Blanca Perera and her mum Blanca Mejia make one taco every 50 seconds at their pop-up Mexican eatery Olotl. Their workspace – a service counter in a room above Campos on Missenden Road – is just big enough for two people, so even if they wanted to hire more staff, they couldn’t.

Some customers balk at the wait time, but most people don’t mind. On Saturday and Sunday – the two days this upstairs taqueria is open – queues snake down the stairs. “People arrive at 10.30am and form a queue before we open. By 11.40, there’s an hour wait,” Perera tells Broadsheet. They’ve just started taking phone numbers, so you can wander King Street while you wait.

Tacos served on cornflour tortillas, and the occasional tostada, are the only menu items. “We always do mole verde from my great-grandmother’s recipe,” she says. “There are around 28 ingredients: five nuts, two chillies, a lot of veggies. It’s our signature dish and it has a lot of sentimental value.”

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There’s always birria too, “because everyone sees it on Tiktok and asks for it”. Traditionally the dish is made with goat, but Perera believes it’s “too strong” for Australian palates, so her recipe brings beef to the table instead.

Some menu items are up for a vote. “We put a poll on Instagram asking people to choose what they want us to make. The variety of Mexican food is wide; we want to be able to showcase that for everyone.” This week, the taco options are bistec en salsa guajillo, pork with tomatillo sauce, and slow-cooked beef. Or grab a crisp-fried tostada with fish.

The only rule at Olotl is using the right salsa with the right taco. “My mum finds it amusing when people put all the salsas on all their tacos,” Perera says. “We usually recommend how to eat them: use the lime with the birria, not salsa; the salsa chile morita goes with the carnitas; and most importantly no salsa on the mole. Mole is already a super special sauce, if you put more salsa on top, you can’t taste it.”

Until recently, Perera was an architect, while Mejia was a public servant. To learn about hospitality and to launch Olotl, they began working with social enterprise Food Lab Sydney, which started as a collaboration between the City of Sydney, the University of Sydney and Tafe. All of Olotl’s food preparation is still done in Food Lab’s commercial kitchen – where meat is prepped and both salsas and 600 to 800 tortillas (to last the weekend) are all made by hand.

“We do a lot of slow cooking, we use whole ingredients, don’t buy pastes or powders, and we use whole chillies – devein, roast and cook them. I think people can taste it, the work that goes into the food.”

Perera is obsessed with ingredients and focuses on finding the best suppliers of authentic Mexican produce. Australian-grown tomatillos are used in the salsa verde, and recently she found an Aussie-grown source for organic nopales (cactus). If the family can save the funds to open a permanent spot – they already have a King Street location earmarked – they’ll work with a company that sources ethically produced Mexican cornflour that supports small farms.

After all, the word olotl is Aztec for “heart of the corn” – but it’s much more than a staple ingredient. “In pre-Hispanic Mexico, the diet was beans and corn, but the word olotl goes beyond that. For those cultures, the origin of life is corn.”

Olotl
193 Missenden Road, Newtown
Upstairs at Campos

Hours
Sat & Sun 11am–3pm

@olotl_sydney