After 29 years of exploring tacos, I can make one judgment with confidence: The Holy Grail of taco consumption appears when you’re standing on a random street, holding a shitty paper plate heaped with tortillas and meat.
A truly great street taco stand has a gravity unto its own, pulling you to the event horizon of caramelized fat and toasting masa. It teases you with scent, sight and sound until, suddenly, a plate appears above the griddle, beckoning your touch.
And every great taco demands a ritual. With haste, you accept the taquero’s precious gift with two hands. With delicate care, you pinch the taco with three fingers, and hunch over at about 25 degrees. Then, with proper ferocity, you must lean in for a bite that seems too big.
As the legendary Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold once wrote: “Taco should be a verb.” To truly taco is to embrace how joy intertwines with the liminal. Perhaps the greatest taco I ever ate was one I stumbled upon in a cramped aisle of the maze-like Mercado de San Juan in Mexico City, where a man handed me a taco full of chopped intestines, fried until crisp and laced with a salsa molcajete so electric that it practically vibrated. I do not recall his name, nor that of his stall. Instead, I fell into a black hole, dissociating in pure sabor until I came to, having eaten six of the damn things.
It’s been a long time since I felt that way. But Luis Gutierrez changed that.
Lou’s Bomb-Azz Tacos is run out of a crowded garage at his grandmother’s house on a quiet block at 2960 22nd St, just off Treat Ave. He proudly shows off the mountain of miscellany inside — “There’s treasures in there, bro, like Sega Genesis games,” he wisecracks — but there’s just enough space for Gutierrez to man a small Blackstone griddle and crank out what may be some of the best tacos in San Francisco.
There is little to deliberate when you walk up to this petite taco stand: There’s exactly two options for fillings. The marinated pork al pastor is perfumed with earthy roasted chiles, which imbue the meat with a beautiful reddish hue. Delicious, but my preference is the carne asada — the beef has a quality sear, perfect seasoning, and rich flavor, contrasting the grey blandness that passes as normal at mediocre taquerias.
You can get a regular taco for $3.50, but the true move is to get it with cheese for $4. Rather than tossing a lazy hit of queso on top, Gutierrez carefully griddles two corn tortillas with cheese, until it oozes out of the middle and begins to brown.
“The trick is cooking one side good and crisp and making the other side nice and soft,” he tells me, pointing a thick finger at the lacy edge of crunchy cheese.
He offers pinto beans by request, and you’re welcome to add onions, cilantro, and lime, but of essence are the two salsas: One is a smooth concoction of fresh tomato and gentle spice, while the salsa verde sparkles with acidity and a more persistent heat.
You would be forgiven for assuming the 42-year-old has been in the taco business forever — instead, his stall only opened three months ago, he tells me. But making this food is in his blood. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. He is the latest generation in a family that fed people in the Mission for decades.
Gutierrez’s grandparents, Luis and Maria Bañuelos, opened a string of Mission restaurants starting in the 1980s. First came El Palenque at 24th and Mission streets and then, later, a bigger spot named La Posta down 24th on Florida Street. “That was the jump off for us — it had a big bar, big seafood, good Mexican shit. It was the spot,” Gutierrez recalls.
Around 2004, however, the specter of gentrification came to haunt the restaurant. The new landlord of the building proposed doubling the rent on La Posta’s space, which was untenable; Gutierrez then says the landlord’s deal to relocate the eatery to 17th Street fizzled out, with the family losing money over the confusion. A few years later, some nostalgic customers who loved the cooking of Gutierrez’s mother, Martha Bañuelos, broached an idea to serve her Mexican cuisine at Jay’n Bee Club, a watering hole on 20th Street. They cut a deal with the bar’s owners, and Bañuelos soon received a rave review in 2008 from the KQED television show “Check, Please!,” surging her pop-up restaurant, Marta’s Kitchen, to newfound popularity.
(Yes, it was Martha running Marta’s Kitchen — the fellow who made the the sign and logo made an error, but they ran with it anyway.)
As with La Posta, bad luck derailed a good thing. Gutierrez blames an altercation with a bartender at Jay’n Bee, which led the owners to ban him and his grandmother, among others, from entering the premises again. Martha couldn’t bear going it alone, and left with them. A few years later, they collaborated with family friends who ran Casa Sanchez (near 24th and York streets), hoping that it would rejuvenate business there. It didn’t pan out.
That was 2014, by Gutierrez’s recollection. A decade later, he’s the last person in the lineage carrying the culinary torch. It’s an unlikely conclusion for a Mission native who has had a front-row view to the neighborhood’s evolution.
When he was a teenager, Latino gangs were running the streets. “Every corner was filled with cholos,” he says with a shrug.
“I guess I got influenced by that. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” he tells me. “I had a tough time with school. Just doing knucklehead type shit. At least until I wondered… what am I doing with my life?”
He worked as a waiter and bartender at some of his family’s restaurants, but had no ambitions of cooking alongside his mom. Gutierrez preferred rapping, which led to him learning to design logos and graphics for his and others’ mixtapes. Eventually, when he had his son at 23 years old, he buckled down and focused on graphic design to make a living.
Music and art remains a passion for Gutierrez — he made the colorful sign for Lou’s Bomb-Azz Tacos, complete with a cartoon version of himself — but it was only in the last few years that he realized he got a thrill from feeding people, too.
“I realized, man, I’m pretty good at this. And I do love it, after all. It just took some time,” he says.
He focused on one-off events at first, such as the massive Carnaval party that descends on the Mission every May. Nowadays, it’s practically a full-time gig: He cooks Tuesday-Friday, usually from around 12:30 to 8:30 p.m. (it's rarely precise, in my experience). It remains a family effort, just like it has always been.
“My grandma’s right here upstairs. My mom helps me out, making the beans and her salsas,” Gutierrez says. "I just love being in my neighborhood."
He spends much of his time in the Mission, despite living in San Bruno, and dreams of expanding one day, perhaps with a food truck — although he (rightfully) grumbles about the sky-high cost of operating in San Francisco. “A fully licensed truck here is like, $150,000,” he tells me with a sigh. “Why they gotta make everything so expensive?”
But even if opening a restaurant here seems impossible, selfishly, I don’t want him to. At least for now.
As I stood there on the sidewalk, hunched over by 25 degrees and unhinging my jaw for another bite, it struck me that I had discovered one of the very best taco memories in San Francisco. The clouds seemed to part a bit right then, as if to urge me to stay and order more.
