“Tacos are universal,” says Adolfo Torres with a grin, “everybody loves tacos.” ¡Es verdad! In 2016, Torres and his family parked a trailer in Peoria and introduced Phoenicians to the Tijuana-style tacos they had been serving for decades to family and friends. Five years later, the family affair continues to grow.
Tacos Calafia, winner of Phoenix New Times Best New Restaurant 2017 and Best Al Pastor in 2018, and PHOENIX Magazine Best Tacos 2019, has several locations across Phoenix. Torres’ menu includes street tacos, quesadillas, burritos, nachos, vampiros (crunchy tortillas topped with melted cheese and taco toppings pictured below) and mulitas (two tortillas sandwiching the taco filling inside). Handmade tortillas, guacamole and salsas are made fresh daily and signature marinades are closely-guarded family recipes.
What defines Tijuana style tacos?
First are handmade tortillas with yellow corn. We use a nixtmal masa for our tacos which is an authentic way the corn is processed, and our tortillas are made fresh on demand. Toppings for tacos like carne asada and al pastor are simple – white onion, cilantro, salsa and guacamole. We keep it authentic and make everything fresh every morning.
How did you get your start?
As a kid helping my parents. I lived in Los Angeles until I was 8, but when things got bad with racial issues and gangs, we returned to Mexico and ended up in Tijuana, and my parents were deciding what to do. My dad had worked in a taco shop in his hometown of Sinoloa, so he knew the business. He loves to cook and his food has great flavor, or sazón, as we say in Spanish. So it was a no-brainer – we opened a taco stand and started selling carne asada, al pastor and tripa tacos. It was just a little stand with a bench and I’d hand out the soda, sweep the area and help as much as I could.
How did you end up in Arizona?
By 2001, my siblings and I were headed towards high school and college. Since we were all US citizens, we decided the smartest thing to do was to pursue our education in the US, and ended up in Glendale. We worked as a family in the commercial cleaning business at first, but always had that entrepreneurship mindset about starting a taco shop. Not only for a business, but because we had a hard time finding good Tijuana-stye tacos. In 2016, we finally got together and said, the timing is right, let’s make it happen.
Was your original plan a food truck?
It was our only option. Because of the investment, we had to start small. We worked with somebody to convert a trailer into a kitchen, and towed it with my dad’s pick-up. The permit and zoning process was very challenging, but just by accident we found the perfect spot. We were driving by a large corner lot at 67th Avenue and Thunderbird where a Circle K had closed. There was a bicycle shop there using the parking spots in front of the store and the rest of the lot was open. We said, let’s go talk to the owner, and the location ended up checking all the boxes.
When did you open your first restaurant?
Tacos Calafia is just myself and my wife. My dad and a couple of my brothers have kept the food truck. They’re Tacos Tijuana, and they’re doing great too and also expanding. I opened this [Peoria] location in 2017 and when we started to have lines out the door, we opened our second location in Surprise about a year later. Three months later we opened in Tolleson, so all were within a year and a half. We also recently started to offer franchise-type expansions, but keeping it within family and friends. We take pride in our brand so we need to have people who are very familiar with what we do and are able to keep up the quality. For example, the downtown Phoenix location is owned by Wendy, my wife’s twin sister, and her husband Leo.
What’s on the menu?
We started with three meats, pollo, carne asada and al pastor, and now have cabeza and nopales, our vegan option. We also have a secret menu with our naked tacos. The name came about because we strip the tortillas out to make it keto friendly. People were asking for tacos with just the meat, so I said, we can do something better than that! We make a cheese crust by grilling cheese on our plancha so it’s like a tortilla chip and use them to make the naked tacos, mulitas and quesadillas. As far as drinks, our micheladas come with chamoy and tajin rims and our customers started asking us to rim margaritas, so you can request that too. I pretty much say whatever you can imagine with the ingredients we have, we’ll make it happen.
Tell me about the murals.
They represent the streets of Tijuana. Those mini-buses are called calafias – that’s where the name for Tacos Calafia comes from. They’re the city’s public transportation and are everywhere. The burro painted as a zebra is something you’ll see on every corner in Tijuana for you to take pictures as souvenirs. And that statue is Cuauhtémoc that you’ll see at the glorieta, or roundabout; you can’t miss it when you’re in Tijuana.
We have a lot of guests that know Tijuana. And as soon as they walk in and they see those murals and images and smell the tacos, they’re transported. We get comments about that feeling of nostalgia a lot – they ask for the manager or owner, just to tell me that it reminds them of their childhood. I love that because that’s the way I feel. The ambiance and the smells remind me of helping out my parents as a kid, so for customers to tell me they feel the same thing, it means the world to me.
Interview by Christina Barrueta
Photography by Luke Irvin