You can’t go wrong with grabbing dinner at a local taco joint—but you can go so right. After determining the top food and drink trends of 2024 and even modern restaurant etiquette pointers, Yelp is back with another report designed to help you find the tastiest food and coziest ambience in your area—specifically, the Best Taco Spot in Every State.
Although you can visit Yelp’s official report to find your own state’s personal favorite based on ratings, we highlighted a few findings for you. The following states had the highest number of searches for tacos (and are at the forefront of creating the most popular trends when it comes to cooking them).
5 Findings from Yelp’s 2024 Best Taco Spot in Every State
Yelp
Arizona
Arizona had some of the most Yelp searches for tacos (alongside Texas and California), and its report on the best local joint delivers on options and flavor. Just Tacos and More in Phoenix, Arizona, has an enormous menu with a feature on three categories: One for land, one for sea, and one for guisados, or stewed fillings.
According to one of the shop’s partners, Violeta Cortez, the tortillas are made by an Arizona vendor—but everything else on the menu is made in-house. That’s one reason why Just Tacos and More has upheld their nearly five-star rating across almost 400 reviews.
Yelp
Texas
In 2023, Yelp created a list of the Top 100 Taco Spots in the U.S., and a certain Texan restaurant, Cuantos Tacos, made the rankings—so it’s no surprise that it’s back for another year as Texas’s best spot for tacos. The food truck uses traditional nixtamalized corn tortillas for better flavor, and features a special on Wednesdays for lengua (beef tongue) tacos.
Their menu is vast and the tacos themselves are small—meant to be eaten in just two to three bites according to Cuantos Tacos—so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to sample their many styles. You’ll also find plenty of quesadillas to try.
Yelp
Florida
Over in Key Largo, Yelp says that there’s one taco spot that tops every other in Florida: Tacos Jalisco. This restaurant was also given a nod in Yelp’s 2023 Top 100 U.S. Taco Spots, and their reappearance as Florida’s best is well-deserved.
As Yelp puts it, if you’re a fan of homemade salsa, fresh-grilled tortillas, and comfort food from Jalisco (the Mexican region known as the birthplace of tequila), you’re going to love this place. The dish you can’t miss? A taco called “The Original”—Jalisco’s menu labels it a “must-have.” Loaded with plenty of meat, like steak, bacon, and chorizo, it’s a highlight of many Yelp reviewers’ experiences.
Yelp
California
California is home to a very honorable taco spot—one that earned the #2 ranking in Yelp’s 2023 Top 100 U.S. Taco Spots. Birrieria Little Tijuana in Riverside serves up all things birria—a trendy meat stew that’s lending its flavor to dishes other than tacos. The Quesabirria Tacos on their menu is a mashup of a quesadilla filled with this slow-cooked delicacy.
You’ll also find innovative takes like birria fries, nachos, and even ramen on the menu—all of which keep customers coming back for more.
Yelp
New York
Meanwhile, in New York, a standing-room-only taco spot wins Yelp’s best pick: Los Tacos No. 1. Though the restaurant expanded into a New York City taco chain classic, Yelp specifically selected the location in Midtown to make its list. You’ll find four tacos (and four quesadillas) to choose from, but reviewers agree that the smaller selection hardly matters when it’s done right.
“The carne asada taco tasted just like a street taco—so good, the meat cooked on the plancha that gives this unique flavor, with cilantro, onion, and lime, oh my. It tasted like a big hug!” one excerpt from a Yelp reviewer wrote.
So, how did Yelp find all of these taco spots? It looked for locations with the highest number of Yelp reviewers and rankings, using key words within its database of U.S. taco restaurants between January 2019 and July 2024. Then it checked each restaurant’s health score and chose the highest-rated location if the top pick was a chain.
If you haven’t yet tasted the best taco in your state, now you know exactly where to go. For more details, head over to yelp.com to view the full report.
