Why is Mexican food so popular in Ireland?

Analysis: Like every seemingly overnight success, Mexican food has a longer history in Ireland than we might imagine

By Catherine Leen, TCD and Melissa Hidalgo

From burritos and tacos to tequila and beer, Mexican food is having a moment in Ireland. Despite the relatively small number of Mexican people in Ireland, restaurants, pop-ups, market stalls and food trucks offer a variety of Mexican food and drinks across the island.

Like every seemingly overnight success, Mexican food has a longer history in Ireland than we might imagine. Café Mexicana has been a fixture in Cork city for 30 years, Dublin's Acapulco just celebrated its 25th anniversary and nationwide chain Boojum began in Belfast in 2007.

One pioneer who has both popularized Mexican food and shared its soul with Ireland is Lily Ramírez-Foran, the founder of Picado Pantry in Dublin and the author of the award-winning book Tacos (Blasta Books, 2022), the first Mexican cookbook published in Ireland. Tacos combines her journey to Ireland with a history of the taco and her own family’s three-generation tradition of baking tortillas in Monterrey. With warmth and humour, she provides tips on everything from holding tacos, to adapting recipes to incorporate Irish ingredients, to making a DIY tortilla press.

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Ramírez-Foran's combination of food, history and culture is seen in more recent food enterprises across Ireland. Pickosito, established on Mary Street, Dublin, last May by Edlyn García Moran and Raquel Hernández Rodríguez, showcases the culinary tradition of their native Coahuila. Its vibrant decor gives patrons an insight into Mexican culture through pictures and texts about iconic figures like Zapata as well as their own family stories.

A particularly striking photograph of Rodríguez's farmer grandparents underlines Mexico’s shared agricultural heritage with Ireland. Unlike the centre and south of Mexico, where the corn tortilla rules supreme and where the food retains strong pre-Hispanic influences, northern tortillas are made from wheat. Therefore, sourcing corn to make Pickosito’s tortillas is not an issue. They also demonstrate the resourcefulness characteristic of inhabitants of the harsh northern Mexican landscape by adapting recipes to use Kerrymaid cheese instead of Oaxaca cheese, which cannot be imported into the EU, and using less ripe tomatoes instead of tomatillos.

Although adaptability is key to the success of Mexican food businesses, the presence of these businesses has also inspired growers in Ireland to produce Mexican ingredients. Growing corn is a challenge, as the "what is rare is wonderful" slogan of Kilmullen Farm in Co Wicklow affirms. Heavy rain means that yields can be poor or are wiped out, but other typically Mexican ingredients thrive in Ireland.

McNally's Farm in North Dublin has produced poblano peppers and a variety of chilies for about eight years. Although the lack of sun can affect the chili crop, Niamh McNally confirms that tomatillos are easier to grow in Ireland than ordinary tomatoes. Even the Irish air can affect Mexican cuisine. Erick Carrillo, cofounder of Fondita Mestiza-Art and Food workshops that combine Mexican food with art exhibitions, recalls that when he and cofounder Andrea Flores tried to make the traditional pan de muerto to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the dough would not rise because of the damp air.

Ireland's strong historical and diplomatic links with the United States and Mexico help to form a pathway for the arrival of Mexican food in Ireland. Specifically, "Cal-Mex" and "Tex-Mex" dishes such as burritos, nachos, and fajitas, appear regularly on menus around Ireland. Mexican food items popularized in California and the US Southwest states such as Arizona and Texas—part of Mexico until 1848—appear to be the most available and translatable to Irish palates.

Belfast burrito chain Boojum was started by David Maxwell in 2007 who fell in love with Mexican food and culture while running a pub in Arizona. Boojum’s is a "mission style" foil-wrapped burrito that originated in San Francisco’s Mission District. The burrito’s sizable portion —a large flour tortilla stuffed with Mexican-origin ingredients including meat, usually carne asada, carnitas, or chicken, with rice, beans, cheese, maybe guacamole, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and salsa—was an inexpensive but filling meal for the area’s laborers.

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From Potatoes to Tacos: How Mexican Food is Making Waves in Ireland podcast talks to Scott Holder about the inspirations behind his Los Chicanos Taquería fodo business

Los Angeles also figures prominently in the emergence of a taco culture in Ireland. Scott Holder took inspiration from the tacos and Mexican food he enjoyed while researching L.A.’s vibrant taco scene to open his own L.A.-style taco truck, Los Chicanos Taquería, in Dublin. Holder counts Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and parts of Baja California in Mexico as the primary influences behind his own taquería creations. One example of Holder’s recipes includes his unique version of tacos birria that uses Guinness to make the traditional consommé. Holder’s taquería illustrates the US-Mexican borderland influence on Irish food cultures and new routes of intercultural culinary exchange.

Mexican food and drink, especially the kind popular in the US, was already 'global’ thanks to the emergence of taco chains in the 1960s. As Los Angeles Times columnist and longtime food writer Gustavo Arellano observes in his 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, "as globalisation sets in, so does Mexican food". He notes that "Mexican food is as much of an ambassador for the United States as the hot dog," pointing to the important role the US plays in creating transnational foodways.

Mexican food is transforming Ireland's culinary landscape through new ingredients and the passion and expertise of Mexican people involved in food businesses

The taco trucks, pop-ups and other Mexican businesses, such as Garnacha salsas and Maria Valdez Cortez's Piñata Ireland, sprouting up around the country point both to a longer history of cultural exchange between Mexico, the US, and Ireland, as well as to newer forces such as globalization and migration.

In their Introduction to Food Across Borders (Rutgers UP, 2017), the editors discuss how tastes are "rooted in place, rooted in a sense of belonging," yet "get rerouted to new homes, new lands, as ‘belonging’ becomes ‘longing.’" Mexican food is transforming Ireland’s culinary landscape through new ingredients and the passion and expertise of Mexican people involved in food businesses. More importantly, however, food provides a means for Mexican people in Ireland to honour their heritage while creating a new sense of belonging in an increasingly multicultural Ireland.

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Dr Catherine Leen is the Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies at the Department of Hispanic Studies at TCD. She is the Principal Investigator for an Irish Research Council New Foundations Award for a project that examines Mexican food and film. Dr. Melissa M Hidalgo is an independent scholar based in Los Angeles who completed a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Limerick. She is the author of Mozlandia: Morrissey Fans in the Borderlands, a project which led to her current research on Irish, Chicano, and Mexican cultural connections.