Mamacita Tacoria

The beer poured at the brewery next door goes into the food. Side Launch's Hazy IPA turns up in the batter on the Baja crispy fish taco, and the brewery's Wheat Ale is cooked into the smoked cheese sauce that holds the Nachos Amor together. Mamacita Tacoria is the retro taco bus parked at the edge of Side Launch Brewing in Collingwood's Mountain Road corridor, a chef-run kitchen that treats its address as an ingredient rather than a backdrop. It keeps weekend hours, Friday through Sunday, which makes it less a daily errand than a planned stop for a table that has already decided to spend the afternoon in the beer garden.

The board is compact and reads like a kitchen that would rather do ten things precisely than thirty things loosely. Tacos arrive in pairs. Slow-roasted chicken comes under guacamole, chimichurri crema, and a bright pineapple agrodolce; smoked beef brisket anchors the Ranchero, layered with smoky barbecue sauce, refried beans, and hibiscus pickled onions; the Chorizo El Diablo is built on beef-and-pork chorizo, mango and morita salsa, and a house dusting the kitchen calls Magic Pork Dust. The Faux-Rizo is the vegetarian entry and no afterthought — garlic-roasted cauliflower, squash, black beans, and a veggie crumble carry the same slaw, crema, and pickled onions as the meat versions. Nearly every taco on the board is listed gluten-free.

What the rest of the menu says about the kitchen is that it does not think of itself as a taco truck with a fixed ceiling. The Not Tacos side runs from a straightforward chips and dips through Mamacita's Quesadilla — a choice of protein folded with Havarti and pepper jack, available every day but Saturday — to the Ahi Tuna Poke Tostada, sushi-grade tuna with mango, cucumber, furikake, smoked Tajín, and local microgreens over a crisp tortilla. It is a plate that would look at home in a sit-down dining room and arrives instead from a bus window. The through-line is a set of house components — curdito slaw, hibiscus crema, chimichurri crema, mango and morita salsa, street corn salsa — recombined across the menu so that even the kids' Bambino quesadilla is built from the same parts as everything else.

For all the invention, it stays an easy place to bring a mixed group. Most of the board is marked gluten-free, the Bambino kids' meal keeps the youngest table members fed with a mini quesadilla and chips, and the brewery garden around the bus is dog-friendly and given to live music on the right afternoon. Ordering is walk-up and first-come — no reservations to hold, no host stand to clear. The gluten-free breadth in particular does quiet work: a diner who usually has to negotiate a menu gets to order almost anything on the board.

The truck is the work of Steve Doucet and Alisha Nicholson, the chef duo who started it in 2021. Local reporting has described Doucet as the cook and Nicholson as culinary-school trained, and the two of them as partners who put the hours into making the food from scratch. That in-house habit is the part a diner tastes: the tortillas, the salsas, the slow-cooked meats, and the cremas come out of one small operation rather than off a distributor's shelf. Catering runs as a separate line of the business, but the bus itself stays put at the brewery rather than travelling to events — the cooking happens where the beer is.

So the way to use Mamacita is the way its hours already suggest: a weekend fixture rather than a weeknight fallback. A table claims a picnic seat in the brewery garden, orders a pint from the brewery whose beer is cooked into the fish batter, and works through a couple of taco pairs and a shared Nachos Amor while the afternoon runs long. The Mountain Road corridor sits at the edge of Collingwood, where the town gives way to the road climbing toward the mountains, and the bus has parked there long enough to feel like part of the brewery rather than a guest of it. A kitchen that reads its beer, its weekend crowd, and its own short menu as one connected thing.