The Mule

A taco and tequila bar that happens to be entirely gluten-free is a rarer thing than it sounds. At The Mule, on Richmond Street in London, the whole menu is built without gluten — every taco, every dip, every brunch plate — so the diner who usually spends a night out negotiating the kitchen simply orders like everyone else. The gluten-free build is quiet infrastructure, there for whoever needs it rather than announced. What the restaurant foregrounds instead is a taco menu that reads like a kitchen having fun.

The tacos start on familiar ground. The O.G. Fish Taco fries its fish and stacks it with chipotle mayo, cabbage, sweet onion salsa, pickled red onion, and radish; the Nashville Fried Chicken Taco carries the expected heat under cabbage and pickled cucumber. From there the board gets stranger and better. The Bulgogi Taco folds pork shoulder together with kimchi, sriracha mayo, and pickled chiles. The Habanero Brisket Taco pulls beef under a habanero barbecue sauce and lemon mayo. The Tuna Poke Tostada layers marinated ahi with mango slaw, avocado, and sesame. The Sweet Potato Halloumi Taco — crisp sweet potato, salty halloumi, tomatillo hot sauce — is the one vegetarians order twice, and it adapts to vegan on request. Classic tacos run seven dollars, the premium ones a quarter more, and a twenty-three-dollar taco party bundles three classics with a side for a table that would rather not decide.

The board doesn't end at tacos. Dips and shareable starters open the meal — guacamole and chips, queso fundido, papas bravas, Graham's nachos — the kind of spread a group grazes on before the tacos land. Dessert holds its own corner. Vegetarian, vegan, and vegan-adaptable options are marked plainly across the menu, so a table that arrives with mixed diets sorts itself out without a negotiation.

The through-line is a kitchen that treats the taco as a format rather than a tradition. Korean bulgogi, Nashville hot chicken, Hawaiian-style poke — the fillings come from everywhere and get folded into the same handheld shape, which takes a particular kind of confidence. The naming keeps pace: a Cease & Desist Taco, a Bang Bang MFC, Birria Foldies on the board. Tequila is the other half of the identity, and the bar leans in — Halfy Hour runs weekday afternoons from three to five, with half-price classic and W.A.P. margaritas and house cerveza. The kitchen doesn't reach for authenticity, and the menu is better for it — a bar cooking with range instead of guarding a tradition.

The Mule opened in 2023 under The Other Bird, a small Ontario hospitality group, and the lineage shows in how the place operates: bar-forward, built for a crowd, as ready to host a private event as a Tuesday dinner. The character comes off the food and the tequila list rather than any marquee name. It's the kind of operation that treats a full house and a booked event as the normal state of things, not the exception.

The week has a shape to it. Dinner runs daily; lunch and brunch open up Friday through Sunday, when the taco format stretches to fried chicken and churros and huevos rancheros. Fridays and Saturdays the kitchen stays on until midnight, and in warm months the patio pushes the seating out onto Richmond Street. Reservations are taken, which matters for the group tables the place is built to hold. Richmond Row is London's going-out strip, and The Mule sits in it the way it sits in its own menu — casual, a little irreverent, and easy to say yes to when nobody at the table can agree on anything except that they want tacos and a margarita.