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If you want to get a sense of how London’s Mexican food scene has progressed in the past decade or so, then all you need to do is ask Chef Erick – co-founder of new-wave pozoleria Maiz – about “the cutlery incident”. This was around six years ago, in the infancy of Los Ilegales, the locally beloved mobile taqueria that the Zacatecas native had been operating out of a truck in a Greenwich courtyard. “I remember people came and asked me for a knife and fork to eat tacos,” he says, with a smile and a shake of the head. “I gave it to them but, for me, it was very weird and kind of embarrassing. Now, I see how people eat tacos,” he raises a tightly cupped hand to his mouth, “and it’s almost like they’re Mexicans.”
Putting any sort of purity test around utensil use to one side, it’s hard to dispute this depiction of Mexican-loving Londoners shifting steadily from inexperienced caution to confident adventurousness. Where once it was the norm to bemoan the reliable awfulness of the capital’s tacos, now the city teems with a multiverse of high-quality options, dealing in faithfully rendered regional flavours rather than clumsy, Old El Paso-coded cliches. The mantle laid down by spots like El Pastor and Breddos has been taken up by the likes of Sonora Taqueria and Homies on Donkeys, by La Chingada, Comalera and top-end establishments like Fonda and Cavita. This week’s launch of Cometa – the Carousel team’s splashy, permanent exploration of coastal Mexican cuisine – will further expand a citywide repertoire of serious aguachiles, birrias, esquites, moles and more.
But one of the more fascinating aspects of this trend is that some of its more exciting recent additions have been concentrated in and around Peckham. There is Taca Tacos and Taquiza, where zippy Micheladas and incendiary smoked leek and mushroom tamales jostle with an adjacent nightclub. There is the specialist deli and Margarita bar at Mexican Mama, plus Maiz, where south Londoners have lately been bowing before the steam of complex pozole stews, thick with white hominy corn and the ringing heat of green chillies. And then, of course, there is Guacamoles: the no-frills Rye Lane Market counter that – as flagged by national newspapers, video reviewers and, pivotally, Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn –is producing tacos that, with their profound, fatty savour and heady whack of fresh masa, really might be among London’s best.
What this all points to is the emergence of Pexico: a hyper-local, papel picado-strung scene that is fostering and sustaining dazzling levels of culinary ambition and creativity. So, it is worth asking: is this a legitimate localised phenomena or just a geographical aberration? And what can the presence of these new businesses tell us about where Mexican food in London is heading?
The first thing to say is that there is, of course, a fair bit of random luck and coincidence shaping this scene. Chef Erick decided to establish Maiz in Peckham partly because he happened to live in the area; Guacamoles founder Manny de la Torre (who came to the UK in 2022 after fleeing drug violence in his native Veracruz) initially launched the business in Hounslow before happenstance, and transfer to a new asylum hotel, brought him to Peckham. Excellent Mexican-inspired restaurants proliferate across London (the stretch of Dalston and Stoke Newington that contains the likes of Corrochios and Sonora has a decent claim to being something of a taco and mezcal mile) so, from a certain angle, the current boom in SE15 is just a reflection of a broader, city-wide revolution.
And yet, there does seem to be something about Peckham that has been especially conducive to bold, value-forward Mexican cooking. For one thing, though London’s Mexican-born diaspora is still small, the proximity of Latin American community strongholds in places like Old Kent Road and New Cross has proved beneficial (de la Torre’s business partner, Jonathan Giraldo, is Colombian; ditto the founders of defunct, pan-South American stalwart Cravings La Carreta). And Rye Lane’s ragged patchwork of food businesses – encompassing everything from feted modern Vietnamese and new-wave West African to Algerian wraps and Kurdish mezze – amounts to a particular gastronomic microclimate; a cocktail of relatively attainable sites frequented by diners who are adventurous, loyal and not opposed to establishments that feel a little ramshackle or rough around the edges.
“It’s a very multicultural area and people are very open to trying new things,” says Mark Parish, who founded Mexican Mama, a grocery, bar and wholesaler, with his partner Maira Gallardo Duran in 2020. “Our customers in the shop are very knowledgeable. They know the chillies they want for a birria; the spices for a pozole. And I think that knowledge shows in the quality and authenticity of the places that are opening up.” This, as Gallardo Duran notes, is quite a turnaround from 2014, when she schlepped to Fulham to buy “really, really bad” tortillas from one of the only specialist Mexican shops she could find.
So where does Pexico head next? Well, beyond the fact that it is already growing – as proven by the presence of other spots like Market Place spot Los Tacos and Latin stand 35 Americas in Rye Lane Market – the next step for these businesses will be to further expand their roster of Mexican dishes beyond standard crowd-pleasers. “A lot of Mexican restaurants always have the same thing, like tinga [shredded chicken] and birria,” says Chef Erick. “So we want to add more interesting, real Mexican food. Tostadas, chicharron, gorditas.”
Beyond that, history tells us that success in a particular postcode inevitably leads to expansion beyond it (here we turn to La Chingada, which began in Surrey Quays but now has locations in Bermondsey and Euston). Inevitably, de la Torre has just announced a second site, in Tooting Market, and there are rumours of more to come. Today south London; tomorrow the world. The upshot, with any luck, will be an ever-growing, city-wide universe of soothing pozoles, shatteringly crisp flautas and gooey quesadillas, messily downed without any cautious requests for cutlery. Peckham’s taco supremacy may be real. But this is a Mexican wave that’s destined to lift all boats.
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