Inside the cheesy, beefy pizzacoa capital of Tacoma

At dinnertime most Fridays and Saturdays, Palmira Mendoza has three cooks dedicated to making a single dish — one brimming with tender beef, slow-roasted in its own juices with herbs and spices and piled high not once but twice with mozzarella, between three layers of tortillas.

In a neighboring pot, the reserves await their chance to coat the next pizzacoa and, inevitably, your hand, which will soon dip a slice into a small Styrofoam cup of the stuff, that of Instagram fame, sprinkled with chopped red onions and cilantro.

Mendoza has cornered this hot new “pizzacoa” market, and with it she has become Western Washington’s birria queen.

A Google search with just the word pizzacoa reveals that Mendoza coined the term: The results return various links that all connect to her family’s restaurant in the South End of Tacoma, sandwiched between their Azteca Tortilleria and El Jalapeño grocery store.

Los Tamales was known locally for its handmade namesake (you must try the one filled with elotes), but now it is a Mexican restaurant drawing visitors from around the South Sound, from eastern Washington and Oregon, according to Mendoza.

They are here for the birria.

At its core, birria de res is slow-roasted barbacoa beef in a red, fatty broth — hence the “coa” in Mendoza’s pizzacoa. That same meat stars in the quesabirria, a taco also hydrated by and served with the barbacoa sauce. It is often made with goat (chivo) or lamb (oveja). Complicating matters, in some Mexican states, including the Mendoza family’s home of Michoacán, birria means only goat, while barbacoa would be either beef or lamb.

She decided not to mess with renaming her quesabirria because you don’t mess with fame.

In the United States, some time between 2018 and today, the term “birria” (pronounced “beer-ē-ya”) has become synonymous with this taco. My Instagram feed — and likely yours if you have ever glanced at even a single picture of The Birria Dip — has been a-flutter with examples of this juicy, cheesy phenomenon for many, many months. Obviously barbacoa is storied, but birria as America knows it, according to Eater’s Bill Esparza, likely took off when a Los Angeles taco truck owner snapped a photo of his quesabirria dunked in consomé, the choice descriptor of the accompanying broth.

The pandemic, it seems, ignited its trajectory from coast to coast. If a taqueria didn’t have quesabirria on the menu already, it does now, because the owner would be missing an opportunity as lucrative as the one Mendoza stumbled into when a customer messaged her last summer asking if she made birria pizza.

“I couldn’t describe how busy we were,” she told The News Tribune in June, reflecting on the restaurant’s biggest year since opening in 2016. “A customer asked if we made pizzacoa, and I said, ‘Pizza? in a Mexican restaurant?’ We had the barbacoa, so why not try it? So I did, and I didn’t even pay for advertising or anything. I just put a picture on my Facebook account, on Los Tamales, and it was just … boom.”

Built like an American quesadilla, the pizzacoa starts with three flour tortillas on the flat-top, each then lathered with the rich, red “barbacoa sauce,” as Mendoza refers to the meat reserves. Each layer gets barbacoa beef, shredded mozzarella cheese, a couple ladles of sauce for good measure, and a generous wave of raw red onions and chopped cilantro. It’s sliced like a pizza and served like a pizza, on a circular metal tray on-site or in a pizza box to-go.

She recalled one of her cooks saying, “‘She’s dreaming big. Really, we’re gonna sell pizzas? Like, OK!’ I bought a pack of boxes, but they thought I was crazy.”

Los Tamales had already discovered customers’ affection for the quesabirria, which it introduced in May 2020 as “tacos de barbacoa con consomé” before latching onto the term du jour.

As the pandemic changed the way we lived, Mendoza realized, “I had to be unique.” She added family packs of 16 tacos or 12 tamales with rice, beans and a two-liter soda for under $30, garnering new fans and lots of families that kept returning for the “very authentic food, like it’s from your grandma making it.”

On the heels of her quesabirria’s success, she posted a photo of her first pizzacoa on a Tuesday morning in August, saying it would be available on Friday. That morning, the phone started ringing and ringing and ringing.

“I want pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza,” said Mendoza. “I couldn’t stop selling pizzas.”

At $16.99 for the 9-inch small or $26.99 for the 12-inch large, the pizzacoa has become as typical a to-go order as a Friday night pizza ritual. It is, perhaps, the culinary exemplar of Mexican American culture, of flavors and textures and traditions blending into a singular sensation.

What differentiates Los Tamales from other birria makers, though, is the family’s barbacoa, cooked for three or four hours with cinnamon, clove and cumin, marjoram, thyme and avocado leaves. “Everything is in the style and the flavor,” said Mendoza. “We use special meat — it has a little bit of fat, and that’s what one of our secrets is. The fat makes the barbacoa better.”

It benefits not just the beef but the broth, and as we’ve learned, no birria experience is complete without that messy, satisfying dip.

The funny thing is, Los Tamales has always had birria de res, and de chivo, on the menu, but in its traditional stew form or in a standard taco. Mendoza estimates they went through 100 or 200 pounds of barbacoa a week; now they tear through some 1,200 pounds, she said. At one point last year, she was at the restaurant from 8 a.m. until midnight, every day, “because I had to be here. I couldn’t let the customer down. We needed to cook the meat. We needed to be ready for the next day.”

She remains humble, indebted, she says, to the support of her family, which has owned the grocery next door since 1999 and the tortilleria since 2005. One of her sisters runs the salon in the same plaza on 72nd Street., while the other manages an El Jalapeno in Renton.

Her parents worked in Chelan for several years before her father moved to Seattle in search of better work. He eventually got a job as a dishwasher at Moctezuma’s, where Mendoza and her sisters all worked at one point. After opening the grocery in Tacoma, he dreamed of having a restaurant next door. Soon, said Mendoza, they will open another.

Her sister wants to know: “What are you gonna invent now?” she laughed. “I’m like, I’m thinking!”

LOS TAMALES TACOMA

▪ 1018 72nd St. E, Tacoma, 253-301-0849, facebook.com/Lostamalestacoma

▪ Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 9 a.m.-9 p.m.

▪ Details: homemade tamales, Mexican plates and the famous quesabirria ($10.99 for 3 tacos y consomé) and pizzacoa ($16.99-$26.99)

This story was originally published June 22, 2021 at 5:05 AM.