Cartel Del Taco Brings Proper Mexican Breakfast to Brisbane (Finally!)

You’re picturing a breakfast burrito – I know you are. But the traditions of Mexican breakfast extend well beyond bacon and eggs blanketed in a tortilla.

While Sydney and Melbourne have seen an uptick in Mexican breakfasts over the last few years, Brisbane’s brekkie scene has missed out.

Cartel Del Taco’s Marco Ramirez and Erick Martinez are set to right this wrong. The pair is introducing weekend desayunos y cafe (breakfast and coffee) service.

“People have asked us for several years if we would open for breakfast one day. So now that we have established ourselves with our lunch and dinner services, we’ve had the time to plan [the breakfast service] for maybe six months,” Ramirez tells Broadsheet.

The menu includes familiar favourites like breakfast burgers and burritos as well as guacamole on sourdough, but there are also tamales, molletes, enmoladas and huevos rancheros.

“Chilaquiles rojos y verdes are my favourite breakfast in Mexico. It’s beautiful. It could be like the next big thing after birria,” says Ramirez.

Birria is also joining the breakfast menu in the form of a toastie.

“Our best-seller is the birria taco. We are doing around almost 300 kilos of birria a week. So, I think for breakfast it could be good to have it with a side of coffee. We're going to slice the bread a little bit thicker than normal. Next, we put a bit of butter and toast the bread first, and then put the birria inside with a little bit of the consomme inside, and then melted cheese as well,” he says.

The coffee will be Cartel’s own blend, which was made in collaboration with Ona Roasters. As well as your traditional order, the team is serving cafe de olla in traditional clay pots which Ramirez’s grandmother helped him pick out in a market in Mexico City.

The tradition of cafe de olla comes from “how the Mayans and the Aztecs used to have coffee … It’s made in a clay pot. They actually boil the beans and mix it with a little bit of cinnamon, a touch of piloncillo, which is a type of natural sweetener.”

Sous chef and baker, Jaris Ortiz, will also be baking conchas, a shell-shaped sweet pastry. Ortiz’s recipes have been passed down from her grandparents – Rodolfo Aleman and Lina Escobedo – who are both master bread artisans and run bakeries in Saltillo in northeastern Mexico.

There will be vanilla and strawberry conchas and – for the first month – a limited-edition matcha flavour. There will also be a special matcha tamale for the first month.

The breakfast service will run from Fridays to Sundays from 7am until 11am at the Hawthorne Cartel Del Taco location. The plan is to expand it to the New Farm outpost before the end of the year.

The first breakfast service at Cartel Del Taco, Hawthorne will be on Saturday August 30. The first 60 people to purchase a coffee that day will score a free concha.

@carteldeltacobrisbane