The food truck that started the craze in Miami, Latin Burger and Taco, recently opened the doors on its first ever brick and mortar location in the heart of Coral Gables. Chat Chow TV sat down with owner Jim Heins to find out more about his new restaurant, its menu and its famous burgers.
Guests can find the iconic look of the truck throughout the restaurant with the bright pink walls and black detailing. Decorating the walls is custom pop art of Heins’ favorite artists eating burgers, which is a nod to the restaurant and to Heins love of art.
The restaurant’s menu stays true the cuisine found in the Latin Burger and Taco trucks but serves a larger variety of offerings including more upscale tacos, and according to the Heins the burgers still remain king.
“Being from Texas and loving the taco tradition, I said we’re going to do an upper-end taco,” notes Heins. “We hired chefs and everything and our hamburgers are still outselling our tacos.”
There’s good reason for that as his Latin Macho burger has won many accolades including being named the “Best Dade County Burger” at the 2010 Burgie Awards. The burger is made with an Angus patty mixed with Argentine chorizo and special spices, and then topped with caramelized onions, Oaxaca cheese and a special red pepper mayo.
The burger is so good in fact that it landed on the Joe’s Takeaway menu — the first item from an outside vendor to do so in more than 100 years.
Curious what inspired Heins to get into the food truck business to begin with? Or why he chose Coral Gables for his first location? Find out all that and more in the video above.
I went to latin burger and taco today because of your podcast. It was the worst place I have ever been in. The owner was there because they were having trouble with the credit cards but the cashier fixed it so we moved on. The food took years to cook. One order came normal and our other two orders done at the same time took 30 minutes more. The cashier told us when we aske that all burgers were well cooked because if not you would get sick. The fries were cold and tasteless, the meat did not taste like good meat and I order a fish taco which looked like a brown chicharroma nd it was supposed to be tilapia. I returned it and asked for my money but I did not insist because the poor cashier was in charge of taking orders, delivering them and cleaning the tables. The poor kids cooking for doing their best but were ill equipped to handle more tha. 3 orders at once. The only thing that I could say good about the place was the caramel it’d onion were the only thing that tasted good. Perhaps the ones they cook at Joe’s are better. Too bad, I had good expectations. Best burger? Maybe in 2010, certainly not now.
Tere, it was actually worse than described. Two employees no showed then we had a complete system failure with over 100 people at lunch. disaster is a understatement. thankful that this is first time it happened. still using prime beef so not sure about that statement.
Jim