Tacos Oscar.

Tacos Oscar

Every tortilla here is hand-pressed from fresh La Finca masa and griddled on the plancha. That fills the plancha, so the chile verde is tomatillo-braised pork shoulder under chicharron dust and the barbacoa is chili-braised beef shoulder in tomatillo salsa.

Why go

Oscar Michel grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles, learned beans, rice and salsa from his mother, who is from Jalisco, and cooked his way through East Bay kitchens including Doña Tomás.3 He and Jake Weiss ran Tacos Oscar as a pop-up from 2014, then put a kitchen inside a double-stack of shipping containers on 40th Street at Webster.4 You eat on the patio between them, under café lights and heat lamps, off a menu chalked on a container door that changes constantly.1 The chile verde is tomatillo-braised pork shoulder off his mother's recipe. The mole started as one Weiss learned in a class in Oaxaca and has moved so far from it that Michel told the East Bay Express they should call it Jake's mole.3

Order this / avoid

• Order: the fried huevo taco. Runny yolk, crisp lacy edges, queso fresco, on a thick chewy tortilla. It comes from Austin breakfast tacos and it is why the logo has eggs for the letter O.3
• Order: the charred broccoli taco. Michel's answer to the doubters, in 2019: Yeah, they eat broccoli in Mexico. You should go down there sometime.3
• Order: the barbacoa when it is up. Chili-braised beef shoulder under roasted tomatillo salsa.1
• Order a tostada too. Katherine Hamilton rated a vegan one above everything else she ate here: Peruvian beans under grilled cactus, purple cabbage and mushrooms, with parsley, mint and toasted chili oil. It comes from the cactus-and-cabbage salad Michel's mother made for summer barbecues, off the plants in their yard.3
• Avoid: the chicharron dust on the chile verde if crunch is what you are after. Katherine Hamilton found it ground too fine to do anything.3

What locals & experts say

• MICHELIN gave it a Bib Gourmand on the 2026 California list, and files it in Oakland. The inspector's practical line: Arrive when doors open to beat the lines and snag a spot at the back.1
• MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez, in the Chronicle's 2026 Top 100, at No. 19: The Bay Area has countless taquerias, but only one Tacos Oscar. The Chronicle files that entry under San Francisco, where a second room recently opened.2
• Flora Tsapovsky, in Eater's 38 essential East Bay restaurants, 2025: Tucked into a shipping container in Temescal, Tacos Oscar has some of the best tacos in town.5
• Katherine Hamilton, East Bay Express, 2019, on what missed: But the chicharron dust, which sounded great in theory, was so finely ground that it lacked the satisfying crunch I've come to expect from chicharrones.3

Good to know

• Booking: the room handles its own, and the guide's advice is to turn up when the doors open.1
• Seating is outside, on a patio with heat lamps.3
• If you do not eat meat: the guide singles out grilled summer squash and corn with fava bean salsa and Thai basil.1
• There is a second Tacos Oscar in San Francisco, opened recently, and everything above is the 40th Street one.1

Verdict

should-visit — The tortillas are the point here and the rest of the kitchen is arranged to protect them. Turn up when the doors open, take a patio table between the containers, and start with the egg taco.