Today I went on an “informal” taco tasting with my friend Johnny. We wanted to hang out since it had been awhile since we had seen each other, but he can’t drink right now and he veto’s all my picnic plans.

I recently stumbled onto a list on Eater: 17 SF Tacos To Try Right Now and proposed a taco crawl. Surprisingly, he agreed!

We met up at 24th St BART in the Mission District and started our journey. We walked to La Taqueria, the famed burrito taqueria in the area before realizing two things:

1. It was super busy, even at 2 pm
2. It was not on the Eater list

So, we consulted the list and set off to our first destination, Taqueria Vallarta.

I ordered 2 carnitas tacos and Johnny got two carne asada tacos. You order at a counter and then actually go to a taco stand near the front of the building to get your tacos. The taco man takes the mini tortillas, dips them in who knows what, grills them for a minute and then loads them onto a plate, and the meat into the tortillas. He gives you the plate and you’re given free reign for how much cilantro, onions, salsa and limes you want. I love that, since I hate onions. We customized our tacos and then chowed down. One word: delicious.

We then made our way to the next stop, La Gallinita Meat Market. Here we switched our orders, I got two carne asada tacos and Johnny got carnitas. I also got a Mexican coke, because when in Rome, you should drink delicious Coke. The specialty here is cecina, but since I don’t know what that is, I didn’t get it. Again it was a ‘dress your own way’ situation. Tacos were good, salsa was spicier than expected (I don’t have a high spice tolerance, unfortunately).

The next on the list was La Torta Gorda. However, we weren’t paying attention to where we were walking, and we walked right past it. Since Johnny is a strange dude, he didn’t want to go back. We moved on to the next closest place on the list, San Jalisco, which was a few blocks away.

We stroll up to the restaurant- a sit down rather than a walk up like the others- and grab a table. No one comes to gives us menus or acknowledge our presence. We see a waitress give menus to other people who have walked in, and we wait, looking expectantly, for service that never comes. After 20 minutes we left.

Two misses leads us to our last mission-based taco destination, Taqueria Cancun. Apparently this is a chain, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell from looking at it. Because we were pretty full, we only got one taco each here. Again, carnitas and carne asada (we probably should have changed it up a bit). These tacos had the most meat on them, but came with all the fixings, no way to do it yourself. I enjoyed mine a lot, but even though the tacos are small, I was stuffed!

We ended up walking around the area a lot more (Johnny was navigated and couldn’t make up his mind of what he wanted to do/where to go) and then finally grabbed dessert at Dandelion Chocolate Company. For me, a frozen hot chocolate. For him, a chocolate chip cookie.

After approximately 4,000 steps and four hours, we jumped back on BART and bid adieu.

All in all, my taco crawl was fun, albeit unsuccessful at trying all the best local tacos. Maybe that means we’ll just have to do it again….

Photo by Taiana Martinez (Tai’s Captures) on Unsplash