FOOD | CULTURE | TACOS

Requiem for a Taco Shop: Gentrification Dooms One of America’s Oldest Mexican Restaurants

Also, when is a taco no longer a taco?

The author’s meal of two tacos and a bowl of menudo at Las Cuatro Milpas, Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA. (Photo: ©Craig K. Collins)

Change comes slowly, if at all, to Las Cuatro Milpas, touted by many who keep track of such things as one of the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurants in the United States.

It is 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and there is already a 15-minute-long line that’s formed on the sidewalk in front of this unassuming but very much renowned restaurant storefront located in San Diego’s suddenly hip and increasingly pricey Barrio Logan neighborhood.

I have come for the menudo, a special beef-tripe stew that’s only served here on Saturdays and attracts devotees who have been coming here religiously for this dish every week for decades.

And if you show up late, say, around 10 a.m., you’re likely to hear, “Lo siento. No mas menudo.” (Sorry, no more menudo.)

I shuffle into the restaurant, whose blue checker-cloth-covered tables are already crowded with patrons, and order a bowl of menudo, a dozen homemade flour tortillas to go, and two tacos — one beef, one pork.

My order is placed on a plastic cafeteria tray. I push the tray so my order can be rung up…