Dining Out 012: CDMX Tacos
Lunch in Soho.
About a week ago, I started following a new taco place in Soho, called CDMX Tacos, on Instagram. I clicked the ‘follow’ button because I was interested in the photos on the profile.
The restaurant in the pictures was tiled white, with a till and a small kitchen at the front, and counters at the walls, where you eat standing up, and then go on your merry way after a short stay, eating with your hands and leaning over like an animal at a trough. This set-up seemed to mimic the no frills style of American taquerias, which are quite cafeteria-like in feel (I have never been to Mexico but I’m led to believe this is kind of the vibe there, too), so I suspected that the food might also follow the pattern.
You may or may not know that London has a bit of a taco problem. Other than a few well-known notable exceptions (I’m sure there are more that I’m missing, but in my experience, the best ones are at Sonora in Stoke Newington, whose barbacoa taco should be taught as a sort of What To Do With Beef 101, and the OG La Chingada in Surrey Quays, where I had an excellent beef suadero taco a few months ago*), London does not do an especially good line in tacos.
And that’s OK! London is great at loads of other stuff, like lager and bánh mì and pies. When it comes to tacos, though, it understandably doesn’t really have a leg to stand on when compared with south and even north America, just literally due to simple factors like physical proximity to Mexico and its produce.
The Taco Problem is much-discussed, anyway, and it’s because of this scarcity mindset that whenever a new taco spot which looks like it might be the Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope of London Mexican food opens, both press and punters go wild for it.
As if to illustrate my point perfectly, over the course of the first week I spent as an Instagram follower of CDMX Tacos – which, in line with the US taquerias I’ve visited, carries a small menu of tacos with pork (al pastor or chiccaron), steak (asada) and nopal (aka cactus), as well as a selection of chips and dips, and the option to make any taco a quesadilla – I felt like I watched the hype machine creaking into action, going through the usual motions that I have observed in the sort of liminal space I occupy as a sort of observer and participant, with one foot in food media and another out of it.
In this case, this meant that first, I saw that the restaurant had been featured on the personal Instagram stories of a load of food journalists. Then The Infatuation reviewed CDMX in a vertical video format for Instagram and TikTok (very positively, I’d add!) And then the place hit the Food Instagram motherlode: Eating With Tod.
If I were to get into my specific thoughts on Eating With Tod (for the uninitiated he’s a food influencer with a particular penchant for like, piles of meat and viral donuts and so on, maybe like if Buzzfeed Tasty in 2015 was a guy), we’d be here for another 10,000 words**. But whatever your opinion, the bloke holds sway, and a feature on his account – which now has a million followers – will do bits for your business, no doubt. In CDMX’s case, due to that feature, as well as all the other online promo and word-spreading, they added about 3000 followers to their account in the time between my initially following them and my writing this. I’m sure that number is only increasing.
Such hype online does, in London at least, translate to lots of customers and big queues. So all of this is to say that last weekend, partly because of my endless fascination with the way that the internet has affected our relationships with food and particularly with restaurants, and partly because I’m only human and I did kind of want to see what was up with the tacos, I stood in line at CDMX for about an hour and a half to buy two tacos.
I’m very aware that we’re a good few hundred words in at this point, and you haven’t heard anything about a single bite I ate, so I will give you my rundown of those tacos now. By the time I came to order, the kitchen was out of pork, so I kept it simple and opted for one asada taco and one nopal taco. The tacos come “con todo” – so that’s onion, coriander, guacamole and salsas – and there’s also an option to add more salsas yourself when you receive your food.
When my time came, I took my little polystyrene box over to the counter in the front window and posted up to eat. I tackled the cactus first, and enjoyed it: it wasn’t too soft, and the mild, verdant flavour of the plant was both honoured by the seasoning and livened up by a bit of lime juice squeezed over just before eating.
Where the steak was concerned, it was a little tough, but the tomatillo salsa was tart and along with the onions, it elbowed its way through the meat’s umami char from the plancha with the force of me trying to get to the front of the Robbie Williams show at Hyde Park in a few weeks (that is to say: considerable). Carne asada is famously pretty simple, and I appreciated the respect for classicism here (the guac that came on the nopal taco was held for this one), because I do find that one of the major pitfalls of a lot of London taco places, particularly chains, is an unnecessary tendency to throw the kitchen sink at a dish that at its heart doesn’t and shouldn’t really need much.
I did find that I was a little disappointed with the tortillas themselves – made fresh behind the counter in a press, with masa, to CDMX’s credit – just because they were too thick. This meant that they came apart in my hand quite quickly, and had a bit of a grainy texture. And considering that the tortilla kind of underpins the whole taco, I’d say that’s a pretty fundamental issue, though given the rate that these things were having to be slung out at, it’s not entirely surprising.
