Fresno is not on this list of the Top 10 California cities for tacos. What the heck?
A list of 2021’s Best California Cities for Tacos is making the rounds – and Fresno didn’t even crack the Top 10.
In fact, it landed in the No. 53 spot.
OK, let’s all take a deep breath. If you know Fresno, you know this is a taco town and a ranking that low is shocking news.
There’s more. The city that landed the No. 1 spot?
Santa Barbara.
Fresno and tacos
How can this happen? After all, the city of Fresno is known for its tacos. It’s the home of the Taco Truck Throwdown and probably the only city where the local baseball team changed its name and uniform to the Fresno Tacos for a night.
And we just have some darn good tacos on the menus at taquerias and taco trucks here.
So let’s add some context.
The criteria used to develop the list included taco access, top Michelin honors, high consumer ratings, taco festivals and Google search volumes of “tacos” to gauge “local taco love.”
Now, these rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt. After all, one of them just ranked Fresno the No. 1 romantic city for singles.
Who’s crunching these numbers?
LawnStarter, a lawn-care company that says in its press release: “And in queso you were wondering why a lawn care company cares about tacos, we’re just hungry data nerds who like to think outside the bun.”
(And maybe to get their name and some extra hits on their website while they do it.)
We reached out to LawnStarter’s editor-in-chief Jeff Herman, who agreed that Fresno is a “fantastic taco city.”
He said two metrics that brought Fresno down were the number of Michelin-rated restaurants serving tacos per 100,000 restaurants, and the median consumer rating for establishments serving tacos.
“But who gets tacos at a Michelin-starred restaurant anyway?” he acknowledged in an email.
Fresno doesn’t have any restaurants with a Michelin star, though apparently we could do a better job of rating our top taco places online.
If the Michelin ranking were swapped out for a different ranking, say taco trucks per 100,000 residents, Fresno could have landed the top spot, Herman said.
How good is the Fresno taco scene?
The only California cities that might challenge Fresno’s taco greatness are Los Angeles or San Diego, noted Mike Osegueda, founder of the Taco Truck Throwdown and Fresno Street Eats food truck events.
He said he’s never heard a single person talk about going to Santa Barbara to eat tacos.
Fresno, meanwhile, is unique in that it has people from every part of Mexico and they’ve brought their own take on tacos with them, he said.
Tacos in Fresno have attracted the attention of Eater magazine and Instagram and You Tube reviewer Mexi Papa.
You can taste some of them at the 10th Taco Truck Throwdown at 3 p.m. Oct. 23 at Chukchansi Park. Tickets are $36 each.
“We have amazing places,” Osegueda said. “If you look back at all the press and all the stuff that’s happened over the years related to the Fresno taco scene … I think that speaks far more volumes about Fresno than some silly ranking.”
