The St. Louis Tacos Price Map

A Total Taco Teardown of St. Louis

I've been reviewing restaurants (and weighing sandwiches) in St. Louis for over two years now. All the while, creating food maps has been a dream in the back of my mind.

The goal? To see where the priciest, cheapest, and best areas for food in the county are.

Well, over the weekend, I finally got enough time to make a version 1.0 — the St. Louis Taco Map.

Using the menus for 162 Mexican restaurants in the St. Louis County area, I was able to pull out the price of a taco. To do this, I standardized to the cost of one taco. So a plate of 3 tacos for $9.99 at Seoul Taco becomes $3.33 per taco.

I also wanted to do some take on "quality" (the best) and "value" (best for the price). A quick sanity check on the data surfaced The Loop and Cherokee Street as tops for tacos, so I was happy with the general trend, if not maybe every specific.

I'm a food nerd after all.

Here's a look at what I found.

The best taco ZIPs (a sanity check)

"Best" here is a Google-review-weighted score — a spot's star rating times its number of reviews, added up per ZIP. Review count does most of the lifting on purpose: 3,700 people vouching for a place tells you more than a 5.0 from eight of them.

The top of the list is 63130 — University City and the Delmar Loop — carried there by Mi Ranchito (★4.6 from 3,751 Google reviews). Behind it: 63376 (St. Peters, El Mezón), 63118 (Cherokee Street, Taqueria El Bronco), and 63104 (Soulard, home of Session Taco). Those are the neighborhoods I'd have sent you to before I had a chart. Good — the data and I are getting along.

The priciest taco

The priciest tacos in the metro run right up to the $7 line — LaPez Mod Mex in the Central West End (63108) sits exactly on it at $7.00, with Chava's ($6.88) and Taco Twist ($6.75) a hair behind. ZIP 63104 carries the highest median at $6.19 (thin sample, so take the neighborhood read lightly). Nobody got past seven bucks, which is its own kind of answer: in St. Louis, once a taco crosses $7 it's usually stopped being a taco and started being an entrée.

The best value

Value isn't just cheapest — it's cheap and good, the stuff that earns a place on my list of the best Mexican food in St. Louis. Mi Ranchito wins it twice: $2.99 a taco, ★4.6, and 3,751 people backing that up — about a buck under the roughly $4 regional median, with one of the biggest review counts in the set. Seoul Taco ($3.33, ★4.5) and Dos Reyes ($3.50, ★4.5) are a step behind. The lowest sticker price on the board is Tacos Uno at $2.25 (63129) — though the cheapest outliers lean on Google's menu data more than a menu I scraped myself, so I trust them a hair less.

The taco deserts

The farthest you can stand from a taco in the metro is 63138, up in north county — 3.98 miles to the nearest taqueria, with none inside a 3-mile circle. 63147 and 63137 are right there with it.

North city and north county are the dry stretches. South city has the opposite problem, which brings us to…

A few more things the menus gave up

• Most taco-dense ZIP: 63110 — 57 taco spots within three miles. That's not a desert, that's a buffet.
• Best-rated spot, period: Mestiza (63139), ★4.9 from 380 Google reviews — the kind of number that's hard to argue with.
• The typical St. Louis taco: about $4. Cheaper than you'd guess for 240 rated spots' worth of options.

Bottom line: this is one view of a database of real menus — scraped, normalized, and stamped with the month. It got the broad strokes right, which is the part I cared about: it points at the same neighborhoods I'd point at after a few hundred dinners. Where it isn't sure, it says so. Spot a price that's wrong? Every pin links back to the menu it came from. I bring the receipts — now the map does too.