Are Hard-Shell Tacos Mexican? Mexico City Tacos vs the Crunchy Shell

What is wrong with the picture

It is the shell. At a Mexico City taquería, al pastor is thin, marinated pork stacked on a vertical spit called a trompo, with a peeled pineapple on top. The cook shaves the crisp outside straight onto small corn tortillas.

Onion, cilantro, a slice of pineapple and salsa finish it, and an order is several small tacos, not two big ones. Mexico News Daily puts the usual order at five. Shredded iceberg, cheddar and a folded crunchy shell belong to a different dish.

Where al pastor came from

The vertical spit came with immigrants from the Ottoman-ruled Levant, many of them Lebanese Christians, who settled in Puebla and Mexico City in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In Puebla their spit-roasted meat became tacos árabes, and Taquería Bagdad was an institution there by the 1930s.

In Mexico City, non-Lebanese taquerías adopted the spit and changed the recipe: pork instead of lamb, achiote and dried chiles instead of the original spices, corn tortillas instead of pita. By the 1960s it looked like the al pastor we know. Several businesses claim to have invented it, and no one knows for sure why the pineapple was added.

Our tacos al pastor build the trompo at home in a loaf pan. Thin sheets of chile and achiote marinated pork are layered, roasted, then shaved and crisped in a skillet.

Where the crunchy shell came from

There is no single inventor, and the usual story is wrong. Food historian Jeffrey Pilcher traces the American shell to tacos dorados, golden fried tacos from Mexico. Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, points to fried tacos in the earliest English-language taco recipes, published in Los Angeles around 1914, and credits George Ashley with selling shell molds for home cooks by the late 1930s.

Patents came next. Juvencio Maldonado, an Oaxacan restaurant owner in New York, filed for a form for frying taco shells in 1947 and received US patent 2,506,305 in 1950. In San Bernardino, the Mitla Cafe was selling crunchy beef tacos from 1937.

Glen Bell ran a burger stand across the street from Mitla, opened Taco Tia in the 1950s and launched the first Taco Bell in 1962. His authorized biography says he invented the shell, but historians note the patents and recipes came first. His real feat, Pilcher argues, was selling tacos to a mainstream American audience.

So is the hard shell wrong?

Only if you call it Mexico City food. The crunchy taco is a real Mexican-American tradition with nearly a century of history. Arellano calls Mitla's version "the taco that launched a thousand tacos."

Our hard-shell ground beef tacos fry corn tortillas into shells at home, the way those early cooks did. You can put them next to al pastor in hard shell vs al pastor, or browse every style on our tacos page.

Questions people ask