QUESABIRRIA
The cheesy, dunked taco has arrived in Hampton Roads
It happened on Instagram.
Perhaps you have already seen it there: a crispy orange-shelled taco dunked in a cup of lava-red consomé broth, flecked with onion and floating cilantro and steaming with the promise of spice. The taco brims with melted cheese and tender pulled beef that glistens in the soft light of the Instagram filter.
Behold, the quesabirria: Born in Jalisco, remade by Tijuana, and fashioned by social media savvy tacopreneurs in California into an unstoppable food phenomenon.
In pre-COVID San Francisco, lines stretched around the block for quesabirria pop-ups announced only on Instagram and held at the chefs’ home garage. In Texas, customers filled a Fort Worth parking lot to wait for a taste of tacos made by a chef who called himself Baby Cortez.
And this spring, it arrived in Virginia. Nearly simultaneously, four of the best Mexican restaurants in Hampton Roads have all begun serving a version of the dish.
A fifth house of cheese and birria is soon to follow, when Tequila’s — from the owners of Los Cuates on Newtown Road — reopens after point-of-sale and
plumbing issues forced them to shut down dinner service almost as soon as the restaurant opened in June.
Though the birrieria is a longtime staple of border states and the West Coast, birria’s sudden prominence in the United States is new.
Until recently, birria was a delicious but lesser known dish among lovers of Mexican food in this country — a centuries-old pot-roasted meat dish descended from pit barbecue. It was first made in the southwest coastal state of Jalisco, when a famine wrought by Spanish colonials forced the locals to discover that goat can also be delicious. Birria brims with chilies and spice, generally served as a stew or in tacos with a side of consomé meant for sipping, not dipping.
But in the border city of Tijuana, the dish got an update. Made with beef, which is more customary in Mexico’s north, the pot-roasted birria was then shuttled into tacos made with northern Mexico’s cheese-melted tortillas and fried in the drippings and spice of the stew.
A new generation of Instagram-friendly Tijuana restaurateurs brought the dish to Los Angeles, and birria-hungry Angeleno customers added their own twist: They began dipping their tacos in the consomé.
Boomerang videos slingshotted across Mexican-American Instagram showing a taco forever dunking and re-dunking itself into consomé. Los Angeles, and then the rest of America, promptly freaked out.
In its essence, the birria quesotaco is the Mexican-American answer to another great Los Angeles delicacy, the French dip. It is both a taco-shaped cardiac event and an admirable exercise in economy. The tortillas are fried to orange crispness in the juices the meat was cooked in, and then the whole assemblage is dipped gushingly back into a soup made with that same chile-spiced au jus.
Reader, I would marry it.
Here’s where to find quesabirria (and quesa-barbacoa) in Hampton Roads.
A birria-of-all-trades: Taqueria La Patrona
1153 Lynnhaven Pkwy., Virginia Beach, 757-301-4527, taqueriala patrona.mobilebytes.com. Indoor dining, takeout, drive-thru window and delivery.
Chris Lopez, co-owner of Virginia Beach’s Taqueria La Patrona, laughs a bit about the quesabirria trend.
“I’ve noticed that Mexican food goes to California to get Americanized,” he said. “They started dipping it in there, and now that’s a trend. People assume the consomé is a dipping sauce, but that’s been a social media thing. Normally you eat the tacos or the gringa, and then you finish by consuming the soup.”
But he also can’t argue with success.
“The second people see it on Facebook, it’s done,” he says. “People come in and they say, ‘We want this thing we saw on Facebook!’ We’ve had countless people come in asking for that. Maybe they throw some extra syllables and letters in there, but as long as there’s a B, an R, and an A in there, I know what they’re looking for.”
La Patrona’s chef, Lopez’s godmother Francisca Angel — whom family all know as Kiki — hails from San Jose de la Paz in Jalisco. But at La Patrona, they don’t make the style of birria that Lopez looks forward to when he visits his family’s hometown. They make the beefy quesabirria he calls the “West Coast” style.
The birria comes in more forms at Patrona than anywhere else in Hampton Roads. Of course, it arrives in lightly crisped tacos filled with meat and stringy Oaxaca cheese with a side of consomé. Even better, it arrives in the form of voluminous gringas, a flour tortilla hybrid between quesadilla and taco, named after two American women who used to order the dish in Mexico City in the ’60s.
The birria Patrona serves is a thick-chunked and beefy version with a bit of chew, more earthy than fiery, and perhaps not quite as juicy as the meat served at a couple other spots on this list. Patrona’s consomé, meanwhile, is a blockbuster: an easy-sipping, tomato-based broth made with four kinds of chili pepper and seasoned to beautiful roundness and depth.
Dip it if you like, but my Lord, it’s wonderful just to gulp it.
Still, the birria here is at its most delicious not in the photogenic quesatacos, but in a mammoth vampiro that doesn’t arrive with consomé. Instead, the dish is a double-deck stack of tortilla filled with melted cheese, guacamole, cilantro and onion — a lovely and well-considered balance of acidic sauce, earthyspiced meat, crisp textures and gooey fats. It is the flatbread sandwich they would serve in heaven.
The only trade-off is that you don’t get your bowl of delicious consomé. Life is full of decisions.
Critic’s pick:
The Jalisco-style barbacoa at Chorizo
4820 Hampton Blvd., Suite A, Norfolk, 757-390-2526, chorizomexican-eatery.business.site. Dine-in, takeout and limited patio seats.
Chorizo chef Rodrigo Ochoa didn’t set out to take part in the biggest Mexican food trend in America. He hails from Guadalajara in Jalisco, where he grew up on legendary barbacoa taco halls such as Charlie’s and Tacos Juan. The barbacoa there is made with beef in a style much like birria: stewed in pots of tomato-chili broth.
