Review: I Tested Mexico City’s Sole Michelin-Starred Taco Stand, and It’s Worth the Trip

The Michelin Guide — a 125-year-old organization — is in its change era. Of course, the past six years under international director Gwendal Poullennec have wrought a lot of expansion and evolution already: Presence in new countries and Green stars have been ways the guide has sought to remain relevant in a constantly shifting landscape. Another method the red book has used to continue influencing dining decisions is to look at different types of restaurants altogether.

Michelin will always be associated with fine dining. But these days, accessible street food is on the table for anonymous inspectors and guide followers across the globe. In 2016, Michelin set international cuisine into a tizzy when it awarded a hawker stall in Singapore, Hawker Chan, a single star. In 2017, the guide’s first Thailand edition doled the same recognition to Jay Fai, a Bangkok food stall. At the time of writing, Jay Fai has maintained its rank, while Hawker Chan lost its station in 2021. Its legacy will be remembered as the rock that split the river.

In its 2024 guide to Mexico City, Michelin created buzz again by awarding one star to a street food eatery: Taquería El Califa de León. In a town known for tacos, neglecting to include one would have amounted to high culinary crimes. With the 2025 edition of the CDMX guide anticipated to drop sometime in May 2025, it remains to be seen if this was a shooting star destined to dazzle and disappear or if the taquería has long-term staying power. Since I’ve eaten at both of Michelin’s priorly starred street-food stands, I felt compelled to try Taquería Califa de León on a recent trip to Mexico City.

By some accounts, there are 11,000 taco shops in Mexico City. By others, there may be 1.6 million when you consider unregistered shops, stalls, and taco carts. Whatever number you use to benchmark, the undisputed fact is that Taquería El Califa de León is Mexico City’s only taco shop with a Michelin star.

Per reporting by El Restaurante, the modest shop was first opened by a man named Don Juan Hernandez Gonzalez over 60 years ago. Today, it remains a family business operated by Don Juan’s son, Mario Hernandez Alonso. For a long time, the shop was a regular hotspot for Mexican politicians and government officials, though now the queue consists of far fewer suits and way more international tourists. Its signature item, a beef filet called the gaonera taco, is named after the patronage of a bullfighter who once supported the restaurant, señior Rodolfo Gaona. 

In late 2024, Taquería El Califa de León took its Michelin-starred tacos on the road, running pop-ups in New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Miami. However, its location in CDMX is its one and only brick and mortar despite another local taco chain called by a similar name, El Califa. 

There are precious few things available besides the gaonera taco: El Califa de León also serves bistec (beef steak), chuleta (pork chop), and costilla (beef rib) tacos. All tacos come on handmade corn tortillas. Two sauces accompany your meat medley: a salsa verde made with chopped onion, green tomatoes, cilantro, and serrano chili, and a salsa rojo made with dried guajillo and pasilla chilis. Your beverage choices consist of a few water and soda options, chilled.

Taquería El Califa de León is located at Avenue Ribera de San Cosme 56, col. San Rafael. It’s approximately a 15-minute walk from the Monument to the Revolution, a common tourist destination in CDMX, and also nearby the Mercado San Cosme, another popular destination for shopping and eating. If you’re staying in Roma Norte or La Condesa — two popular tourist destinations — the easiest way to reach the shop is by taxi. With CDMX traffic, this can take upwards of 35 minutes. 

The shop has accessible hours, open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day of the week. That said, the tides flow. Get there early, and your lunch could take as little as 10-15 minutes to order and arrive. A bit later, and you may end up behind a busload of guided food tours. I arrived around 6 p.m. for an early dinner and had a five-minute queue to handle. By the time I finished my meal, the line extended out of the shop and down the sidewalk.

Credit cards aren’t accepted, so you’ll need to bring cash and keep your change handy. Like many taco stands in CDMX, there aren’t any chairs or stools here, but a small clothing store directly next door has set up some tables and allowed guests a place to eat their meals. You can repay their kindness with the aforementioned coins. All food comes on a little plastic plate adorned with a few limes. If it wasn’t clear before, this taqueria is not vegetarian-friendly.

The costilla taco was my first dive into tasting Taquería El Califa de León, and as first impressions go, let’s just say that this meeting made me start considering a future together. Maybe I’d have let it take me home to meet the parents. The costilla arrived without pretense on a plastic plate but piled high over the other options. This said to me, “I’m down to earth, but that’s because I know how special I am.” That’s the kind of thing I crave from my food. It was also smoking hot — so hot, in fact, that I had to let it cool — and there was a little bit of jiggle to it. If you’re cutting beef from the rib, there needs to be a little bit of fat there, and this taco delivered just enough.

