First Look: Olotl, Newtown’s Adored Weekend-Only Taqueria, Finds a Permanent Home

“I hear you make great tacos!” someone hollers as they swing the King Street door open. Nobody inside looks up – the tacos are why we’re all here. After close to a year as a weekend-only taqueria above Campos Newtown , Olotl is in its flash new permanent home.

It’s 11.15am on day one, and the cosy space is already buzzing with hungry Olotl lovers, elbow-to-elbow. We’re here for the signature mole verde tacos, the birria numbers and the cheesy quesadillas – and maybe one of the ultra-limited tamales.

From a young age, Blanca Perera knew she wanted to run her own venue. Her grandparents opened their first restaurant in Actopan, Hidalgo, where her mother Blanca Mejia was born. When Mejia was a teenager, the family moved to Mexico City and opened another restaurant. By the time Perera came along, they’d opened a third. Her childhood was steeped in the bustle of kitchens, but despite being surrounded by food, life pulled her in a different direction.

“I come from a family with, like, this growing aspirational vibe,” Perera tells Broadsheet. “So I went to uni, as you do.”

With Fridays free from classes, she’d spend the day at her grandparents’ home, helping to cook the recipes they knew by heart. As they guided her through each dish, she transcribed their words into a book. It was her record of her family’s culinary history: her grandparents’ recipes and their parents’ recipes – generations of knowledge, all captured in her handwritten pages. Those pages are now being brought to life in the kitchen at Olotl.

The signature mole verde taco uses Perera’s great-grandmother’s recipe, with an incredible 31-ingredient blend of nuts, chillies and veggies – now with macadamias, tortillas and chile poblano in the mix, too – slow-cooked over the course of a day. There are some adaptations too, like the crowd-favourite birria taco, made with beef instead of the traditional goat. At the moment, Nopales are made with tinned cactus from Mexico, but from November it’ll be fresh, local cactus, once the plants are back in season. Vegetarians can also tuck into braised shiitake mushroom and cheese quesadillas, or the off-menu vegan mole and birria.

The cornflour tortillas are the bedrock of everything at Olotl. Crafted from scratch, they’re unbelievably soft – and so smooth you’d swear they’re flour tortillas, easily some of the best corn tortillas you’ll find in the southern hemisphere. Every weekend, the team rolls out 590, baking 90 of them into crisp tostadas.

When Mejia came to work in Canberra 10 years ago, Perera was working as an architect. As her mum’s role finished up, Perera convinced her to move to Sydney to launch Olotl. Their fledgling project got its start with Food Lab Sydney , before weekend pop-ups at Glebe Tramsheds and then the pop-up above Campos in Newtown.

At their new spot, the mother-daughter duo’s added tamales to the menu – in limited quantities. “We brought in tamales as a special one day and people like them so much,” Perera says. There will be just 14 available every Saturday and Sunday morning. They can’t make more because of how labour-intensive it is, but to make things fair, you can pre-order with a booking.

Weekend sittings also come with a little taste of home: cups of rich Mexican cacao made with Frido Cacao , served alongside sweet conchas, just like in Mexico.

Olotl
12 King Street, Newtown

Hours:
Fri & Sat 11am–3pm, 5pm–9pm
Sun 11am–3pm

olotl.com.au
@olotl_sydney