New York's Best Steak Tacos: The Definitive Guide
Short reviews of Empellón, Oxomoco, Santo, Soledad, Cuerno, El Chato, Frijoleros, and others
Please give a warm welcome to Steak Tacos, a long column that I’ve been plotting for quite some time!!! This is my third big beef guide, after The Steak List and The Budget Steak List.
Putting together a steak taco guide wasn’t initially on my radar. But so the story goes that that spots like Santo, Soledad, Cuerno, and others have been changing the way we eat red meat. These newer spots specialize in thinly-sliced and sometimes minimalist steak tacos meant to be inhaled in just a few bites. Mexico City’s El Califa de León will join this growing club when it debuts its first stateside location in Flatiron this spring. I can’t wait.
That said, we already have a lot of steak tacos to eat. So let’s get to it.
Steak Tacos, Your Definitive Guide
Alright, what kind of steak do ya want?
We got steak tacos sliced from the trompo. Steak tacos seared over coals and grilled over mesquite. Steak tacos griddled with cheese, cut with marrow, and paired with fries.
Shall I go on?
We got steak tacos with raw beef and steak tacos as sizzling fajitas. Steak tacos served with fancy wagyu. Steak tacos made with cecina. Tiny steak tacos meant to be scarfed down in 30 seconds and giant steak taco platters meant to shared. In fact, as I’m writing these words I’m literally eating a steak costra taco at a new seafood spot, of all places, because at this point you’re either on this beefy taco train or you’re not.
The steak taco is the defining New York taco of our current era. Let it be known. I’ll share more thoughts about why this is the case in a short essay down below, but let’s get to the fun stuff first.
New York’s 17 Best Steak Tacos
This list is in no particular order! Scroll to the very bottom for a fun little video of Empellón’s steak tartare tacos
The trompo and carne asada tacos at Santo
My favorite order at Santo remains the zucchini coins with queso Oaxaca and salsa macha; it’s easily one of the city’s top vegetarian tacos. But most folks come here, to this taqueria by Cosme co-founder Santiago Perez, for different reasons. They come for the steak.
There are two varieties.
The classic carne asada involves charcoal grilled steak on good corn tortillas; the little nuggets of meat pack a solid beefiness and a nice smokiness. But the true draw is the trompo: sirloin and strip steak seared on the spit and shaved like a gyro. The tender meat sports a gorgeous exterior, not unlike a the rough hewn texture of beef jerky. It packs a clear, roast beef-y flavor while the wobbly, silky fats yield to a soft bite. Notice how lightly-loaded the taco is; the meat never overwhelms the tortilla ($6.95). 94 University Place, Greenwich Village. Read my full review!
The cecina tacos at Frijoleros
Cecina, salted and air-dried beef, doesn’t get a lot of airtime at new school Mexican spots in New York. Perhaps that’ll change after more folks swing by Frijoleros to try cecina in taco form — a dish that’s improved since I first sampled it last summer.
The kitchen serves the tacos “like how we’d eat them in Guanajuato,” the owners write on Instagram, though they caramelize their onions here (versus plating them raw) and top off everything with fries and red jalapeno salsa. This isn’t about deep, beefy flavors. The cecina tacos are a study in contrasts. The savory, gently chewy steak acts as a foil to the sugary onions and sweet tortillas. And then the papas fritas hit you with an absolute wallop of earthiness. 131 Greenpoint Avenue, Greenpoint
The steak tartare tacos at Empellón Midtown
Alex Stupak, the longtime WD~50 pastry chef who helped usher in New York’s current era of Modern Mexican dining, is still fostering an environment of creativity at his restaurants. That’s my takeaway from a recent meal at Empellón in Midtown.
I dropped by for the steak tartare tacos ($38). And I encountered a crowd that felt about right for a restaurant on the ground floor of a building known for its hedge funds and private equity firms. A dude in a BNP Paribas vest did shots with his colleagues at the standing tables, all while Goldfrapp’s “Strict Machine” pumped through the sound system. I’ll allow it.
