It’s blown up on our Instagram so we’re sure it’s blown up on yours, Canberra’s newest taco joint Cartel Taqueria serves tacos that are perfectly unique, big and damn tasty.
When owner Anna Petridis first hit to Instagram with her brand-new restaurant in an unlikely location, teasing us with photos and videos of insane tacos and margaritas, everyone was eager to get their taste.
You may already know Anna from Patissez café, from the days of freak shakes and where her first loaded tacos were born.
Learning how to make her version of birria tacos from social media, Anna started trialling tacos on the specials board which led to them landing on the permanent menu, which quickly turned into their most popular menu items.
“The good thing about social media is that people film exactly how they make their food, so I thought ‘I can do that’ and just learnt,” says Anna.
After finishing up at Patissez Anna decided to start a new restaurant specialising in her tacos. While it wasn’t her original plan, when she saw the beautiful alfresco space along the river at Ray Morton Park in Queanbeyan, she knew it was meant to be, and that’s really become part of the charm of the restaurant.
After opening at the end of 2022, the love from locals was bigger than Anna had expected, with people coming all the way from Bungendore and Braidwood, seeing the kitchen frequently selling out of tacos and going through 1300 avocados over a four-day week.
Experimenting and trialling with flavours and ingredients with her mum, they created eight fully loaded, flavour-packed tacos. Flavours include the classic birria beef, pork shoulder with caramelised onion, and chilli and garlic butter king prawns with caramelised pineapple and chilli salsa.
While their inspiration comes from traditional birria beef tacos, Cartel Taqueria’s flavours are unique. They are much larger than what you’d find in Mexico as Anna says she never wants anyone to leave hungry and the birria style of dipping and grilling the tortilla is used for all the taco flavours, not just beef.
“We made them how we like them, so if I was to make them for myself what would I like?” She says.
“What you see online is what you get. The food we serve here is exactly what you’d get if you came to our house.”
But of course, you couldn’t have tacos without a frozen marg, right? Insisting on creating the frozen margarita flavours from scratch with no premix, Anna says she spent a lot of time learning how to create the perfect consistency and it proved to be the biggest challenge of the menu.
“The key is to make the perfect ratio between sugar, alcohol and fruit for it to become a slushy. The depths of the internet that I went to find the information was insane.”
Flavours include classic lime, chilli mango, watermelon mint, passionfruit coconut, strawberry lime and virgin.
Already climbing its way to the top of Canberra’s best taco joint (perhaps they’re already there), Cartel Taqueria tastes as good as it looks and is well worth the hype.
Get all the latest from Cartel Taqueria vis their Instagram. Open Thursday to Sunday 12pm-late.
