Ballard’s Situ Tacos (5239 Ballard Ave NW) has just earned a massive nod from Esquire, which named the Lebanese-Mexican taco restaurant one of the best new restaurants in the U.S. this year.
Situ’s owner, Lupe Flores, named the restaurant after her situ (Arabic for “grandma”), Delores Flores, who was half-Lebanese, half-Mexican.
“She raised me in the kitchen cooking, since I was 3 years old. Learning how to make and sew these tacos, was a rite of passage for me when I was young, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Lupe says on her website. Her signature crunchy tacos are fried, stuffed, and “sewn” together with toothpicks before being pan-fried and topped with guacamole or pico de gallo.
Lupe, who is also a drummer (for Wild Powwers and Tacos the Band), opened Situ Tacos in 2024 in the former Bitterroot location (Bitterroot closed in 2023). Before that, she ran Situ as a pop-up in Tractor Tavern.
“It’s been a wild 24 hours. I have no words to express how grateful I am to all of my staff, my family, and the community at large that have supported us from the early Covid days of me driving around in my car, delivering tacos in paper bags to peoples doorsteps, until now,” Lupe shared in a social media post.
Here’s Esquire’s take on Situ:
Pay attention. The signs are everywhere. “Don’t eat the fucking toothpicks!” they say. The signs exist because Lupe Flores and her team specialize in tacos that are stuffed with goodness along the lines of hushwe (the Lebanese dish of beef cooked in butter and spices) or garlicky potatoes before being latched shut with toothpicks and dunked in a deep fryer. (The soups are killer too, and you don’t have to dislodge anything from them.) Flores, a rock ’n’ roll drummer in Seattle, is paying tribute to Mexico’s (and her own) Middle Eastern heritage. But she’s not a food scholar, and she’s not presenting all this in a doctrinaire way. Situ Tacos is open till midnight on Fridays and Saturdays for a reason: this is a fine place to wander into for a bite after a few rounds at a bar, provided you’re not so drunk that you swallow a toothpick. —J.G.
Jeff Gordinier, Esquire
Lupe says: “I know I’ve worked my ass off, but I also feel insanely lucky and I just want to express how grateful I am and that I’m not taking any second of it for granted. Gracias, Shukran, thank you, thank you thank you.”
Photo: Owner Lupe Flores and General Manager Kat Wilkinson, photo courtesy Situ Tacos