Of all the awesome tacquerias dotting Monument Street, downtown Concord, and its outlying areas, the best is Tacqueria Los Gallos on Grant Street.

The ambiance is typical tacqueria: plastic chairs and tables, menu on the wall surrounded by a collage of pictures of the menu items, soccer on TV, and a serape here and there.

But here are the atypical things:

1. They give you a basket for all-you-can-eat chips you get yourself. And these are not the chips I’ve seen in the city, the ones that taste like they came out of a five-pound Costco bag and sat under a heat lamp for two seconds, or event the pitifully thin and crumbly homemade chips I’ve had here. Los Gallos’s chips are thick and substantial, cut from tortillas and fried until they curl. The wax paper under them sops up their grease and salt.

2. The salsa bar isn’t two metal buckets with a thin layer of salsa coating the bottom. Instead, it features eight different salsas, including a mild, creamy avocado dip, plain old pico, and spicy fire-roasted tomato salsa. It also has the other accoutrement of Mexican cuisine -- plenty of limes, onions, cilantro, jalapenos, and spicy carrots in the midst of pickled vegetables.
(What I’ve always loved about Mexican food is the sheer number of sauces, seasonings, spices. I can doctor a burrito with more onion, cilantro and lime when I crave that marriage of tang and freshness, pico when I desire the clean pop of the tomato, spicy salsa and Tapatio when I need heat. Which is why I take umbrage with a pitifully small selection of sauces: I can’t alter the flavor to the exact degree I’d like.)

3. The Burrito Bonado (wet burrito). First off, this burrito is huge, and, unlike other “wet” burritos that come with a drizzle of canned enchilada red sauce and a few stray shreds of chalky cheddar, it is swimming in a thick, intense, piping hot ranchera sauce. The cheese is plentiful, and melted on top of that sauce. The carne asada gleams, but isn’t greasy. The refried beans are rich (mashed, not pureed) and accented with melted jack cheese, spicy salsa, and tangy guacamole.

I would never want to move back to Concord, but I do go back sometimes to visit the person and the places I loved. And one of them is always Los Gallos.

Tacqueria Los Gallos
1950 Grant St # A
Concord, CA 94520
(925) 687-5988
http://www.taquerialosgallosexpress.com