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The Migas Breakfast Taco from the Hot Taco Truck parked in front of the Line hotel in Koreatown will arrive beautifully wrapped in your hands.
The first layer of packaging is made of paper printed with a neon pink logo – an etch of a folded taco, filled to the brim and placed along the zigzag lines of an EKG. Underneath is a wrinkled pack of aluminum foil; unfold and the taco unfolds, neatly set up and deliciously chaotic at the same time. Scrambled rags clash against tortilla chips, shredded Monterey jack cheese, black beans, pico de gallo, and a thin, crucial avocado crescent.
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The person who took your order will point out three available salsas: a mild one with roasted tomatoes and jalapeño, a creamy verde and a silky red-orange version with chili de arbol, which is warned as “extra hot”, but me never find it too scorching. I end up splashing each of them over the migas for the collective gentle heat and flavor.
Los Angeles is, and likely will always be, a breakfast burrito city. (I ate a lot of these earlier this year.) Breakfast tacos are Texas’ first and foremost. Although Angelenos has been most passionate about morning tacos at Texan native Briana Valdez’s five locations in HomeState, the wonderful Migas tacos at Hot Tacos have a deep pedigree when you’re ready to open up to another option.
The Migas tacos the Vazquezes and her team serve in Koreatown can definitely rival their counterparts in Austin.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The company is a rebranding of Veracruz All Natural in LA, a modern Austin institution founded in 2008 by sisters and co-owners Reyna and Maritza Vazquez. Texans will never run out of passionate words about origins, ownership, and debates on superiority when it comes to breakfast tacos, but most I know who started their day with a Veracruz All Natural Migas taco agree that it does Has a place in the lexicon.
During my years roaming the country for Eater, every time I came through Austin, I shared breakfast tacos, elbows on a picnic table, with a local friend in Veracruz’s original location in east Austin. Since those years the Vazquez sisters have been forced to move away from this property. (In September my colleague Fidel Martinez, a native of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, wrote a story about Veracruz All Natural and the ongoing gentrification of east Austin.) The business has expanded to include Austin over the past decade, including a take -Away window at Austin’s Line Hotel; Parking the Hot Tacos Truck in a corner of the hotel’s Koreatown estate with rows of palm trees and the Romanesque grandeur of Oasis Church as a backdrop was an organic extension of the partnership.
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About the migas: corn tortilla or flour tortilla? Beet juice turns the corn tortillas a subtle brand pink, but unless you’re not eating wheat, ask for a flour tortilla that is homemade and appealingly stretchy to best weigh all the ingredients. The black beans are an LA supplement that I can take or leave. And while I respect the vegetarian nature of the original Austin version, Hot Taco includes options for chorizo or bacon, and they make things better for us. Chorizo adds seasoning and helps melt the cheese; Strips of bacon bring the critical breakfast crispy.
I hesitate to use the word “improvement”, but the migas tacos the Vazquezes and her team serve in Koreatown can definitely rival their counterparts in Austin.
The truck runs Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and while the migas are the clear draw, the rest of the menu tends towards lunch, with tacos and quesadillas filled with citrusy cochinita pibil, grilled chicken or steak and ” al pastor cauliflower “. “With a little crunch and laced with pineapple.
Go now. The duration of Hot Taco’s Koreatown run (which started in October) is nebulous and may end in January. The owners have announced that they will now build a more permanent site, but nothing is certain yet. Though within reach, the Migas taco alone deserves a morning detour.
The 101 is coming!
The 2021 edition of The Times’ Annual 101 Best Restaurants in LA, presented by City National Bank, goes live on December 7th at 8:30 p.m. PST. The beautiful print version will be added to the subscribers’ newspapers on the following Sunday; Print editions will also be available through the Times’ online store later this month.
The 101 Best Restaurants Presentation Event, due to take place on December 7th at the City Market Social House, is sold out.
Other stories
Ben Mims comes through with his annual Christmas Cookie Extravaganza. What do oat and hazelnut chess bars with raspberry and lime jam, candied gingerbread macarons, prickly orange and chocolate chip cookies, Mexican cherry and walnut milk fudge and salty black and white chocolate crinkles have in common? They’re either vegan or gluten free and they’re all spectacular.
Stephanie Breijo covers Stellar Pizza, a food truck founded by former SpaceX engineers that will use robotic arms to serve and bake pizzas, and the other opening news of the week.
Bonus mention: Ruth Reichl, food writing legend and former food editor and restaurant critic for the Times, published a newsletter for December. It includes suggestions for Christmas presents, but also insightful stories from their old archives, copies of old menus (remember Trumps led by Chef Michael Roberts?) And recipes. She calls it La Briffe – “a loving old French term for food,” she writes – and it’s great.
A selection of Ben Mims Christmas cookies 2021.
(Silvia Razgova / For the time)
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https://www.latimes.com/food/newsletter/2021-12-04/hot-tacos-koreatown-migas-breakfast-tacos-tasting-notes