As such, I think that my main verdict on CDMX Tacos is really that I’d just be interested to try it again when the hype fades a bit, and the chefs have had a second to breathe, because I think they make demonstrably good food that is probably great under easier circumstances. What I will say, however, is that the hype is kind of fascinating, and that my experience of this place outside of the tacos themselves was genuinely really thought-provoking.
During my 90 minutes in the queue, just vibing alone – there is no way I would have made another person do this with me, honestly – I noticed that a lot of people in the line (and I include myself in this of course) were there because they were creating content of some type. One well-dressed girl in a mac-type coat had her iPhone notes app open, typing out her thoughts on her experience. The group in front of me were one of quite a few who had collected burgers from another viral spot – Supernova, which is, aptly, just around the corner – to tide them over while they waited (and probably, in some cases, to kill two birds with one stone for a “come with me to try viral food in London” Instagram reel series). Someone else was filming a TikTok, and pretty much everyone was taking a lot of photos.
Obviously internet and word-of-mouth hype is something that eventually fulfills itself once the touchpaper has been lit. As soon as a place is mentioned by one influencer or journalist, five more get wind of it and want to make content about it too, and that means that five or ten or fifty of their followers will then be minded to go down to that spot to try it for themselves. It was interesting to see this in action in an establishment at the very beginning of that process, and to consider what it does for a restaurant.
Of course, the obvious answer is that a massive queue is great for a business’ bottom line, particularly in the early months of the doors being open. But at CDMX, while the front of house staff handled it with grace*** and the chefs took their time, didn’t get frustrated with each other, and just kept their service at a steady pace, it was clear that the relentlessness had inevitably affected both the quality of the food and the service (the team is very small, consisting of a person behind the till, and three chefs on a little production line at the counter: one making tortillas, one at the plancha and the spit, and one finishing the tacos and calling orders).
I went in knowing I’d have a long wait, because that’s the nature of these things. But as I stood there, snaking my way slowly around the queue, scrolling on my phone and looking around as mariachi music played on the overhead speakers, and the weather outside shifted from sunshine to grey, I noticed that everyone looked bored and miserable, and that made me sad, because all of the staff I encountered were really warm and I could tell they cared a lot about their place and what they were doing.
Honestly, the thing that was wrecking the vibe was the hype and the queue itself – the seriousness and the clamouring and the guarding of positions in the line, lest someone else receive their taco and take their photo of it before you. I thought, in that time, a bit about the split between reality and our phones, and how, in a lot of ways, the way we share food on social media and hype up certain places is pretty antithetical to what I actually love about eating in restaurants – even if they are casual spots where you’re just housing a quick taco and then dipping.
The best thing about being at a restaurant is feeling embodied, in that place, and having the sensory experience that someone else wants to give you. But the preoccupation with creating content around food and restaurants, and therefore reproducing hype, is a little at odds with that – like having the experience comes second to showing people that you had it. That, of course, is the burden of all social media, but it’s an especial shame when it comes to restaurants, which at their best can take you out of your shit life and into another little world entirely.
I’m aware that I am sitting here writing a blog about restaurants, so of course I myself am part of this ecosystem. I always take photos of my food, because it’s easy to snap one on my phone. But the reason I like to write about food, ultimately, is because I like to write about pleasure and immediacy and sensuality and fun. I think my experience at the weekend, then, was a reminder that social media and our constant need to post are not comfortable bedfellows with those things – all they do is breed prissiness and particularity and this sense of wanting to be first.
I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to counter any of this – I am but one woman and Instagram and TikTok are a tidal wave – and if online hype keeps decent places in business when they might otherwise have struggled, then it’s a net good. But I do think it can also stop chefs from doing their best work – understandably cutting corners when rushed, or just offering the stuff people want to take photos of, for example. Don’t get me wrong, in the case of CDMX, my tacos were pretty good, and I’m glad I had this weird hour and a half of reflection. But I must say, I am looking forward to going again once the queue has died down a bit.
* While I was on a first date as well, mind you, because I’m many things but I’m not a fucking coward.
** TL;DR: I don’t really go in for what I would term “cheese pull culture” (that is, the act of staring and nodding down a phone camera while you rip a toastie apart) so Eating With Tod isn’t really for me, but his style is at the very least accessible, which is more than you can say for a lot of other food media, which is feverishly gatekept by privately educated people. Oop!
*** Having been behind a till and on the receiving end of a line of customers as long as that many times myself, I certainly would have gone Bubbly’s In The Fridge mode at least once.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.
See you this Sunday for a new paid post – about London’s best date restaurants, ft. some very special guest contributors – and next Thursday for the weekly review!