Tacos off the tourism trail

Excerpt from The Pitch, September 22, 2021
Words by Liz Cook
Photos by Zach Bauman

The house margaritas, cochinita pilbil tacos, chips and salsa, and six-salsa sampler at Taco Naco

Taco Naco KC Market & Taqueria

Great taquerias don’t always cater to the chips-and-margs set, but Overland Park’s Taco Naco mostly succeeds in balancing regional Mexican flavors with nods to Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex-loving customers. 

It’s hard to blame chef Fernanda Reyes and her husband and co-owner, Brian Goldman, for listening to the locals. Although the pair took on intermittent catering jobs and pop-ups in 2019, they found success in 2020 once they began selling their tacos (and later, their margarita mixes and meal kits) at the Overland Park Farmers’ Market.

The pair opened the brick-and-mortar Naco in a stripmall at 82nd and Metcalf this January, and the taqueria and market have been reliably busy since (don’t worry; the line moves fast, as do the line cooks). The space is suffused with light-hearted touches and cartoon colors, from salmon and azure accent walls to an altar of snake plants to cute cucumber garnishes stabbed with Mexican flag toothpicks. 

All tacos here use Yoli corn tortillas, which are excellent, and all of them are $3.75 (except on Tuesdays, when they’re three for $9). The best pork option is the cochinita pibil, which features pork shoulder marinated in a blend of annatto paste and bitter orange, and slow-cooked in banana leaves.

The salsa and egg tacos and black beans at Taco Naco

The shredded pork in my taco was tender and moist—and flavorful enough that I didn’t need the heavy-handed drizzle of chipotle aioli. I preferred that aioli on the brisket barbacoa, where it added a velvety richness to the lean meat (balanced by tangy pickled onions). I wanted to love the mushroom mole taco (one of two vegan options here). But the mole tasted flat, adding only a slight sweetness to the earthy mushrooms. For now, I’ll stick with the meats.

If you want to dawdle here, order a king-sized margarita, which the restaurant serves in a plastic pint cup with a lipstick rim of Tajin and chamoy. The classic lime margarita ($9; $5 at happy hour) tasted fresh, with the right balance of tart to sweet. You can have a fine time just sipping one on the sunny patio and grazing on a quarter-sheet pan of Taco Naco’s fresh tortilla chips. Every order of guacamole or salsa arrives with enough chips to get a small bear through hibernation. 

The six-salsa sampler ($5) is a good way to try them all, but the restaurant also sells 8-ounce cups of individual sauces. If you go that route, I recommend the creamy jalapeno (an avocado-cool contradiction with a snaking, sneaking heat) or the tomatillo (AstroTurf-green; vegetal and mild).

Reyes tells me she used to make her salsa macha the traditional Veracruzana way—less blended sauce than chile oil, with a sediment layer of ground peanuts and chiles de arbol. When that version didn’t sell, she started using peanut butter (and blending it). “Some people—and more here in Overland Park—they don’t like to see a lot of oil.” That’s a shame, because the version I tried tasted uncannily like roasted veggie cream cheese. 

Customer preferences dictated the Tex-Mex salsa as well—the only one of the restaurant’s salsas to use canned tomatoes, and the only one mild enough for a goldfish to swim in. “That one we just do because everyone says, ‘I want my regular ketchup-flavored salsa.’” Reyes laughs. “I don’t know how to say ‘no’ to my customers.”

Reyes has good culinary instincts, and Taco Naco is likely to keep improving as she and Goldman refine where to adapt and where to stick to their guns/guts. For now, the restaurant is already a mood-lifting place to eat and shop, with tacos worth the drive for urban core-dwellers.