Servers prepare the raw beef tableside, mixing in coulotte steak, egg yolk, capers, salt, and a proper dose of lacto-fermented fresno chiles. It would be a fine tartare by itself, but a certain whimsical element transforms the whole thing into something more quintessentially Stupakian.
The kitchen sends out a pile of hard shell taco crisps.
They’re miniature crisps. You use a tiny spoon to fill each one with cubes of crimson tartare. The shells are so small it’s as if you’re hosting a suburban taco night at your…local Barbie Dreamhouse. It’s hard not to imagine a little Ken Doll pretending to eat one at a plastic table.
Simply constructing the little hors d’oeuvres is half the fun, but the flavors are spectacular. The meat is slippery, sweet, and tangy, with the chiles adding just a whisper of heat. And the corn chips lend a salty crunch. 510 Madison Avenue, Midtown. Scroll to the bottom for a video of the dish!
If you’re not reading Alex Stupak’s excellent Substack you are missing out! Here’s his latest column, where he talks about prices for Mexican fare and using tacos as proverbial Trojan horses for….well, just read the essay!
His newsletter is called The Sweet Release.
The El Rey at Dolores
“I believe that steak tacos are the first taco to ever exist, and certainly the most popular in all of Mexico,” Emir Dupeyron tells me via email. I was asking him about his “El Rey” at Dolores; it’s not a run-of-the-mill carne asada taco.
Dolores, which specializes in comida chilanga, uses grilled short rib, a flavor-packed cut that doesn’t show up too often in the New York taco world.
Why does Dupeyron prefer short rib?
Because ribeye would’ve pushed the taco to $12, he tells me, and because skirt steak “tends to dry out and if not cooked properly can be stringy.”
Chef de cuisine Damian Escalante Petersen marinates the meat in cilantro, garlic, lime, and soy. He then grills it, chops it up, and places it on a pillowy Caramelo flour tortilla with salsa de arbol ahumada. It’s a heck of a taco: The seasoned short rib, at once tender and a little chewy, sports a gentle sweetness and a lot of savoriness. You really need the zippy orange salsa to slice through it all. Cost: $8. 397 Tompkins Avenue, Bed-Stuy. Read my NYT review of Dolores!
A new breed of steak tacos…
“A steak taco is rarely the best taco on any menu,” I wrote last April, adding that steak “doesn’t carry the depth or nuances of suadero or lengua. It doesn’t have the compelling texture of good cabeza or tripa. Yet on a summer evening, a little ribeye and salsa on a tortilla can be a wonderful, momentary pleasure. It’s something meaty to keep the tequila from hitting you too fast.”
How things have changed.
When I published that column, a newer breed of steak tacos — inspired by the success of El Califa de León and other spots in Mexico City — was only starting to take hold.
Today, the New Steak Taco seems to be showing up in more and more places.
These minimalist creations, characterized by papery slices of beef, squirts of lime, and maybe a little cilantro or cebollo, stand in contrast to the chunkier carne asada tacos you’ll find at Los Tacos. No.1.
The New Steak Taco doesn’t seek to overload or overwhelm. It showcases good tortillas as much as marbled beef, just as new school pizzerias highlight airy breadmaking over stretchy mozz and fragrant pomodori.
The New Steak Taco feels like an implicit argument against the Steakhouse Steak. It isn’t a story about overindulgence or heft. It’s about proportions and balance.
But let’s be real: The proliferation of steak tacos doesn’t just coincide with our city’s booming Mexican scene. It overlaps with the rising cultural relevance of red meat — which is flourishing for all sorts of crazy reasons, including RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid and the MAHA movement. So we’ll keep seeing more beef, more steak tacos, for better or for worse.
But unless the algorithms control us all, lol, I like to think and hope we’ll also encounter a greater diversity of steak tacos going forward, like the short rib variety at Dolores or the whimsical mini-tartare tacos at Empellón.
New York is a steak city. New York is a steak taco city. Even if the steak taco still isn’t the best taco on most menus :)
On that note…