An American classic: Pleasanton restaurateur wins James Beard Award

Some have called him “The General.” Others, “The King of Tacos.”

But now, Pleasanton resident Miguel Jara has a new moniker — James Beard Award winner.

Jara, 74, is owner of San Francisco’s famed Mexican restaurant La Taqueria, which he opened in the Mission district in 1973.

Forty-four years and countless burritos later, the James Beard Foundation last month named La Taqueria one of “America’s Classics,” a distinction bestowed upon select locally owned restaurants that have been in business at least a decade.

Jara’s restaurant is the sixth in the Bay Area to receive the America’s Classics award since the foundation began giving out the recognition in 1998.

“The wait to place an order at the counter and score a weathered wooden table at La Taqueria gets more and more absurd as time goes by, but the quality stays remarkably high,” James Beard officials said of Jara’s restaurant.

The James Beard Award, which honors the best of the best in U.S. culinary achievements annually, is the latest in a series of accolades racked up by La Taqueria over the years.

The Mission mainstay saw business spike after the website FiveThirtyEight in 2014 declared the restaurant home to the best burrito in the country — so much so that this spring, Jara decided to start closing the busy taqueria on Mondays to give employees a break.

It’s those employees, 23 in all, who Jara credits for the America’s Classics award.

“I’m so grateful to my mom and the employees,” Jara said. “If it wasn’t for (them), I wouldn’t be receiving these kinds of awards.”

Jara took an unconventional path into the culinary world.

Born in 1942 in the small town of Villa Guerrero in Jalisco, Mexico, Jara grew up on a ranch, looking after their cows from the time he was 5 years old.

When he was 8 or 9, his family moved to Tijuana where Jara would finish primary school, which proved to be the end of his formal education.

While Jara considers his youth in Tijuana “wonderful years of my life,” his family didn’t have a lot of money. When he was 16, Jara’s cousin offered to take him to the United States to work.

“We didn’t have no food, we had shoes with holes in the bottoms, my pants were patched,” Jara recalled during a recent interview from his house in Pleasanton.

So Miguel moved to Temple City, southeast of Pasadena, where he earned $100 a week — “a lot of money back in 1958,” Jara said — working for a swimming pool company.

He stayed there until 1959 when his father, who by then had moved to San Francisco, asked him to move up north to work with another cousin at their body shop in the city.

“It was great because I learned how to repair cars, paint, do framework,” Jara said.

He later opened his own auto repair business and had been in operation over a decade when he had to go to Mexico City on business.

Jara stayed for nearly three months. When he was about to head back to San Francisco, he had lunch at a taqueria with a friend of his who was an engineer.

“He said to me, ‘You know, you come over here and the only thing you want to do is eat tacos,'” Jara recalled. “I told the engineer, ‘I’m going to go back and I’m going to open a taco place.'”

With the help of his friend, Jara found a suitable location for his business in San Francisco’s Mission district. The only problem? He didn’t know how to cook.

“I never worked in a restaurant,” Jara recalled. “I had no idea what I was going to do but (the engineer) told me I could do anything I want in this life.”

So Jara ventured back to Mexico for some hands-on training in how to make carnitas.

With his new-found knowledge in hand — along with his mother’s hot sauce recipe — Jara opened La Taqueria in 1973. They ran out of food at 2 p.m. on their first day.

As Mexican restaurants began multiplying in the Mission, Jara’s remained a mainstay known for its tacos and burritos.

It was the latter that caught the eye of FiveThirtyEight, an ESPN-owned outlet that in 2014 had set out to find the best burrito in the country. In a March Madness-style bracket, 64 burrito purveyors across America were whittled down to one champion — La Taqueria.

“I didn’t even know they were having this contest,” Jara said. “All of a sudden I get a call, ‘You went to the next bracket, there are 16 of you,’ and I said, ‘Of what?’

“They voted me best burrito of the United States, can you imagine that?” he said. “It’s just a hole in the wall.”

Jara said La Taqueria uses choice or better meat and prepares their food fresh every day.

“The only thing left in the restaurant from yesterday is the employees and the building, because we cook in the morning every day, all fresh.

“In the afternoon we cook again so in the evening, the food is fresh again — I think that makes a lot of difference,” he said.

The cuisine at La Taqueria impressed the judges with the James Beard Foundation, which presented Jara and the restaurant with the America’s Classics award at a gala in Chicago last month.

“When they told me about this, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “When it hit me, I felt really proud.”

A medal from the James Beard Foundation now sits at the Pleasanton home where Jara and his wife Yolanda moved and raised three sons — Angel, Jesus and Ricardo, all Amador Valley High grads — 20 years ago. Pleasanton caught Jara’s eye on drives out from San Jose to Modesto to visit his mother.

“I love it here — I love the weather, and people are really nice around here,” he said.

Now nearing 75 years old, Jara no longer cooks at La Taqueria but can be found working there every Sunday and a couple additional days a week. In his spare time he works on old cars, a hobby harkening back to his first career.

Jara’s sons, now helping out with the business, have tried unsuccessfully to coax their dad into opening a taqueria in the Tri-Valley.

“The kids want me to open a taco place over here so bad, but I’m going to be 75 in a couple months and I think I’m done,” he said. “It’s time to relax.”

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