Fresno is a tough place to stand out for serving great tacos. Taco Truck Throwdown has been establishing our bona fides as a taco destination since 2011, and if there’s one thing the broader world knows about the Fresno food scene, it’s probably tacos. Bringing tacos to Fresno is like bringing sand to the beach.
Yet while most people here have their favorite taco truck to grab a bite on the go, and their favorite old school sit-down joint for family night rellenos and burritos, there’s arguably a gap in the market for great places to “tacos and chill.” Can a place have great tacos and be a nice place for a relaxing lunch? Don Tacha Taqueria, tucked into the lesser-known Lowell neighborhood on Blackstone just north of downtown and south of 180, suggests yes.
While Don Tacha doesn’t have the clearest signage (with a corner spot on Blackstone and McKenzie, it’s tough to say which is the “front”), the best way to locate the place might be by smell. Monday through Saturday, someone there will invariably be cooking arrachera over a charcoal grill, the juice from the marinated skirt steaks hitting the hot coals and perfuming the whole block. It makes for an oasis of calm in a place otherwise characterized by shabby lots and through traffic. Home of the 99-cent taco, reads a vinyl sign out front, though the arrachera will run you a cool $3.50 (worth it).
“‘Don Tacha,’ that’s dad’s nickname from when he was a kid,” says José Gonzales, who opened the place in 2015 with his father (also José). “Long story short, there was a girl that liked him in this town. His brothers, my uncles, would tease him, and say ‘Oh, here’s that girl, Tacha’ – Anastasia. Since then it stuck with him. ‘Hey, Tacha, there’s Tacha.’ In Fresno, there’s Pepes [a diminutive of José] everywhere. I’m José, my dad’s José; so instead of calling it Don José or Don Pepes, which are already out there, I said ‘Hey, let’s go with your nickname.’”
Gonzales (the younger), who grew up in Fig Garden and attended Bullard, now lives next door to his own restaurant, in a house with a growing brood. His wife had just given birth to their fifth child when we met for an interview. Making a home in Lowell and not just a business seems as good proof as any of a deep commitment to growing the community. If he can’t build one, he might just raise one.
“We’re literally next door, so I tend to take it a little bit more personal because the reputation I have here is going to carry on to my home and to my neighbors,” Gonzales says. “So I make sure that the restaurant is always clean, that I’m getting to know people on a first-name basis. I think that kind of sets us apart because in other restaurants, maybe you’re just a ticket number. You go in, you get your food, you don’t eat there. Everyone knows me and my dad here, everyone knows the cooks on a first name basis. People come here to hang out. On the days off, they hang out with our cooks. We try to keep it very community-based.”
There’s something ineffably “Fresno” about Don Tacha’s. It’s funky. It has its unique charms. It has neon signs inside spelling out cheeky sayings like “Tacos over vatos” and “Michis over bichis” (as in Micheladas), that might come off corny and gentrified in other places. But here, in a neighborhood even locals don’t always know the name of, it makes for a strange oasis of calm basically in the middle of a traffic island; genuine and personal, in spite of everything else. Kind of the Fresno experience in a nutshell. You can order a Modelo with your sub-$10 lunch, and they’ll ask you if you want Tapatio in it and it won’t cost you $8.50.
“I tell people all the time, ‘in here, we don’t need cable TV,’ Gonzales says. “There’s always something going on. People fighting down the street maybe, cars bumping their music. You got motorcycle clubs down there racing their bikes. You got CRMC hospital, so the ambulance and the police are just flying up and down.”
That sense of the hectic, the hustle and bustle of real life, somehow doesn’t really puncture the Don Tacha bubble. In New York, you might see people bringing their chairs down to the sidewalk on warmer evenings, just to sit and talk and experience the general buzz of the neighborhood. It’s strange to imagine that in a place as suburban and synonymous with sprawl as Fresno, but Don Tacha’s manages to evoke the experience. Maybe that’s a product of José senior, who spent 10 years in Spanish Harlem as a kid after emigrating from Guadalajara, before making his way to San Jose and eventually Fresno.
These days, it isn’t just Fresnans making the case that Mexican food in the Central Valley is different, even among other North American regional Mexican food cuisines. The continually refreshing pool of migrant farmworkers from all parts of Mexico and Latin America bringing their own traditions, mixing with second, third, fourth-generation Mexican-Americans, and again with nouveau trends and everything now visible through social media, combine to create something unique here. The food at Don Tacha reflects that pan-Mexican sensibility, including, somewhat controversially, beans in the tacos.
“It was unusual when we first started, because you don’t put beans on tacos as far as what you eat out here,” Gonzales says. “But when you really think about it, and any Mexican will tell you this, you go to Mexico, whether it’s in a restaurant or on the street, you get your taco, they have the salsa out, you get your veggies, and they always have a big pot of frijoles. Everywhere you go, the northern part of Mexico, central, down south to Oaxaca, it doesn’t matter. The tacos, man, they come with beans. Maybe not on top, but it’s always been a part of it. So we thought, what the heck, let’s throw it on there. We loved it, we told customers to try it out. They loved it, and we just kept it ever since.”
A lot of what Don Tacha has you can find at plenty of other taco places throughout Fresno and the state. As Vincent says in Pulp Fiction, it’s about the little differences. Beans on the tacos. Arrachera over the open flame in place of the usual asada. Juicy adobada in place of the charred al pastor on the trompo. And oh yeah, asada fries.
“Those are thin-cut potatoes sliced in-house,” Gonzales says. “Pretty much like nachos, you get the cheese, the beans, the guac, all the toppings. No one else does that. I mean, I put ‘Fresno’s only’ on the menu, but I’m pretty sure I could put California’s only thin-cut asada fries. I haven’t seen it anywhere else in the state. I’ve checked social media. No one has it like that.”
It’s a nice idea, cutting the potatoes into rounds, more like chips than traditional fries, and taking the time to do them in-house rather than dropping bagged potatoes into the fryer like so many do. It’s also a good example of Don Tacha’s ad-hoc remixing of tradition and commerce, with a personal twist.
That’s Don Tacha’s approach in general, and also what makes them feel like a microcosm of Fresno’s food scene. If the 99-cent tacos (chicken, ground beef, or chicharron) or the buy-one-get-one-free michelada deals on Saturdays draw you in, you might find yourself wanting to stick around for a while.
“I don’t want to lie and say it’s all butterflies and stuff. Through COVID, a lot of my crowd from north Fresno, they weren’t coming this way,” Gonzales says. “What kept us afloat, honestly, was the community. I’ve really tried to change my mindset, where instead of trying to get all of Fresno to come here, why don’t I just take care of my neighborhood? And so we’ve worked hard to have a good footprint here. The community takes care of the rest.”
