West Coast Taco Bar

West Coast Taco Bar is a taco restaurant on Elk Grove Boulevard in Elk Grove, south of Sacramento, California. Cynthia Garcia, a classically trained chef, owns the restaurant together with her husband, Ivan.

The couple moved their family up from San Diego, could not find tacos they liked and started a food truck in 2019. Ivan had served in the US Marine Corps, grew up in his parents' Mexican restaurant in Tracy and was executive chef at Seasons 52, where he met Cynthia. The truck was once voted the best burrito in Sacramento, and in 2022 the couple opened the restaurant in Elk Grove. It has since made Yelp's national list of the top 100 places to eat.

Tortillas are made locally, the meat comes from a local butcher, and the kitchen makes its sauces fresh every day. The Dirty Diana, named after Cynthia's childhood nickname for her late sister, puts slow-braised beef birria and melted Monterey Jack into a mole tortilla under tomatillo salsa. Sac Town Fire is the shrimp version: garlicky prawns, cilantro slaw and chipotle sauce folded into a red mole tortilla, and Korean Seoul fills a flour tortilla with steak marinated in sweet soy and ginger. Bella Truffle, the vegetarian choice, tops baby portobellos with white truffle cream.

The best-known burrito is the Bitchin' Cali, with carne asada and garlic shrimp in one wrap, and elote comes coated in mayonnaise and paprika. Diners who eat in get chips and salsa on the house, and catering for large groups is a big part of the business. Cynthia calls the ingredients slightly elevated, and the menu shows what that means: Korean marinades and truffle cream sit inside the same tortillas as carnitas, the way a Californian taco truck would build them.