Silver Lake presents a specific difficulty. It is a neighbourhood that has been thoroughly reshaped over twenty years, and it now contains two parallel taco economies operating within a few hundred metres of each other. One is a set of restaurants selling street tacos as a concept, plated, at restaurant prices. The other is the actual street food that has been on those corners the whole time, run off carts and folding tables and trucks. Both are findable, they cost very different amounts, and only one of them is what people mean when they say street tacos.
Stands move, and the good ones set up at hours that have nothing to do with posted opening times. Tell Karpo when you are going out and roughly where on Sunset you will be, and it will tell you what is actually set up tonight.
Learn the difference on sight
A street taco operation has a comal or a flat-top over propane, a cooler, a folding table for the salsas, and often a single work light clamped to a pole. It appears in the evening and it is gone by two or three in the morning. There is no menu board - the options are called out or written on a piece of card.
A restaurant selling street tacos has a menu with descriptions, a printed price, and the tacos arrive on a plate with a lime wedge arranged on the side. This is not a criticism; some of them cook very well. But three of them will cost twenty dollars and the equivalent from the cart is under eight, and the difference is not in the tortilla.
Where and when the stands appear
The reliable corridor is Sunset Boulevard through Silver Lake and the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard south of it, plus the blocks running toward Echo Park where the density increases noticeably. The eastern end, toward Silver Lake Boulevard and Sunset Junction, is the busiest.
Timing is the whole thing. Most stands set up somewhere between seven and nine in the evening and the good ones run late. Before seven you will find almost nothing, which is why people who go looking for tacos at six in Silver Lake conclude there is nothing there. Weekend nights have the most stands out; Monday and Tuesday are thin.
What to order at a stand
Al pastor if there is a trompo turning. Suadero - a cut from between the belly and the leg, cooked slowly in fat until it goes soft and slightly crisp - if the stand has a large domed griddle with a well of fat in the middle, which is the Mexico City setup and increasingly common here. Carne asada is the safe default and the hardest to do badly.
Take them with onion and coriander, which is standard, and add salsa yourself from the table. If the stand offers a quesataco - cheese griddled onto the tortilla before the meat - it is worth the extra dollar and it is how most of these are eaten locally.
The salsa table tells you everything
A stand that puts out three or four salsas in deli containers, plus radish, cucumber, grilled spring onion and lime, is cooking properly and has been doing this for a while. One squeeze bottle of red is a stand that opened last month.
The grilled spring onions are worth taking even if you did not plan to. They come off the same griddle, they are free, and they are the thing most people walk past. So is the roasted jalapeño if there is one.
Cash, queues and the etiquette
Bring cash. Many stands take payment apps now and a good number still do not, and there is no card reader on a folding table. Small bills make everything faster, and the queue moves fast enough that fumbling holds up eight people.
The convention is to order everything at once - all your tacos, in one go - rather than adding as you eat. You stand to one side, you eat off a paper plate, and you take your rubbish to the bin they have set out. Nobody is going to explain any of this and it is all obvious once you have watched one person ahead of you.
The honest case for the restaurants too
There are a handful of sit-down places in Silver Lake doing regional cooking that a stand cannot: moles that take a day, cochinita pibil, whole fish, proper mezcal lists. Those are worth their prices and they are not competing with the cart on the corner.
The thing to avoid is the middle - the room charging restaurant prices for exactly what the stand outside is making better, on the strength of having chairs and a cocktail menu. That category is well represented on this stretch of Sunset and it is the one worth walking past.
Making a night of it
The neighbourhood is walkable in a way most of Los Angeles is not, and the sensible version of this is a bar first, two stands after, and a third if you are still out at one. The stands are at their best late and the queues at eleven are shorter than at nine.
Parking on Sunset through Silver Lake is genuinely difficult on a weekend night and the side streets are permit-restricted in places. Walking or a rideshare is the less annoying answer, and it also removes the question of whether you are going to have a drink.
Tags: #SilverLake #StreetTacos #LosAngeles #LAFood #SunsetBoulevard #AlPastor #TacoStands #LATacos #EchoPark #LANights
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Ask Karpo first
The tacos on this stretch of Sunset are excellent and the pricing spread is absurd. Ask Karpo which stands are set up tonight and how late they run, and skip the rooms charging four times as much for the same thing.