Not too greasy, but with enough juice to make things tender, the costilla was a welcome introduction to the taqueria’s game. A squirt of lime brought up flavors that felt like they had already been cooked in the meat and just needed a drip to be brought forth to the surface. For a beef taco, the flavor was full but also a bit refreshing. The salt and acid and thin texture made it quick to forget that I was in the depths of a concrete jungle and not on a beach somewhere.

Things started to blur on my second taco, the bistec. To put it bluntly, there are a lot of great bistec tacos in Mexico City, and this is just one of the good ones. Was the meat high quality? Yes. Was it flavorful and moreish and salty? Also yes. Was it served thinly sliced instead of chopped, like most bistec is done across CDMX, thereby making it a distinct texture compared to its competitors? Triple yes. Could I tell the difference between it and the costilla? Barely.

Had I been alone on this delicious outing, I might have just questioned my own chops as a food writer and assumed that my palate and knowledge of butchery were just too uneducated to notice any inherent textural differences between the two cuts. However, I wasn’t alone and was instead assured by a local friend that, no, this wasn’t just my gringoness showing through: The two tacos were very similar. Bistec can come from the chuck, tenderloin, top or bottom sirloin, which means that it can also be hard to identify. It was in this case.

Salty, pleasantly unctuous, and with a bachata dancer’s balance of heat and acid springing from salsas and lime, the gaonera taco was my favorite by far. According to El Restaurante, gaonera is a filleted cut that derives from the front leg of the cow; it doesn’t have the same marbling as the rib cut, for example, but there were bits of fat around the edges. I’m a disgustingly easy sell anytime I see the sizzling edge of a perfectly rendered flavor bomb, which the gaonera was.

I expected a piece of beef that is cut from a hard-working area to potentially have some graininess, a chewy texture, or maybe even feel a little tough while chewing. This was far from the case. The gaonera meat wasn’t ribeye tender — that is to say it didn’t melt in your mouth exactly, but it was a lot more noshable than it looked and even had some friable crisp edges to contrast.

The corn tortillas brought an underlying, grainy sweetness, made more potent from their freshness. Best of all, they were still piping hot by the time I arrived at the gaonera and managed not to fold under the pressure.

Apart from the gaonera, the chuleta was — by and large — the taco with the most distinct taste. However, with the chuleta, that taste was mostly salt, and for 82 MXN, this ranks as one of the more expensive chuletas you’ll buy in Mexico City. Keeping the relativity in mind made it much easier to move past that as a sticking point and instead get into the flavor.

The chuleta was as tender as a ballad sung by Seal, which explains why it was possibly the juiciest taco that I had at Taquería El Califa de León. It was also the only instance where the tortilla folded under pressure and broke halfway through eating. You hate to see it happen like that. Given the devilishly hot temperature at which food items were served, this was understandable. The tortillas did have a nice alkalized flavor to them, which gave a little contrast to the umami sweetness of the pork. The finishing salt was putting in heavy work, though, requiring more than a little bit of salsa. The rojo was my favorite addition to the pork. It was a little less ethereal and raw, more down to earth. The right amount of heat, and with a dried, smoky profile that feels like it’s been paired with the pork for decades, which it has.

My initial impression of Taquería El Califa de León was akin to the Michelin inspectors, who describe the food as “elemental and pure.” I’m just not sure they were for the same reasons. To me, there is a true element to eating in a place where so much life has — and still continues — to happen: The small, flat top grill serving hundreds a day; the tortillas made to order; the history of the building, business, and Mexico City that can be felt within the walls. To experience a restaurant that means so much to so many is a privilege, especially when you consider that something like a Michelin star offers the chance for dramatic change. Still, though, you get the sense that Taquería El Califa de León remained true to its culture.

Setting a clear and distinct penchant for nostalgia aside, the food is really good, albeit a bit confusing. When my tacos arrived at my table next door, they were delivered without a single explanation of what was what. That required me to bother an (already harried) employee for more clarification. Yet, even when the meats were differentiated by name, the taste and texture were almost indecipherable in some instances. Luckily, those tastes were still delicious.

Ultimately, this is really good food that you’ll want to make the trip for, so long as you pick the right timing. With a million taco shops on offer, you can find excellent bites without the lines. I recommend the journey, but plan wisely!