Visit #1 ·
★★★★★Christmas Day, Pacheco's. Look, I'm not going to pretend this was some calculated decision — most things are closed and I wasn't cooking. But I'll say this: the places that are open on December 25th either really need the money or really love what they do, and figuring out which one you're dealing with usually shows up in the food.
This was visit one, so I'm still reading the room.
I went through a few things — I'll get into specifics when I pull the photos and nail down exactly what landed on the table. First impressions though: the tortillas were made in-house, or at minimum not coming off a commercial stack, and that matters to me more than most people think. You can paper over a lot of problems with a fresh tortilla. The meat I had was properly seasoned, not just salted at the end, which tells me someone back there has been doing this for a while.
Service on a holiday is always a little loose. Staff is short, energy is different. I don't hold that against a place on visit one, especially not Christmas. What I do note is whether the food quality dips when the dining room stress goes up. Here it didn't seem to.
Wilshire's a weird block for tacos. A lot of foot traffic but not the kind that necessarily knows what they're eating. The fact that Pacheco's exists there without obviously dumbing anything down is a point in their favor.
I need two more visits before I have an actual opinion. I want to see consistency on a regular Tuesday. I want to see if the proteins rotate or if they're running the same four things every time. And I want to go back when I can actually document the order properly.
Receipt's in the folder. Photos are logged. Check back after visit three.