Quesabirria enthusiasts have been known to travel to far-flung corners of the East Bay to satisfy their craving - to a Mexican swap meet out in Antioch or a taqueria down in San Lorenzo. That’s in part because the tacos are still so elusive. In certain Bay Area circles, it’s the single most talked about food item of this current moment. It’s a style of taco that has migrated up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles and, before that, Tijuana - a taco that owes its overwhelming popularity to the social media savvy of a new generation of Mexican-American food entrepreneurs. Almost everyone orders a cup of rich, chile-tinged consomé, or beef broth, on the side to sip between bites. What it is, basically, is a beef birria taco with melted cheese - a kind of cross between a taco and a quesadilla. These tacos are most commonly known as “quesabirria,” a compound word combining queso (cheese) and birria, the traditional Mexican stew. The Montano family, who ran the business from their home, had arranged picnic tables under the tent they blasted Selena and “Te Boté.” The whole setup was not unlike the innumerable backyard quinceñeras and smaller family cookouts that take place every weekend within Richmond’s large Mexican-American community, except that anyone was welcome.īut El Garage also owes its large cult following to the particular style of taco it dished out, which was something many of its customers had never seen before in the Bay Area. At first, the interest in El Garage stemmed in part from the quaint, renegade nature of the whole experience - a restaurant inside somebody’s driveway.
Welcome to El Garage, a driveway taco stand turned quasi-above-board pop-up that, over the course of a year, has become a point of obsession for a certain brand of Bay Area food fanatic - the kind that seeks out off-the-beaten-path dining experiences and gets clout for posting about their discoveries on social media.
From the street, all you could see was the line of customers snaking out onto the sidewalk. The whole operation was hidden inside a big tent. A long line had formed on this sunny June morning, everyone waiting for upwards of 45 minutes to snag a plate of tacos. On a flat-top grill set up in a driveway in a residential neighborhood in Richmond, California, several rows of corn tortillas were glistening and red-stained, sizzling and crisping up as the taquera scattered shredded mozzarella on top and then, once the cheese had melted and oozed, placed a mound of soupy stewed beef on top of that.
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