That is the window it exists for, and the crowd between two and three is exactly what you would expect — people leaving bars, people finishing shifts, and a steady stream of cars pulling up for a bag to take home.
Palm-sized, which is the correct size
The tacos are small — palm-sized, on the cheap end, meant to be ordered several at a time. That format is not a limitation, it is the whole design. A small taco has a much better ratio of edge to middle, holds together in one hand while you are standing on a pavement, and lets you order four different things instead of committing to one. Ordering three and deciding they were enough is a mistake almost everybody makes once.
Standing at a truck also changes the meal in a way that is hard to reproduce indoors. There is no table, no service, no pacing. You order, you wait next to people also waiting, you eat leaning against something. At two in the morning that informality is the point — it is a ten-minute meal that requires no commitment from anybody, which is exactly the right shape for the end of a night out when half the group wants to go home. It is also why trucks survive in a city that has closed a great many late-night restaurants. A restaurant at two in the morning has to fill a dining room, pay a full staff and justify a lease; a truck has to show up. The economics are the reason the best late food in Los Angeles is parked at a kerb, and they are not going to change.
The corner itself
Olympic and La Brea is a large, fast intersection in the middle of the city — Mid-Wilshire, technically, with Miracle Mile to the north and the Fairfax district beyond it. It is not a neighbourhood people walk to. Almost everyone arrives by car, which means the practical question is where to stop, and the answer is the side streets rather than Olympic itself, which moves quickly and has no patience for a car pausing at the kerb.
The location is also central in a useful way. From Koreatown, West Hollywood, Culver City, downtown or the Beverly Grove area this is ten to fifteen minutes at that hour, which puts it within reach of most of the places people are actually leaving at two in the morning. That centrality is a large part of why it became the city's default rather than a neighbourhood favourite.
- Tue–Thu 9am to 1.30am; Fri–Sat 9am to 3.30am; closed Sunday and Monday
- Order more than you think — the tacos are palm-sized and cheap
- Park on a side street, not on Olympic
- The 9am start means it is also a breakfast option, which almost nobody uses it for
The daytime secret
Everything written about this truck concerns the small hours, and it is worth noting that it opens at nine in the morning five days a week. A truck that is famous for being open at three in the morning is also, quietly, serving at ten. The queue at that hour is nonexistent, the food is the same, and parking is trivial. If the idea of standing on a kerb at Olympic and La Brea at half past two does not appeal, the morning version of the same experience is available and almost entirely undiscovered by anyone who reads about it on a list of late-night food.
Practical notes
El Chato Taco Truck, 5300 West Olympic Boulevard at La Brea, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles. Open Tuesday to Thursday 9am to 1.30am and Friday and Saturday 9am to 3.30am; closed Sunday and Monday. Small, inexpensive palm-sized tacos, rated the city's best taco truck by LA Weekly. Cash-and-kerb service with no seating, so plan to stand or take it away. Park on the residential side streets rather than on Olympic, which is fast-moving at all hours. Busiest between 1am and 3am at weekends and effectively empty in the morning.
Tags: #LosAngeles #TacoTruck #LateNightLA #MidWilshire #LaBrea #Tacos #LAEats #AfterHours #StreetFood #CheapEatsLA #OlympicBlvd #ThingsToDoLA #NightsOut #ElChato
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which taco trucks are out tonight, what time they pack up, and which nights they do not show at all? Ask Karpo what is serving near you right now after midnight and how far you would have to go for the good one.
