Ask anyone in the London food nerd community if they have tried that hot new taco place and, at the moment, there will likely only be one answer. CDMX Tacos materialised in a Soho back alley early last month, fully-formed and trafficking in a familiar mode of slick, digital age hype-baiting. The white-tiled space has a minimalist, Supernova burger quality. The queues are long. The crowd is, inevitably, heavy on food influencers pushing their dripping al pastor quesadillas right up towards the camera and gesticulating with all the subtlety of CBeebies presenters.
People say it is pretty good and, having finally eaten there, I mostly agree. But there is something about the supercharged nature of its emergence that I find a little wearying and rote.
Here is a “viral” phenomenon that looks a little like the last one; a manifestation of the food scene’s voracious obsession with newness, scarcity models, aesthetic and authenticity. Here, basically, is another place where the entire point is to go along and make a binary judgment about whether it is worth the hype or not.
This week, I am here to offer you a similarly formulated, brand-new alternative that basically no one is yet talking about. Hidden behind unremarkable graffitied shutters near the Olympic Park, Lucia’s is a diminutive, counter-focused shrine to tacos, mezcal and charcoal-fired cuts of meat possessed of an understatedness that feels almost transgressive. There is no publicist working the brand or sign on the door. Their Instagram account is, at time of writing, yet to post a single image or video.
And yet Lucia’s apparent lack of promotional savvy is more than just a pose. Founder Jo Kurdi, who also runs nearby Cafe Mai, has created that rarest of things: a truly under-the-radar find that thrums with cool, craft and an invigorating purity of purpose.
I can’t pretend that the conditions didn’t contribute to its appeal. On a sweltering, hard-won jewel of a summer’s evening, canal-side Hackney Wick — all shimmering water, spray-painted surfaces, and a half-dressed parade of tattoos, moustaches and Teva sandals — felt a little like a fevered combination of Kreuzberg, Glastonbury and Venice. Lucia’s is little more than a box, really; a squat, 25ish-cover lean-to, mostly given over to walk-in-only counter seats, and ornamented by little more than imported hot sauce bottles, Adobe-toned plaster, an old school sound system spinning Nineties hip hop, and campfire musk wafting from the open kitchen’s binchotan-fired grill.
Grilled vegetables were more than the sum of their parts: a heaped jumble of blistered courgette, tomato, asparagus and more, breathy with smoke, and further punctuated by sprinkled pine nuts and the ragged, simmering heat of a jalapeño salsa verde. Black bean and sweet potato tostada had depth, a crowning mound of guacamole and thunderclapping crunch. Tacos — tender, spiced lobes of monkfish beneath a luscious burnt orange dressing and soft, succulent beef barbacoa with pearlescent diced white onion — were both vivid in flavour and nicely restrained in construction.
London’s latest exceptional Mexican is oriented around fire, fumes and the airborne lure of sizzled animal fat
This is not to say that there weren’t deficiencies. There’s a tendency to repeat dish elements, as with the pine nuts that reappear in a (perfectly lovely) gathering of leek, smoked aubergine, beetroot and chicory. And I did feel like the taco tortillas themselves — heady, nixtamalized corn numbers from a female-run London producer called Masafina — wanted for some pliability and moreishness. But these minor issues, generally a product of Lucia’s newness and forceful simplicity, didn’t really hamper the appealing fundamentals of the experience. We breezed from a crackling-edged, gorgeously rare-cooked bone-in pork chop, orbited by vibrant salsas, to a pair of fiery, housemade chilli chocolate truffles.
Saucers of mellow mezcal were dispatched in the pummelling sunshine, more groups thronged the open door, and the evening took on a sort of languorous, magic hour blur.I know there’s an irony to the fact that I have praised this place’s lack of hype only to spend an entire column stoking it. The cat is fully out of the bag and crowds may follow. But I back Kurdi and his team to take it all in their stride.
London’s latest exceptional Mexican is oriented around fire, fumes and the airborne lure of sizzled animal fat. Nonetheless, Lucia’s feels to me like a much-needed blast of fresh air.
