What is Tacos Jalisco?
Tacos Jalisco, which now calls itself El Original Tacos Jalisco, is a family taqueria at 3060 N 68th Street, on the east side of 68th just south of Thomas Road, a mile south of Old Town in the strip-center stretch of South Scottsdale. It opened in 1996, in a 1960s center that Phoenix New Times, awarding it Scottsdale’s Best Neighborhood Mexican Restaurant in 2012, called dilapidated, and it shares the building with a Circle K, a laundromat and the Closing Soon Saloon.
The people are the Reyes family of Guadalajara, Jalisco. According to New Times’ 2017 Taco Summer profile, the shop was first opened by the uncle of Jose Reyes Jr., shortly before the family immigrated in 1998; Jose Reyes Sr. and his wife Patricia Alvarez took it over, and Jose Jr., who was seven when they arrived, later came back from Colorado to learn the business and now runs the counter. The restaurant’s own site names Reyes Sr. as founder and cook and Alvarez as general manager, and says the extended family owns restaurants in California and Kansas.
What they serve is Guadalajara cooking at Scottsdale’s lowest prices: carne asada tacos on homemade tortillas, a carne asada burrito the family says it sells more than 1,000 of a week, tortas ahogadas, mojarra frita, camarones rancheros, egg breakfasts from 8 a.m., and on weekends birria de chivo and menudo. The thing to understand is the red salsa, made fresh daily from 11 ingredients, two of which the family will admit to, chiles de arbol and tomatillos. The beef is marinated in the same adobo spices. “They are like twins,” Jose Jr. told the paper.
It is for the neighborhood first: the body shops on Thomas, the apartments east of Scottsdale Road, the Saturday families, and the bar regulars from next door who, as New Times noted in 2012, walk a few doors down for a plate and carry it back to their stools. Our verdict: the best cheap Mexican food in Scottsdale is here, in a room nobody would photograph, and it has been for thirty years.
Ordering at Tacos Jalisco
Order the carne asada. The burrito is the house signature, and the story of the place is the story of that burrito: the uncle’s original version was steak, pico de gallo, guacamole and cabbage with no rice or beans (“It was weird,” Jose Jr. told New Times), and the Reyes family rebuilt it with rice, beans, carne asada and their salsa. For about a decade, they say, nobody else in the area made it that way. The tacos use the same meat on homemade tortillas with onion and cilantro. New Times’ 2012 award cited a $6.45 carne asada platter; the site’s current posted prices run about $5.56 for plain nachos and $7.18 for super nachos or papas locas, which tells you the range.
Use the combos. The numbered combination plates are the efficient way in: #1 burro and taco, #6 three tacos, #7 asada plate, #9 two chiles rellenos, #11 four carnitas flautas, each with your choice of meat. #12 birria de chivo is weekends only. There is a separate soup list, with menudo and goat birria on Saturday and Sunday, caldo de res, caldo de camaron and a caldo siete mares, and a torta list that includes the Guadalajara torta ahogada, drowned in a very hot sauce.
Then the salsa bar. The red salsa is the reason to come. Alongside it are jalapenos and the house pickle of carrots, jalapenos and cauliflower, brined in large plastic buckets and replaced after every service. Patricia Alvarez told New Times that those three things, the salsas, the jalapenos and the carrot mix, are what set the shop apart, and she is right.
Timing. Hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, with holiday exceptions. Breakfast is huevos con chorizo, jamon or asada and breakfast burritos; winter brings champurrado, Lent brings fish. Weekday lunch is the crush. Weekend mornings are the family hour and the only time for birria.
Getting there. From Old Town, drive south on 68th from Indian School Road, cross Thomas, and look for the strip on the left. The lot is small and shared with the Circle K; the family’s dessert shop, Raspa2 Jalisco, with raspados and ice cream, is next door. Counter service, no reservations, no alcohol. For the rest of the field, see our best Mexican restaurants in Scottsdale.
The taqueria that outlasted the block
The block tells the story. In the 1990s the strip of 68th Street between Thomas and Osborn was what south Scottsdale looked like before SkySong and the apartment towers: a Circle K, a laundromat, a dive bar called the Closing Soon Saloon and, from 1996, a taqueria. A few blocks east, Sugar Daddy’s and the Scottsdale Road nightclubs of the 2000s came and went. Tacos Jalisco stayed, because it was never for the nightlife; it was for the people who lived and worked within a mile.
The family’s account, given to New Times in 2017 and on its own site, is consistent: the shop was founded in 1996 by a relative, the Reyes family arrived from Guadalajara in 1998 and took it over, and the extended family runs restaurants in California and Kansas. The change they made was the burrito, and they date their claim to being the only shop in the area doing rice-beans-asada-salsa to roughly the first decade of their ownership. By 2012 New Times’ Best of Phoenix issue was calling it the best neighborhood Mexican in Scottsdale, “dirt-cheap Mex eats” in a mom-and-pop room; by 2017 the paper’s Taco Summer series was back for the salsa.
The name change is recent. Around 2020 the restaurant put up its own site as El Original Tacos Jalisco, “Mexican food from scratch,” with online pickup ordering, and the “Original” presumably stakes a claim against other Tacos Jalisco signs around the Valley, though the family has not said so in print. The site’s “about” page, written when the shop was 24 years old, names Jose Reyes as founder and cook and Patricia as general manager and invites you next door to Raspa2 Jalisco for dessert, a second family business that the press has not covered at all.
What the record does not say: who the founding uncle was, when exactly the Reyes family bought him out, and whether Jose Jr. now owns a share. We also could not find any press after 2017; the restaurant’s 2026 standing rests on its own site, which was updated in June 2026, and on more than 500 Yelp reviews running through August 2026. That is a good sign for a place of this kind. Restaurants on this block do not get written up when they are doing well; they get written up when they close.
Honest assessment: this is a taqueria, not a restaurant, and the complaints in the reviews, slow service at the rush and an occasional inconsistent plate, are the complaints every honest taqueria gets. The carne asada, the red salsa and the pickled vegetables are as good as anything at Los Sombreros at a third of the price, and it is open at 8 a.m. on a Sunday with goat birria. If you want to know what south Scottsdale eats, this is the room.