At the heart of downtown Pacific Palisades, the current lunch crowd wears orange and fluorescent yellow safety vests. General contractors and heavy equipment operators, cleanup crew members and internet linemen rush to grab sustenance and get back to work restoring the neighborhood ravaged by January’s fire. Waiting to serve them is a line of taco trucks.
“Food trucks are like first responders,” said Rodolfo Barrientos, the owner of the Gracias Señor taco truck. “We’re able to get nourishing food, not pre-prepared, where the need is.” He looked out at the smoke-scarred rubble of what was once a Ralph’s supermarket and added, “It’s sad food trucks are not as accepted as they should be.”
In tourism advertising and popular media, taco trucks are celebrated as Los Angeles’s mascots. But they are a rare sight in the downtowns of exclusive neighborhoods. In 2024, Ralph’s threatened legal action against him, accusing his customers of using its parking lot, although Mr. Barrientos had parked his truck outside the grocery store on Sunset Boulevard for years without complaints.
In the aftermath of the fire, he’s returned to this parking spot to serve the new arrivals and his former regulars alike.
One former regular, Jaden Tash, stopped by to get a surf-and-turf burrito. He discovered Gracias Señor when he was a student at Palisades Charter High School, known locally as “Pali High.” When he came home from college to his mother’s house, which still didn’t have water service, the truck was his first stop.
“I lived here my whole life, and Mexican food is one of my comfort foods,” Mr. Tash said.
Before the fires, downtown Palisades had at least a dozen restaurants serving upscale sushi, California-inflected Italian and bistro staples. Then, on Jan. 7, the Palisades fire roared down the Santa Monica mountains, consuming whole block after block of homes and leaving downtown half destroyed.
A few restaurants, most notably a Chipotle, have recently reopened. But when the recovery got underway, the most reliable place to find lunch was this huddle of taco trucks (as well as a local cafe that miraculously survived the fire). One of the five regular trucks, Martin’s, used to park in Santa Monica. But the rest had been staples of the Palisades before the fires, in some cases for years.
In 2015, Mr. Barrientos bought his food truck from the previous owner, who had operated on Temescal Canyon Road, where it catered primarily to the workers in the neighborhood. He was studying business at California State University Los Angeles at the time, and thought his truck could grow by expanding its market to Palisades residents.
With a menu similar to other taco trucks popular at the time, Mr. Barrientos moved Gracias Señor to the middle of downtown Palisades, in front of the parking lot for the Ralph’s. He grew his following slowly and steadily. Eventually, he was joined by two other trucks, Glenda’s and Rocky’s, Mr. Barrientos said, as well as a taco stand with a rotating trompo for spit-cooking al pastor.
Then, in late 2024, he and the other trucks were served with cease-and-desist orders by a lawyer representing Ralph’s, as first reported by L.A. Taco. A regular customer offered pro bono legal help, but Mr. Barrientos ended up moving his truck to a side street nearby. He said his business fell by 20 percent.
On the day of the fires, the trucks were doing business as usual. Glenda Caneles, the owner of Glenda’s, has a video of the smoke she saw rising in the distance from her same parking spot. “This was 2 p.m.,” she said. “By 4 p.m., it was all gone.” She found out her daughter’s truck, which operated nearby, escaped by a TikTok video sent by a friend, which showed it pulling onto Pacific Coast Highway.
Mr. Barrientos said he narrowly avoided being trapped in the traffic jam that had people abandoning their cars to flee the flames.
In the immediate weeks after the disaster, Mr. Barrientos worked as part of the relief effort by World Central Kitchen, the organization led by the chef José Andrés. But about a month after the fires, he returned to his former parking spot. The other trucks and the taco stand came back, too.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Armaund Urquidez, a general contractor who grew up in the Palisades, took a lunch break with his crew, who sprawled in a mismatched collection of office chairs, bar seats and armchairs which had just been dropped off at a nearby dumpster. The group of 20 ate tacos, burritos and carne asada fries from several of the trucks.
Mr. Urquidez, whose mother lost her home in the fire, believed taco trucks would be as essential to the rebuilding process as any other heavy vehicle. In conversations he’s had with other contractors, he said, they all can’t imagine how rebuilding will work logistically. “How many trucks are moving through, and how are people going to eat?”
As the initial cleanup phase winds down, however, business has grown slow for Mr. Barrientos and the other trucks. He was parking in the Palisades two days a week, but said that, at least temporarily, he plans to move to Brentwood exclusively, where many of his former customers have relocated. He also visited the temporary location of Pali High in Santa Monica after some students sent him messages on Instagram.
The first few times he parked in his old spot after the fires, it felt surreal, he said. On a chalkboard on the side of his truck, it still reads in English and Spanish, “Do NOT park in Ralph’s parking lot.” But the army of pickups, and the workers hunched on curbs downing burritos, haven’t run into any trouble.
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