The barbacoa is then stuffed into tacos whose shells are fried on the grill using a basting of the barbacoa’s fats and spice. They are served with grilled onions and often drowned in that beefy sauce. In Guadalajara, that’s breakfast.
So this spring, Ochoa decided to bring those tacos to his little Norfolk taqueria on the weekends as a lunch and dinner special, stewing fatty beef cheek for eight hours and serving it in greasecrisped tacos alongside chilecumin-clove-spiced consomé.
But his partner at Chorizo, Fernanda Martinez, had also seen the quesabirria craze on Instagram. Would he be opposed to making a quesadilla version of his barbacoa stuffed with gooey cheese, using flour tortillas they made fresh in-house?
He was not at all opposed.
That weekend-only quesadilla at Chorizo is now a monster. The lightly toasted and toothsome tortillas are stuffed until fluffy with Oaxaca cheese, grilled onion and achingly tender beef cheek. It is a school in decadent richness leavened with spice, barely contained by the crispness of wheat.
The consomé served as dipper triples down on that acid-balanced fat. The broth at Chorizo is not something you sip: It is instead dense, beefy, spiced au jus, made to accentuate the already unbearable umami of the quesadilla.
The tacos are also excellent, a showcase for the savory depths of Ochoa’s barbacoa. But my God, that quesadilla: I think about it too much. It will likely kill me long before anything you read about elsewhere in the newspaper.
The beef-bombs at Jessy’s Taco Bistro
328 W. 20th St., Norfolk, 757-2169922, jessysghent.com. Dine-in, takeout, patio, delivery apps.
Jessy’s has long been serving birria and consomé, but you wouldn’t find it on the menu. Instead, says co-owner Jorge Romero, they had begun serving it at catered weddings: 200 pounds at a time of lamb or beef, cooked in the traditional style using the whole head of the animal.
The birria was so popular, he brought it into his restaurant as an off-menu special for the restaurant’s Mexican customers, an underground plate for those in the know. Until this past year, Romero had no reason to believe that local-born Virginians would know or want a bowl of birria.
But this past year, he said he started seeing birria pop up on social media and began to wonder whether he should make the long-stewed, laborious meat into a main item. The final straw, he said, came this spring.
“A 12-year-old daughter of one of my customers, who is not someone who knows about Mexican culture, said she wanted to try ‘these things you dip into soup,’” he remembers. She’d seen it on Instagram and wanted to try it.
Romero showed her a picture of birria, and she excitedly said that was the dish she most wanted to taste.
So Romero went with the times: He asked the Bistro’s chef to whip up a version, and they’ve been tinkering with it mightily ever since.
The version we tried at Jessy’s is by far the meatiest, weightiest and likely richest version in town — if also, unfortunately, the saltiest. The whole process takes 24 hours, says Romero, and they cook it a bit like barbacoa.
Jessy’s approximates the mix of meats in cabeza — a cow head — by mixing beef cheek (for fat), rib (for the flavor of the bone) and chuck roll (for simple meatiness). They marinate the meat for hours in chili-rich sauce, before steaming the stewy beef in banana leaves.
The fatty drippings form the base of the consomé, which is then mixed in with meat, more salsa and garbanzo beans for variety. On our visit, the broth was heavily reduced to the point of viscosity — though Romero says they’ve since thinned it a bit to make it more sippable.
The tacos we had were thick as beef cake and rich as Croesus, brimming over with meat and juice; they benefited from adding a bit of onion and cilantro to cut the fat.
Romero’s restaurant now adds the onion and cilantro to the tacos by default, alongside a new ingredient Romero brainstormed while at home. The tacos now include avocado, a touch of unsaturated California-style lightness.
The crispness: La Hacienda
2146 S. Military Highway, Chesapeake; 757-962-0090, taqueriala haciendava.com. Dine-in, takeout and delivery through ordering apps.
For years in a predominately Spanish-speaking tract of Chesapeake, the Ramos family has been serving its beef and lamb birria at La Hacienda Taqueria, both in soups and as a protein filled into tacos or sopes. La Hacienda first marinates the meat for 24 hours in a mix of herbs and dry-roasted spices that is a closely held family secret from Jalisco. They then cook their birria low and slow for 10 hours more in a special steamer pot the restaurant also uses for tamales.
Cheese and birria would never mix in Jalisco, says Cynthia Ramos. But cheese-free crispy birria tacos have recently been popping up at breakfast stands near her family’s hometown of Tizapan El Alto. And over the past year, Ramos says her customers began asking for the cheesy version made popular in California. Eventually, what used to be a special request found its way onto the page.
The trio of quesatacos de birria served at La Hacienda has perhaps the smartest architecture among the versions served in Hampton Roads. If quesabirria has a fault, it’s that the fat-ladled richness can make the tacos difficult to eat sensibly: They can be gooey, juicy and as sticky as a plate of hot wings.
But not at La Hacienda. The tacos here are the crispest in town, a bit smaller than the version served at the other three spots and as clean-eating as an empanada, with the cheese hardmelted into the interior of the tortilla. They’re almost airy, and a pleasure to bite into. The consomé is clean, classic and wonderfully spiced, a beautifully round and chuggable example of the form.
The compromise is that the birria served here is a little drier than elsewhere, without that wild unctuous kick of juice mingling with still-gooey cheese. You can dip your tacos into the consomé to compensate, of course, but I found my favorite way to eat them was with a little extra kick from a dollop of Hacienda’s excellent, smoky salsa roja.
After you eat your tacos, sip the warm and soothing richness of the consomé, crisp with the crunch of fresh onion, and feel yourself reverting to a childhood where Grandma heals you with soup. But this time, the recipe comes from Cynthia Ramos’ grandmother, not your own.
Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage @pilotonline.com