Dos Tacos

At Dos Tacos, the first decision is rarely which filling — it is which shape that filling takes. The same cod, steak, chicken, shrimp, chorizo, or vegetable that goes into a handheld taco can also pile onto taco fries, spread across a taco salad, settle into a rice box, or cover a tray of nachos. That one choice is what makes this Richmond Row counter more useful than a tighter menu would be: a short list of fillings, several ways to eat them, scaled from a single snack to a full dinner without ever switching restaurants. Downtown London has no shortage of places to sit for an hour. Dos Tacos is built instead around the order you actually want, in the format that suits the night.

The named tacos are where the kitchen shows its hand. The Codfather batters cod in corn flour and finishes it with cabbage, pico de gallo, honey chipotle, sour cream, and guacamole — the most complete build on the board, and the easiest first order for anyone reading the house style for the first time. Taco ’Bout Shrimp runs brighter, with pan-fried Pacific white shrimp, coleslaw, salsa, and a jalapeño-lime lift, while Bang Bang Shrimp takes the heavier battered route for the diner who wants it. Carne asada and Cali chicken cover the steak-and-poultry middle, and Classic Chorizo holds the spicier corner. To share, a table can open with tortilla chips and guacamole, work through a couple of tacos, and close on churros with chocolate or caramel and a cold Jarritos.

What keeps the menu open to more than one kind of table is how deliberately the dietary paths are drawn. I’m A Fungi builds a vegetarian taco around deep-fried mushrooms and bang bang mayo; I Yam What I Yam leans on sweet potato and black bean. Both are marked vegan-possible rather than parked as a single token meatless line, which is a real distinction on a menu this compact. Gluten-free corn tortillas, in yellow and blue, sit beside the flour option, and the kitchen describes its menu as fully halal. None of this narrows what anyone else is ordering. It means a mixed group — one person avoiding meat, another avoiding gluten, a third just there for the cod — can land at the same counter and each leave with the order they came for.

Dos Tacos opened in the summer of 2017, when Zaid Farid and Asaad Naeeli added it to a wave of independent businesses then filling out Richmond Row. Local reporting at the time traced the idea to a California taco trip and a gap the pair saw on the street back home — a downtown that wanted a proper taco counter and did not yet have one. The plan was plain enough to hold up: keep the fillings tight, let the formats carry the variety, price it so a full meal stays cheap, and stay open long after the rest of the block has locked its doors.

That last habit has become the restaurant’s signature. Friday and Saturday service runs until three in the morning, well past the hour when most downtown kitchens have gone dark, which gives Dos Tacos a specific role at the end of a night out — a shrimp taco, a rice box, or a tray of taco fries when a long sit-down meal is no longer the plan. The same fillings that anchor a Tuesday dinner travel just as cleanly into a takeout bag, a delivery order, or a catering tray for a group. On Richmond Street, that is the whole logic of the place: one counter that knows exactly what it is good for at noon, at dinner, and at last call.