"It's crazy where a taco can take you." Victor Villa posted that line on Instagram the week after Super Bowl LX, and he wasn't exaggerating. During Bad Bunny's halftime show, the camera cut to a piragüero cart and a griddle, and the man behind that griddle runs a taco counter on North Figueroa Street that most of Highland Park has walked past a hundred times.
Villa's Tacos didn't relocate to get famous. It didn't move to a flashier block, rebrand for a wider audience, or wait for a developer to build it a storefront somewhere more visible. It started in a backyard on Highland Park's east side, opened its first brick and mortar a few years later on the same stretch of Figueroa, and has since added two more locations without ever leaving the neighborhood that made it. That's the part of this story that's easy to miss under the Super Bowl headline, and it says something specific about how food success actually moves through this corridor.
Three Tacos, Half a Mile of Figueroa
Villa's current footprint in Los Angeles isn't spread across the city. It's stacked on top of itself.
| Location | What's there | What makes it different |
|---|---|---|
| Original counter, 5455 N. Figueroa St. | The queso taco on handmade blue-corn tortillas, plus off-menu specials like papas con chorizo | Where the line started forming, sometimes stretching to the corner |
| The Baja spot, a few doors up Figueroa | Mesquite-grilled fish, shrimp, and octopus tacos, plus a "Mar y Tierra" taco built on A5 Wagyu | Took over the old Tacos Estrella storefront, the same spot where Villa grew up eating |
| Grand Central Market, 317 S. Broadway | The downtown counter version, Tuesday through Sunday | The only location that isn't in Highland Park |
Two of the three are on the same street. The original location posts wait times that can run toward 45 minutes at peak according to online estimates, though regulars who've timed it themselves report closer to 15 or 20 minutes outside the rush. Either way, the crowd isn't a fluke. It's four blocks from the Highland Park station on Metro's A Line, close enough that a decent share of that line formed without anyone needing to park.
A Backyard on the East Side, Before the Line Wrapped the Block
Villa started selling tacos out of his grandmother Guadalupe Rivera's yard in 2018, cooking on a mesquite grill with recipes he'd picked up watching his other grandmother, Guadalupe Villa, whom he calls La Chula. He didn't have formal training. He had a grill, a table, a canopy, and what he's described as her one piece of advice that stuck: échale todas las ganas, put in everything you've got.
The pandemic pushed him to pickup-only for a stretch, and in early 2023 he opened his first storefront in a modest strip center on Figueroa. The recognition followed fast. The Michelin Guide gave the taqueria a Bib Gourmand, the designation reserved for places that deliver outstanding food at accessible prices, and Villa's took the LA Taco Madness title three separate years, in 2021, 2022, and 2024. By early 2026 the operation had grown to roughly 70 people working across the Highland Park and downtown counters.
None of that required leaving the neighborhood. The growth happened by adding storefronts within walking distance of each other rather than chasing a bigger footprint somewhere else first.
The Two Seconds Bad Bunny Bought Figueroa Street
The Super Bowl LX cameo came during "Tití Me Preguntó," the opening number of the halftime show, when Bad Bunny visits a piragüero cart and hands Villa a shaved ice treat before the camera moves on. It's a brief moment, but it landed on a stage watched by more people than will ever set foot on Figueroa Street, and it turned a neighborhood taco counter into a name that showed up in national coverage the following week.
Villa framed it as bigger than his own business. He told Metro's blog, The Source, that the moment was about honoring the taqueros of Los Angeles and the immigrant parents, including his own, who built lives here one shift at a time. The recognition that followed, the Michelin mentions and the write-ups, arrived at a business that hadn't changed its address to earn any of it.
Vegas Before Atwater, Not Instead of It
Growth is happening now, but it's happening in a specific order. In August 2026, Villa's opened its first location outside Los Angeles, inside the Durango casino in southwest Las Vegas, taking over the former Fiorella space and running food service into the early morning hours on weekends. It's the brand's first out-of-state bet, and it's a real one, backed by a casino operator with the reach to put Villa's in front of an entirely different customer base.
But the next Los Angeles location isn't going to a trendier part of town. Villa has said he's planning a restaurant in Atwater Village, the neighborhood where he grew up with his grandmother La Chula before Highland Park became the place he built his business. "Opening there will feel like coming back home," he told Metro's blog. The Vegas expansion is the outward move. The Atwater plan is the return trip, back into another corner of Northeast LA that already knows his family.
That sequencing matters more than either headline on its own. A lot of LA success stories treat the old neighborhood as a launching pad, a place you're from rather than a place you stay tied to once the cameras show up. Villa's version keeps two of three current locations on the same half mile of Figueroa and points the next expansion at another Northeast LA neighborhood rather than a wealthier or more photographed part of the city.
That's the piece of this story worth sitting with if you already live here. The neighborhood's most nationally visible restaurant moment in 2026 didn't happen because a business left Highland Park behind. It happened because one kept multiplying inside it, on the same stretch of Figueroa where it started, four blocks from a train station, a few doors from the spot where the owner used to eat as a kid.
The original counter is still at 5455 N. Figueroa St., four blocks from the A Line station, and the Baja-style spot is a few doors up the same street.
If you're curious what else is shifting in Highland Park this season, from the Figueroa corridor to the blocks around it, the Mary Dix team keeps a running read on the neighborhood at marydix.com/neighborhoods/highland-park.
