A WEB SEARCH FOR “burnt cheese tacos” and “New Mexico” turns up a bunch of results from just one place. A Reddit post features a photo of a homemade taco with dark-orange cheese seared onto its tortilla. It reads, “Originally encountered these on a road trip with my wife out West, at a diner in a tiny town called Las Vegas, New Mexico.”
Why is the original Las Vegas so wild for a taco that takes its name from cheese that gets grill-encrusted onto a corn tortilla before it’s folded and filled? “I just don’t know of anyplace else you can get them,” says Audrene Cox, the wife of Hillcrest Restaurant co-owner Bill Cox. Just off I-25, Hillcrest’s picture windows and vintage-jukebox-adorned tables affirm its midcentury status as the center of Grand Avenue’s cruising scene. The menu proclaims “Our Famous Burnt Cheese Tacos” as server David Silva assures me that I’m at ground zero of this taco trend, though he rattles off at least four other restaurants in town that serve them too. And at $10 for a plate of three heaping ground-beef or chicken tacos with all the fixings and a chunky red salsa, he says I’ve probably scored the best deal around.
Just off I-25, Hillcrest’s picture windows and vintage-jukebox-adorned tables affirm its midcentury status as the center of Grand Avenue’s cruising scene.
“I’ve had at least three tables that traveled from Albuquerque in the last month just for these tacos,” he adds.
The formula for a burnt-cheese taco doesn’t stray far from writer Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert’s first published recipe for a taco, in 1949. After all, she was a native of Las Vegas. The extra step is the first one. “You put a pile of cheese on the grill. We shred a mix of longhorn and cheddar,” says Hillcrest chef Albert Otero. “Then you put your corn tortilla, then a little more cheese, then your meat. I like it golden yellow on the outside, but some people make it dark. Then you fold them, garnish them, and send ’em out.”
Also known as “dirty tacos,” the special first showed up on Hillcrest’s menu around 2010. But Otero remembers burnt-cheese varieties being around since at least the 1980s. Bill Cox says a since-departed chef decided to put them in rotation. “We sell the hell out of them,” he adds.
At El Rialto Restaurant, head manager Elizabeth M. García says her mother brought the taco to the nearly 50-year-old café. “People really responded to it and liked it,” she says. “But it wasn’t until maybe five years ago that we actually put it on the menu.
The quaint El Rialto Restaurant by Las Vegas Plaza serves crispy tacos with a choice of Fiesta Blend or cheddar cheese and various proteins like beef, chicken, carne adovada, chicharrón, cod, or beans and cheese.
The cozy restaurant near the Las Vegas Plaza is an ideal venue for crispy Fiesta Blend– or cheddar-cheese-draped tacos filled with a protein of choice: ground or roast beef, chicken, carne adovada, chicharrón, cod, or beans and cheese. “I’ve never eaten tacos the way we make them anywhere else other than in Vegas or Mora,” she says. “I’ve had soft street tacos and the solid shell, but none like ours the way we grill it, so it’s kind of in between.”
