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Birria-Landia Is Going Brick-and-Mortar
Photo: Birria Landia
Earlier this month, José Moreno was in Flushing when he tasted a Sichuan peppercorn for the first time. He was hovering over a bowl of fish soup, when one crunched between his teeth. He reached for some water. There wasn’t any. He started to pant. The numbing spread. What saved him was a familiar taste: hibiscus tea. “If you add ice to this, it’s like agua de jamaica,” he says.
Moreno, the owner of a small fleet of Birria-Landia taco trucks, has been learning a lot about Flushing. For months, he’s been in the neighborhood working on his first immobile business, a Birria-Landia taqueria opening in the Tangram mall next month. It occupies a prominent corner stall in the second-floor food court, right by the Angry Birds cafe. “People who come and visit the food trucks, they have to eat standing up,” he says. “Now they have plenty of tables.”
The location may seem like an unlikely landing place for one of the city’s most popular taco purveyors, but that’s why Moreno thinks it’s going to work. He first heard about Tangram last year, when a representative for the shopping center stopped by one of his food trucks with an offer. They wanted his birria. “I thought it was a normal mall with a Macy’s,” he says, before he learned it’s an $800 million development with indoor swimming pools and caviar-topped duck-skin canapés. At the same time, he’d noticed an uptick in Asian customers at his food trucks over the years and agreed to a meeting. When he visited the food court, a group of Latino construction workers implored him to open. “There was nowhere to eat Mexican food,” he says. (No, a nearby Chipotle doesn’t count.)
The new space has translated to a bigger menu, a welcome evolution for day-one fans, who have subsisted on one meat and four items for years. There are new proteins, including chicken and carne asada, and a flour tortilla option for the birria, a trend Moreno observed in northern Mexico. Meatless tacos — potato and mushroom — are on the menu, too, following requests from vegetarian customers.
Photo: Birria Landia
Finally, there will be burritos, a first for Birria-Landia, made with tortillas from Tortilleria Nixtamal, “It’s a skinny burrito you can hold and eat easily,” says Moreno, who worked in Los Angeles before the pandemic. His criteria: whole beans, fewer ingredients inside, a quality tortilla wrapped in aluminum foil, and a manageable hand-feel: “You don’t need a fork and knife.”
Everything has gone through rigorous testing. Before opening his first truck, Moreno fine-tuned his birria by cooking for his co-workers at Patrizia’s Pizzeria. His new chorizo recipe ran the same gauntlet; all of Birria-Landia has weighed in. “Once, twice a week we were eating chorizo burritos,” says Angel Ruiz, who helps manage the business. The winner was an uncomplicated preparation involving pork shoulder, guajillo peppers, vinegar, and salt.
Moreno will run the restaurant with his brother, Jesús, a partner from the start, along with Ruiz, a childhood friend. “I never would have thought that we would be here,” Ruiz says. (He and Moreno used to wash dishes together in the kitchen at Babbo, until they were permitted to cook.) By the time Moreno opened Birria-Landia in 2019, Tijuana-style birria tacos had already taken off in California, but he jump-started the movement here — birria is sold at bodegas, fine-dining restaurants, and Tacombi.
Still, Birria-Landia remains the one to beat: The business has since grown into a multi-borough enterprise with five trucks and nearly 100,000 Instagram followers. Whenever the operation expands — roughly once a year — they consider customer requests and nearby competition. They opened on the Upper West Side because the best alternative for tacos was Chipotle; they expanded to the Bronx after Instagram followers protested that Williamsburg got a food truck first. And Moreno was drawn to Flushing because there are taco trucks and tamale stands stationed along Main Street, but nowhere to sit down and eat carne asada.
“This place needs it,” says Guosheng Wang, from Long Island. He was considering the egg tarts and corn dogs in the Tangram food court when a bright-red bull caught his eye — the Birria-Landia logo. “When I see a new Mexican restaurant open, I always check things out,” Wang says. “I know they have a following.”
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