Of all the parts of the cabeza, Don Arturo Olivares loves the eyes the best. “No cilantro, no onion, just a little bit of salt,” he said. Olivares is the owner of La Gran Chiquita, a popular taqueria near the Fruitvale BART station that specializes in Mexico City-style casual dishes, and often that means doing something different.
“When we started out, we did a lot of research on what other taquerias were doing,” says Olivares. “And we decided that we weren’t going to Americanize our food, that our specialties would be the food that we can’t get here in the U.S.,” he said.