Taqueria Los Jarritos has been feeding West Jordan’s working lunch crowd for years, and if you haven’t found it yet, that’s mostly because it doesn’t advertise itself. It sits in a strip mall off Redwood Road, between a nail salon and a cell phone repair shop, with hand-painted lettering on the window and a parking lot that fills up fast on weekdays around noon.
I went on a Tuesday, which turned out to be a good call. The place was busy but not overwhelming — maybe fifteen people ahead of me, and the line moved. You order at the counter, grab a number, and find a seat at one of the vinyl-covered tables. The room is small, maybe twenty seats, and the walls are decorated with the kind of tchotchkes and Mexican calendar art you’d find in someone’s kitchen. It’s not designed. It just is what it is.
The menu is written on a whiteboard above the register. I asked the woman at the counter what she’d recommend to someone who hadn’t been before. She said the birria tacos without hesitating. So that’s what I got — an order of three, with a cup of consommé on the side. They came out in about eight minutes.
The birria here is the braised, slow-cooked kind: beef that’s been stewed long enough to fall apart, ladled into corn tortillas that have been dipped in the cooking fat and griddled until they’re crisp at the edges and a deep rust color. The consommé was rich without being heavy, and I used most of it for dipping before I remembered I’d also ordered a agua de jamaica. The drink was tart and not too sweet, the way it should be — not the neon-pink sugar water you get at chain spots.
I also tried a side of elotes — corn in a cup, dressed with crema, cotija, chile powder, and a squeeze of lime. It’s messy and worth it. The portions are generous, and with the three tacos, the elotes, and the drink, I paid just under fourteen dollars. That’s the kind of price that makes you feel like the city still has some integrity left.
What I noticed most, honestly, was the consistency. The family at the table next to me had clearly been coming for a while — they ordered without looking at the board, and the woman behind the counter already knew one of their kids wanted extra crema. That kind of regularity tells you something. People don’t drive to a strip mall on their lunch break out of habit unless the food holds up every single time.
If you go on a weekend, expect a wait. The dinner hours on Friday and Saturday can stretch the line out the door, and the parking gets tight. Weekday lunch is the sweet spot. They close relatively early on weeknights — around 8 p.m. — so don’t plan a late dinner without checking their hours first.
Los Jarritos isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is: a family-run taqueria making food that tastes like it came from a home kitchen that happens to serve a hundred people a day. In West Jordan, that’s rarer than it should be.
