The Tex-Mexplainer series explores the ingredients, techniques, history, and culture of Mexican food in Texas.
During a layover in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2023, I visited the original location of Tacos Atarantados, a design-forward northern Mexican chain. As I sat at my table examining the menu, I was gobsmacked. A section was listed as “cachetadas,” which translates to “slaps” (specifically slaps on the cheek). My interest piqued, I ordered one.
Turns out, it’s a simple taco made with one or two tortillas (Tacos Atarantados uses flour), a crispy cheese costra, and a high-quality cut of meat (thinly sliced ribeye is especially popular). The slap comes into play during the cooking process. Cheese is melted on a flattop and a tortilla is laid on top of it. After a while, the fused layers are flipped to cook the tortilla a bit more—and then comes the signature move. The tortilla-costra is lifted from the cooking surface and slammed onto the griddled steak. There: You have dinner and a show. It’s not surprising that Tacos Atarantados’ rich, provocatively named creation has shot to stardom and is now spreading across Texas.
Texans, like norteños, love beef, and a cachetada allows diners to more affordably indulge in an expensive cut. That’s one of the reasons Austin chef Fermín Núñez added it to the menu at his coastal Mexican seafood restaurant, Este. Núñez’s first encounter with cachetadas was at Cara de Vaca, a modern, high-end steakhouse in Monterrey, in 2022. “It was a beautiful mix of tortilla, cheese, and great beef,” Núñez told me. He loved it so much, he began to tinker with a recipe for his new cookbook, Vitamina T, coauthored with Masienda founder Jorge Gaviria.
For Núñez, it was a solution to a common problem at his restaurant. “A surprising amount of people come to Este and want to eat meat,” he said. “Our steak dish cost between sixty dollars and eighty dollars. That was too much.” He replaced it with a cachetada, made with a trifecta of nixtamalized-corn tortillas, asadero cheese, and Wagyu ribeye. Tender, salty, and aromatic, Este’s cachetada now ranks among the most popular items on the menu.
Its name initially confused Este’s kitchen staff, but it’s common for Mexican dishes to inspire laughter, or sometimes traumatic memories. A gordita is a little fat girl; a trompo is a spinning top; a cachetada is a slap, but also a stunner of a taco, served open-faced. Este’s gives the Wagyu ribeye, cut thin with a deli slicer, the spotlight. At first blush, treating that cut of meat that way seems sacrilegious. “My chefs were shocked,” Núñez said. “I got asked a lot, ‘Why would you do that?’ ”
A cachetada at Tacos Atarantados in Monterrey.Photograph by José R. Ralat
Dallas–Fort Worth’s Osman Avila, co-owner of Knight Out, also came across the cachetada during a visit to Monterrey in 2022. He called it “a really good taco,” noting that ribeye is his favorite cut of steak. “It has just the right amount of fat, the right amount of meat,” Avila said. “Especially if you season it just right, I think it hits the spot.” He made up his mind right there to serve his own version. It took him more than a year to get his cachetada, which is called the Ribeye Slap on Knight Out’s menu, the way he liked it. He dresses it with a long arc of avocado that cools the finger-burning taco and cuts through the spice of salsa negra, a condiment of charred onions and chiles. My favorite touch is his use of Muenster for the costra.
At Maximo, in Houston, executive chef Adrian Torres serves his cachetadas only on special occasions. It was at one of those dinners that I got to revel in it. A wide, flat fan of barbacoa de cachete left only a sliver of tortilla and queso Chihuahua visible on the plate. The stacked dollops of avocado crema and habanero salsa gave the taco a fruity spike.
Torres considers the slap he and his chefs give the taco to be the distinguishing element of a cachetada. “I see cachetada more as a technique than a defined dish,” he said. “[It’s] definitely norteño because it’s a carne asada–type taco—high heat, that aggressive press. The name, to me, lives somewhere between the act of slapping it on the grill and that idea of something thin and pressed, like the candy,” he says, referring to the impossibly thin lollipop of the same name.
There is another kind of taco dubbed a cachetada that was created in Tampico, in the northern Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. That taco is filled with refried beans and shredded brisket. Because it has brisket, one would have thought it would become Texas’s preferred version. I’ve yet to see one in person, though.
When Patricio Bernardini and his partners opened Tacos Atarantados in 2020 (there are now eleven locations across Mexico and one in Miami) with the cachetada, they created a sensation. Bernardini described it as “a signature dish of the taqueria that is also an evolution of the gringa [a taco al pastor with cheese in a flour tortilla] or a quesadilla.” And while ribeye is most popular protein option for its cachetada, Tacos Atarantados also offers, among others, lamb, trompo negro, and trompo de chicharron. Frankly, they all, well, slap.
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