While you’re making plans for Taco Tuesday, keep in mind that two taco festivals are taking over the town later this week, which means that everything from traditional tacos to cutting-edge creativity — right down to the masa that goes into the tortillas — will be available for taco fans.
Both festivals, Top Taco and the Denver Taco Festival, started three years ago, an extension of the taco craze started by Roy Choi and his Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles. It’s just coincidence that both events started the same year, and are held about the same time, because the two festivals are very different.
“Tacos have always been popular,” said Jeff Suskin, a founder of Top Taco. “But we’re not staying with what I grew up with, the hard shell, chopped beef, cheese, lettuce and tomato. Now it’s all about the tortillas you make yourself, and the different types of masa you use to make it. Most gourmet chefs are taco aficionados.”
Top Taco is a taco-and-tequila festival, sort of like a giant tasting party, with more than 55 restaurants dishing out their best tacos, plus taco throw-down competitions with some of the town’s top chefs competing to win in such categories as Top Creative Taco, Top Traditional Taco and Top Vegetarian Taco.
Competing restaurants include , Comida, , Los Chingones, Illegal Pete’s and , including Tamayo, La Biblioteca and Zengo.
, which includes online service fees, plus unlimited taco, margarita and tequila tastings. The event is from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 pm. Thursday at CU Denver Fields on the Auraria Campus.
The Denver Taco Festival this weekend is less upscale and more focused on family entertainment.
“Denver has a Tex-Mex feel, of course, and we wanted to include all the taco vendors, trucks, tacquerias and taco stands,” said co-founder Tim Arguello. “We hope to find a more authentic taco, like people who grew up in Mexico making street tacos, representing the street feel as opposed to the upper echelon of tacos.”
Kids under 12 are free, , and tickets at the door are $12.
Organizers expected about 3,500 to attend the first year, but 10,000 taco fans showed up, and this year they’re expecting about 20,000.
Arguello, who has a three-legged chihuahua named Dagger — the festival’s logo is also a chihuahua — said one of the most popular events is the High Speed Dare Devil Chihuahua Racing Championship.
“Anyone in the city with a chihuahua is invited to come and we race them,” said Arguello. “It’s so cool. The kids love it. It’s hilarious, nothing to do with racing but chihuahuas doing funny things.”
This festival — aside from authentic street tacos — is about wacky, silly fun right down to the entertainment. The Saturday night headliner is Metalachi, which plays favorite metal songs in traditional mariachi style. There’s also live Lucha Libre wrestling with wrestlers from Mexico who perform all over the United States, and game shows like the the Taco Dating Game, where contestants talk about their favorite tacos and are matched up based on that.
The Denver Taco Festival runs from noon to 9 p.m. on Saturday and from noon to 7 p.m. Sunday. It will be held in a 38,000 square-foot warehouse at 3600 Wynkoop St., and some will be held on four blocks closed off in LoDo, between 35th and 38th on Wynkoop Street and Wazee and Brighton Boulevard on 36th.
