Soon enough he was ingratiating himself with the owners of Mitla Cafe. And not long after, he was in their kitchen learning how the ground beef was stuffed into a corn tortilla, deep fried and then loaded with cheese, tomatoes and lettuce. At Mitla Cafe, ground beef is stuffed into corn tortillas, which are deep fried Credit: Ivana Larrosa. He made a fry basket out of chicken wire and started trying to figure out how to mass-produce hard taco shells.
And in November , he added tacos to the menu of his hamburger spot. Soon, his predominantly white clientele began trying these "take-ohs", as non-Mexicans apparently first pronounced them, which, at 19 cents each, were a hit.
A few years later, he opened a couple of new quick-service restaurants that offered only tacos. The taco stands went through different names — Taco Tia, El Taco — before he settled on an eponymous name for his taco eateries. The man's name was Glen Bell and Taco Bell had been born.
Today, there are more than 7, Taco Bell locations across 30 countries. And there is one Mitla Cafe, still quietly producing delicious hard-shell tacos the way it has for decades.
The family of Salvador and Lucia Rodriguez, now in their third generation, are running the place as a community of regular patrons crunch, munch and sip their way through a largely unchanged menu of crispy tacos, gooey cheese enchiladas and potent margaritas. Mitla Cafe has a place in the history of Mexican American cuisine as the first eatery to serve hard-shell tacos in the United States. And also for being the unlikely inspiration that launched a billion hard-shell tacos into corporate south-of-the-border flavoured fast food hegemony.
For more than eight decades, Mitla Cafe has been anchored along Mt Vernon Boulevard, a swath of Route 66, which is like a lifetime for a restaurant. How and why Mitla has managed such longevity is miraculous. Mitla Cafe serves a menu of crispy tacos, gooey cheese enchiladas and potent margaritas Credit: Ivana Larrosa. Why it has largely been so unheralded outside of San Bernardino was a mystery to me. I decided to go to the source to find out its secret. I swung open the door to Mitla Cafe around noon on a Tuesday.
What felt like a ghost town outside was an improbable party inside. The high-ceilinged interior was near capacity with lunching locals. The tacos here are fried to order; when mine arrived, they were warm and crispy. The oddity at Mitla Cafe are the tacos themselves: hard-shell tacos have been so uncool for so long that most lovers of Mexican food consider them to be "non-authentic". And that's mostly because of Taco Bell, which made hard-shell tacos ubiquitous in the mostly white American suburbs.
Dismiss the hard-shell taco at your own peril, though, as you'll be erasing an important era of Mexican American history. Though the classic ingredients are reason enough to come back, the price point is a source of comfort as well. With cheap specialty items, secret menu items, and a solid Dollar Cravings menu, it only makes sense that we keep coming back. All Rights Reserved. Previous Slide Next Slide. Plant-based shrimp? Barbecue restaurants feel the pain of soaring meat prices.
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