San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Taco shop’s unlikely road to success
If you follow Tacos Oscar’s Instagram feed (@tacososcar), which is how most of its fans would find its tacos before the pop-up opened a permanent spot in Oakland last week, you’ve grown accustomed to seeing smiling, often ridiculously attractive, people wearing TACOS OSCAR TACO STALKER T-shirts.
The photos aren’t just posted from Oakland, but from Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, London, Botswana, Guatemala, Bangkok, Oslo, Tokyo, Minnesota, a tractor in Pennsylvania, Burning Man (duh), the Taj Mahal, a Grateful Dead show in Los Angeles and a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas.
Considering the clenchjawed effort some brands put into going viral, it would be tempting to read the T-shirt photos as an exercise in hype building. That is far more draconian than the real story, which is simply that Oscar Michel, the Oscar of Tacos Oscar, has a supernatural ability to make friends.
After his neo-psychedelic rock band Gris Gris stopped touring a decade ago, Michel, 39, spent a few years working at Urban Ore, Berkeley’s architectural salvage mecca. The former Dona Tomas chef stepped away from the job for a spell to work at an East Bay pizzeria and stage at more famous places, but he returned to Urban Ore. Rather than cook in restaurants, the Southern California Mexican American kid just wanted to re-create the breakfast tacos his band had inhaled every time they played in Austin, Texas.
Michel talked about breakfast tacos so much, in fact, that in December 2013 one of his co-workers, who was opening a music studio in West Oakland, told him, “Why don’t you shut up and do something about it?” That friend — just a heads-up, the constellation of friends Michel mentions in telling his story is vast — offered to float the cost of equipment and ingredients if Michel could make tacos to give away at the studio’s opening party.
So Michel dropped a couple hundred bucks at the Coliseum flea market on a propane burner and a griddle, then picked up a block of masa from Oakland tortilla factory La Finca. At the party, Michel pressed and cooked tortillas by hand while a cook friend filled them and passed them out.
They gave away the tacos but set a little tip jar next to the griddle. “At the end of the night
Where and when:
Alleyway in the complex at 420 40th St., Oakland. 5-10 p.m. Monday, Thursday-Sunday.
The menu’s still small and ever changing. Get any taco involving eggs — sometimes a fried egg, sometimes a herbed frittata — and the crispcheese quesadillas (both $4-$4.50). Vegan and vegetarian options are always available.
Extra: A T-shirt, of course ($25, with $5 of the proceeds donated to a cause)
What to eat:
it had $700,” Michel says. “I thought, ‘I could get used to this!’ ” Other friends soon commissioned Michel to make tacos in front of their shops.
After a few pop-ups, he roped in Jake Weiss, 39, another former guitarist (band: Days Away), who had cooked in restaurants such as Delfina for decades. “He’s a bit of a perfectionist, which is great. I’m more aloof and artsy and weird,” Michel says. “I used to help my mom and grandmother cook, but he came from the I’m-16and-working-in-this-Frenchrestaurant world.”
Weiss took over the prep for their events, the quality of the food spiked, and sometime during their weekly residency at Oakland’s Starline Social Club in 2016, Tacos Oscar blew up. Eighty people would line up in front of a griddle only big enough to cook 12 tortillas at a time. Michel quit his Urban Ore job for good.
People loved the pop-up’s fried-egg tacos and its take on quesadilla, made by melting and crisping the cheese directly on the griddle. Tacos Oscar’s psychedelic-cartoon flyers, most of them illustrated by a friend in Texas, didn’t hurt. Most of all, fans loved the freshly made tortillas.
Two Octobers ago, Michel was sitting at another friend’s bar, chatting about a couple of regulars who came to every pop-up — he had started hanging out with them, naturally — and Michel joked that his newest friends were his “taco stalkers.” His bartender friend bought some press-on velvet letters and showed up for the next pop-up wearing a T-shirt reading TACOS OSCAR TACO STALKER. “Our homegirl made this rad shirt for our taco party last night at the Starline!” Michel posted on Instagram. “I want my own!”
So he made one. Back when Gris Gris had toured — the couch-surfing-and-sweaty-van seats kind of touring, not the custom bus-and-groupies kind — Michel said his band would roll into a new town, swing by a thrift shop and buy blank Tshirts to screen-print the band’s logo on for DIY merch. Michel copied the velvet letters onto a printing screen and returned to the thrift stores. He advertised the shirts on Instagram, donating $5 from every sale to a cause like Sonoma fire relief, Mexico City earthquake recovery or an Oakland initiative called Mujeres Unidas y Activas.
Customers bought out each new crop of shirts and sent him pictures of themselves wearing them in Jalisco, Mexico, say, or somewhere in Spain. Weiss’ parents took theirs to Zimbabwe. One stalker took a photo of herself standing in the surf in Hawaii, wearing the T-shirt over a bikini bottom. A week later another stalker, this one bearded, copied the outfit in a snowy field in Kansas City, Mo.
Michel has mailed T-shirts to stalkers who have never been on the same continent as his tacos. “Every time I see (the shirt), it warms my heart,” Michel says. “It’s cool that these people are repping this weird, obscure reference.”
For the past year and a half, Michel and Weiss have been upgrading a shipping container in Temescal, paying the rent by catering weddings and throwing the occasional pop-up. “Nothing’s too thought-out or planned,” Michel says. “That’s probably why it’s taken us so damn long to open.”
But open it finally did on Nov. 30. The end of the shippingcontainer kitchen that faces 40th Street has a service window and a chalkboard that lists the day’s tacos and quesadillas, most priced in the $4 range. Customers file past the container to eat at wooden tables set up in a half-covered alley whose walls are painted robin’s egg blue. (A second shipping container is used for storage.) Michel and Weiss hope to add aguas frescas, a salad and an ever-changing bowl of beans — nothing expensive or grandiose, considering they have minimal refrigeration in their shipping-container kitchen — and then open for lunch and brunch-time Micheladas.
“We have tons of friends in the neighborhood,” Michel says of the new location. Most of the business owners around him are people he knew from his years living in Temescal. “It’s a cool weird magnet.”
Not long before opening day, Michel and Weiss ordered new — and never worn — T-shirts. Professionally printed on the back are the restaurant’s cactus logo and official address.
One has already been spotted in Alaska.