What to order at Kike’s Red Tacos: birria, quesatacos and more

Sixteen months in the past, the Silva Gonzalez household guess all the things that they had on a Denver meals truck.

Slightly than spend money on a home, they determined to start out a enterprise promoting a uncommon deal with on the time for Colorado — birria (pronounced BEER-ee-yuh), the wealthy Mexican stewed beef. They served it in tacos, burritos, quesadillas, tortas and even ramen bowls.

By spring of 2021, phrase had unfold, and Kiké’s (pronounced KEE-kays) Crimson Tacos had change into a formidable participant on the native meals truck scene. Simply this week, the newcomer formally beat out 31 different native taco outlets to change into the winner of Denver’s 2022 March Insanity Bracket. Kiké’s gained its ultimate spherical towards seasoned native professional Tacos Selene, with a whopping 71% of your votes.

RELATED: Denver’s greatest tacos: Saying the winner of our 2022 March Insanity Taco Bracket

“That is nothing like what we anticipated, to be fully trustworthy,” Cesar Silva Gonzalez stated forward of the finals final week. He grew up in Denver consuming at a number of the famed Mexican eating places that his household’s personal startup competed towards for the title of greatest Denver tacos.

Silva Gonzalez, 22, helped his mother and father Enrique Silva Figueroa and Olivia Gonzalez launch Kiké’s Crimson Tacos in late 2020. They known as it Kike, the widespread nickname for Enrique, which has been handed down within the household for generations. After they determined to open the enterprise, additionally they did so as a substitute of shopping for a household house.

“We’ve all the time rented (a home) so long as we’ve lived right here (in Colorado),” Silva Gonzalez stated. “The purpose was to buy a house with the cash that we had saved up on the time … however me and my dad needed to start out this enterprise.”

It additionally was the 22-year-old’s thought for his mother and father to focus their menu on birria, a dish he and his three youthful brothers loved at house all through childhood.

“The rationale I pushed for birria, it’s top-of-the-line dishes my mother and pop would make once I was rising up,” Silva Gonzalez stated. “I needed to be one of the best at no matter we determined to do.”

On the time, the normal home-cooked stew was beginning to catch on at eating places and meals vehicles in america. Silva Gonzalez additionally advised his mother and father in regards to the queso-filled tacos he’d seen trending on social media.

“Once we first began, there wasn’t any spot that I knew of doing that (right here),” he stated. “And I really feel like lots of people draw back from doing birria simply due to the method.”

Whereas Silva Gonzalez stated his mother and father are “tremendous protecting of their recipe,” he described it taking eight hours to prepare dinner at varied heats, with round a dozen completely different spices including taste. Rising up, he would eat the stew with easy sides of rice and beans. However the meals truck takes all of birria’s slow-cooked hominess to new, obsessive, street-food heights.

Take the quesatacos, which begin by dipping corn tortillas into the birria consomé, or broth, earlier than grilling them simply to a crunch (and to a barely purple hue); then fortifying the wealthy stewed meat with a beneficiant layer of melted cheese; and chopping all of it with onions, cilantro and lime juice.