Walter Soto and Julia Silva have been on a decades-long journey to find a permanent home for their acclaimed flour tortilla asadero, El Ruso.
Soto told The LA Local that the new brick and mortar will allow for a consistent menu for the first time since El Ruso made a name for itself a decade ago by setting up shop in an alley outside a CVS in Boyle Heights.
The couple’s journey began when they were 19 struggling with a street cart in Sinaloa and continued as they evolved as people and into one of LA’s best taco trucks. It has taken them through decades of challenges: crime on both sides of the border, LA’s complicated street vending restrictions, inflation, rising gas prices, a pandemic and multiple recessions. They also faced the economic and emotional toll of immigration enforcement raids and even had to set aside $10,000 for parking tickets.
They have shut down for periods of time or switched to private catering. When cash has been a serious issue, they sold their kitchen appliances, their street carts and even their taco trucks. They’ve bounced around from Sinaloa to Tijuana to Sonora to Boyle Heights to Echo Park to Silver Lake, back to Echo Park. But this week, like Odysseus returning to Ithaca, El Ruso has finally found a home, opening its first-ever brick-and-mortar restaurant in Studio City.
“It feels like a lot of pressure has finally eased off,” Soto said as he threw some ribeyes on the mesquite grill Wednesday night. An artist was still painting the sign on the front of his new digs on Ventura Boulevard.
The new El Ruso location also includes a giant billboard announcing some of El Ruso’s critical acclaim, including being featured on a Netflix food docuseries, the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Taco. Inside, there are murals of musical icons Selena Quintanilla and Tupac Shakur eating tacos.
“This is my tribute to my friend,” El Ruso’s business partner Vincent Laresca told The LA Local pointing at the Tupac mural. Laresca, who is a professional actor, met Shakur while playing his rival on the set of the film “Juice.”
“You could see back then that Tupac was going to be a rock star,” Laresca lamented. “It’s too bad he was taken from us at such a young age. If he were alive today, he would have been one of our strongest community leaders.”
Laresca bought the property and opened Roadside Taco there in 2021. The taco shop did well for a time, expanding into a thriving Las Vegas Strip location. But the Studio City location struggled to push through the current economic climate, and Laresca decided to close it this summer.
“I still owned the building and the liquor license. And I’ve been a huge fan of El Ruso,” he explained. “So I reached out and asked Walter and Julia if they wanted to be partners.”
The partnership allows El Ruso to return to their asadero roots, making a stunning ribeye taco on an outdoor mesquite grill and adding an al pastor trompo into the mix. The duo still serves the eclectic Northern Mexico-style guisos that made them one of LA’s enduring, even if nomadic, taco destinations. Those include TJ-style birria, Sonoran chile colorado, Sinaloa-style chicharrón and their own LA-born recipes for shrimp, chorizo and chicken tacos.
The new location also offers a full bar, cozy inside seating and a colorful outdoor patio where you can watch Soto run the grill while Silva spins her giant flour tortillas until they span the length of her arms.
Eating tacos on the patio feels like you’re at a family cookout just a few feet from the Universal lot, where sold-out shows of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey play in 70MM. But the real star of this show is the alchemy of Soto’s touch on the grill and Silva’s hand made flour tortillas that she started selling when she was around 10 years old in Sonora.
“I make about 1,000 tortillas a day plus about 300 of the sobaqueras,” she told The LA Local. “I never liked the way the ones at the store smell. So I made my own with all natural ingredients, no preservatives.”
