El Garage Returns to Its Pop-Up Roots

These days, it feels like nearly every taco truck and taqueria in the Bay Area is slinging quesabirria — those glistening-red, consomé-soaked tacos with their crispy edges and long pulls of stretchy cheese. But before all that, there was El Garage. In the halcyon pre-pandemic days of 2019, the Richmond pop-up was the first quesabirria purveyor to truly blow up in the Bay, and its success helped bring these Tijuana-by-way-of-L.A. beef birria tacos into the mainstream, paving the way for them to become a fixture of our region’s Mexican American food scene.

Then, in August, El Garage quietly closed — or at least its brick-and-mortar restaurant in Richmond did, ending a four-year run.

But Viviana Montano, who runs the business along with her parents and sisters, says El Garage isn’t going anywhere. Instead, the family will focus once again on pop-ups and catering. They’ve already set up one twice-a-month gig at the Dokkaebier taproom in Oakland, and they have several other pop-ups in the works — including a possible regular collaboration with Berkeley Bowl.

According to Montano, closing the restaurant was one the hardest decisions her family has had to make, but it also seemed inevitable for the better part of a year. “We just weren’t bringing enough people in,” she says.

Fans of the taqueria might be familiar with the basic outlines of El Garage’s story: It started as a modest driveway operation in a residential neighborhood, went viral on Instagram to the point of routinely attracting hour-long lines and eventually, with much fanfare, opened a 5,000-square-foot restaurant a few blocks away from the Richmond BART station. For many Bay Area food lovers, El Garage’s quesabirria wasn’t just their introduction to a new taco style. It was one the best tacos they’d ever eaten, period.

But the brick-and-mortar restaurant just never caught on, even as the Montanos expanded their menu to include other crowdpleasers, like pozole and shrimp taquitos. Part of the problem was that there aren’t really any other notable restaurants or attractions in that particular stretch of Richmond, so foot traffic was minimal. Even at the height of El Garage’s popularity, almost all of the business at the restaurant came from takeout and catering. And even when a handful of dine-in customers did sit down for a meal, the dining room still looked empty and sad because it was so big. It became a sort of self-fulfilling feedback loop.

“Most of our orders every day would just be DoorDash or UberEats. The restaurant was functioning as a ghost kitchen, essentially,” Montano says. In the end, paying rent for such a giant space just wasn’t sustainable.

Now that the restaurant is closed, the Montanos are fully focused on doing pop-ups and events — in a sense, going back to their roots as a renegade driveway taco stand. The one regular pop-up they’ve already set up — at Dokkaebier’s Jack London Square taproom — will take place every other Saturday. (The next one is on Oct. 26.) And Montano says she’s also in talks with a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District about the possibility of setting up another recurring pop-up there.

Perhaps most exciting, Montano says El Garage is currently in the process of scheduling its first pop-up at the cafe at Berkeley Bowl West, probably for sometime in November. If all goes well, that, too, might turn into a regular, long-term gig for as many as two or three days a week.

In the future, Montano says, El Garage would be open to exploring the possibility of opening a smaller restaurant in a better, more central location. But for now, the family feels much more comfortable with the pop-up model — and they’re confident that their food is good enough, and has big enough of a following, that customers will seek them out.

“It’s a less stressful situation than having that 5,000-square-foot restaurant,” Montano says.

El Garage currently pops up on every second and fourth Saturday of the month at Dokkaebier (420 3rd St.) in Oakland, 2–7:30 p.m. — the next one will be on Saturday, Oct. 26.