Why Does Authentic Mexican Food Cost More in Australia? Behind the Food at Tacos LA

When you sit down at Tacos LA and see a plate of tacos in front of you, it can look pretty simple.

Tortilla. Meat. Salsa. Garnish. Lime.

But what you don’t see is everything that happened before that plate reached the table.

Making the kind of Mexican food we want to serve at Tacos LA in Melbourne comes with a very different set of challenges and costs than making the same food back home in California. A huge part of that comes down to one simple thing: access to authentic Mexican ingredients in Australia.

Mexican ingredients aren’t cheap in Australia

Many of the ingredients we use aren’t things we can simply pick up cheaply from a local supermarket.

They’re specialised products imported into Australia, and there are only a limited number of distributors bringing many of them into the country. That means the cost can be dramatically different from what you’d pay in California or Mexico.

A box of 500 tortillas can cost us around $155.

A one-kilogram bag of certain dried chillies can cost around $55 here. The same bag back home in California might be around $12.

Even something as simple as fresh lime adds up. At times, we’re paying more than $1 for a single lime, and we’re serving fresh lime wedges with our food.

Then there are ingredients such as achiote, Mexican oregano and different varieties of chillies that are fundamental to getting the flavours right.

We could substitute everything for cheaper, easier-to-find ingredients.

But then it wouldn’t taste the same.

The salsa isn’t coming out of a bottle

Our sauces and salsas are another part of the food people don’t necessarily see.

A single sauce can take around an hour to prepare, and we’re regularly making three or four different sauces.

That means sourcing the chillies and specialty ingredients, preparing them, cooking, blending and adjusting everything until we’re happy with it.

Those sauces might only appear as one part of the finished taco, but there’s a considerable amount of work behind every batch.

Then there’s the smoked meat

One of the biggest differences at Tacos LA is the work we put into our meats.

Smoking meat isn’t a shortcut.

On a prep day, Angel can start at around 4:45am and finish at 5pm. That’s roughly a 12-hour day before you even begin talking about serving customers.

Then there’s the meat itself. A box can cost around $300–$400, and a production run might involve five boxes.

Chicken alone can require around three hours of breakdown and preparation with two people working on it. Before cooking has even finished, there can already be hundreds of dollars invested into the meat, labour and preparation.

Smoking also means additional equipment, fuel, time and attention.

We do it because it creates the flavour and texture we want the food to have.

The taco is only the part you can see

Like every hospitality business, there are also all the things that never appear on the plate.

There’s rent. Electricity. Water. Staff. Permits. Packaging. Greaseproof paper. Branded materials. Cleaning. Equipment. Preparation. Storage. Waste.

And we’re doing all of that in Melbourne, where running a hospitality business isn’t cheap.

That’s why looking at a taco purely as a tortilla with some meat on top doesn’t really tell the story.

You’re looking at imported Mexican ingredients, hours of preparation, handmade salsas, smoked meats and a kitchen team putting in the work long before the doors open.

Why not just make it cheaper?

Because there are certain things we don’t want to compromise on.

Tacos LA was built around Angel’s experience growing up around Mexican food and taco culture in Los Angeles, with his family’s roots in Michoacán, Mexico.

The goal isn’t to make the cheapest possible version of Mexican food.

It’s to make food we’re proud to put on the table.

We know our food isn’t the cheapest Mexican food you’ll find in Melbourne. But there’s a reason it costs what it does.

There’s a lot more behind that plate than you can see.

And for us, that’s the whole point.

Tacos LA - Mexican and Los Angeles-inspired taco culture, made in Mordialloc, Melbourne.