On a recent Tuesday, a hungry search of Reddit led me to Taqueria La Mexicana—a small, homey taqueria in a tiny strip mall along Reisterstown Road in Owings Mills.
There, inside a cheery shop with walls painted the color of avocados, I found an impressively lengthy menu of tacos, tortas, sopas, antojitos, and more. They’re all made-to-order in an expansive kitchen behind a counter loaded with a bubbling aguas frescas dispenser atop a dessert case filled with flan and tres leches. The young woman running the counter was as cheerful as the restaurant; no one else was there.
Taqueria La Mexicana offers over a dozen kinds of tacos—quesabirria, lengua, barbacoa, al pastor (with the requisite pineapple), carnitas, chorizo, cabeza, and more—and all come, if you ask for them, on hand-made tortillas. This is impressive enough, as it seems that fewer and fewer taquerias make their own tortillas. But what’s even more unusual is that, on Tuesdays, the tacos are $1.99 each.
Though I spent a third of my life in Los Angeles, much of it back in the day when you could find excellent $1.25 tacos at trucks parked throughout the city, I can’t remember the last time I had a taco for under two bucks. A very good taco, that is.
The tradition of Taco Tuesdays is an old one, stretching back maybe even a century, and has long been a promotional tool for businesses, especially in California, Texas, and, oddly, New Jersey, where for a while a Jersey Shore restaurant trademarked the term. (It is no longer trademarked, thankfully, although LeBron James tried to trademark the phrase, too.) I tend to forget about Tuesdays as being a particular day to hunt for tacos, because I think of tacos most days anyway. But here it was, a Tuesday, and I got a three-taco lunch—replete with a basket of chips and cup of fresh salsa—all for considerably under $10.
I should also mention that La Mexicana has three kinds of hot sauce, including bottles of my favorite El Yucateca habanero sauce—about three shades of green darker than the paint job—on the tables, plus two additional cups of hot sauce, one red, one green, that come with your order. As the tacos are decorated with roasted jalapeños called chiles toreados, plus a roasted green onion, limes, and cucumbers, this surfeit of sauces isn’t strictly necessary. But then, you can never really have too much hot sauce.
Worth noting too is that there are other daily specials, including on Wednesdays, when pupusas are also $1.99. All this under a blue-and-white striped awning fronting a four-business complex also home to a pizza joint and a “Southern Kitchen” offering ribs, chicken, and that Baltimore specialty, fried lake trout. One could, in theory, never leave.
With everything else (stock markets, tariff policies) changing on a seemingly daily basis, it is beyond comforting to find a place where, on a Tuesday, the world seemed welcoming, even hopeful, in a restaurant that felt at once contemporary and a beautiful throwback.