During the conversation with the Mexican chef Paco Méndez, the phrase “before the pandemic” or “after the pandemic” frequently appears. This is how you are placed in time on one side or the other of that phenomenon that took away a lot of businesses and also the El Barri group to which Hoja Santa belonged (today owned and converted into COME) and Niño Viejo . The success that the latter achieved, added to the demands of his friend and then boss Albert Adrià and her own, led them to raise the bar on the menu and expand the equipment in their tiny room, so that some nights they reached pass more than a hundred diners. That place was going to be a simple taqueria, but it was getting further and further away from that first intention that now, “after the pandemic” they have recovered.
Taco Méndez was born a few months ago without forgetting the experience of that predecessor, the Niño Viejo who died of success. Or, to be more precise, the one they sacrificed a year “before the pandemic”, because in some way it competed with the Hoja Santa restaurant, its older brother in an adjacent space (“people saw that it paid less than there and they spent it in big”). Then, you know, the virus arrived and “after the pandemic” there was no longer Niño Viejo, nor Hoja Santa, nor Tickets, nor any other of the venues of that group that would dissolve and whose members would take different paths.
A year after Méndez reopened COME and when Albert Adrià once again gave birth (in several phases) to an Enigma that is splendid today, Méndez proposed to his friend Adrià to open a taqueria in the premises that had been occupied by Bodega 1900 (later it would be Bodega Lito and it was about to be Romería, a project that did not bear fruit). This is how that cozy and exquisite tavern with the walls covered in old photos linked to the universe of El Bulli looks today with black walls and multicolored furniture so that no one forgets that they are in a taqueria for all budgets: great music, fast service with You order through your mobile phone and a short, direct letter, with an average ticket of 25 euros.
They made things clear from the beginning: this would be a taqueria where you could find classics (“creative tacos are for others”), with freshly made pancakes and maximum local produce. At Taco Méndez you should not expect frills; but those impeccable pancakes (they themselves work the corn from scratch in the two mills they bought); a spinning top to make those al pastor tacos that came to Mexico from Lebanon, based on lamb (like kebab) to which Mexicans exchanged that meat for the pork that Méndez buys in Cal Rovira, as well as the tasty ribs or that delicious Triple Pork sandwich that is worth a visit in itself; the calf’s head taco, the corn flan… They say they are testing it and that they will drop anchor if the clientele decides. So, and everything indicates that yes, perhaps they will open new stores.
