This North Bay Taqueria Is Your New Destination for Late-Night Fried Fish Tacos

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

The best tacos I’ve ever eaten in Marin County are tucked away in the warren of warehouses and car dealerships that populate the eastern end of San Rafael. We pulled into the neighborhood at a little past 9 o’clock on a recent Friday night because we’d heard that one of our favorite taquerias, El Tucán, had finally opened its long-awaited location here — an outpost the owners had initially planned to debut all the way back in 2021.

El Tucán Tacos & Beer is meant to be a swankier, sit-down version of the original taqueria in Richmond. Importantly for our purposes, it stays open until 11 p.m. on weekends.

Technically speaking, both the Richmond taqueria and the even newer El Tucán location in San Francisco are more prototypical late-night spots, slinging tacos until 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Here in the North Bay, however, the new El Tucán is one of the very few places in town that stays open late at all. In this particular semi-industrial corner of San Rafael, it was the only restaurant of any kind, open or closed, we saw for blocks.

As regulars at the original El Tucán, we came with the expectation that we’d be eating some of the tastiest carne asada in the Bay. What we didn’t expect was that the new restaurant would also fry up the best Baja fish tacos we’ve eaten in a long, long time.

The restaurant is bigger and fancier than it looks from the outside, with a long, gleamingly back-lit bar; trendy wicker light fixtures; and multiple flat-screen TVs for sports-watching. Along one wall there’s one of those cursive neon signs: “You are the salsa to my tacos.” On another, a colorful, very geometric mural of the restaurant’s namesake toucan. Not for nothing in Marin County, every other customer on this busy Friday night appeared to be Latino — a mix of twentysomethings sipping on gaudy, fluorescent-hued margaritas and older gentlemen in work boots. (El Tucán is located in San Rafael’s Canal District, where a dense cluster of apartment complexes houses the bulk of Marin County’s working class Latino population.)

The nicest part of the restaurant is the big, expansive deck in the back, adorned with string lights and a flotilla of heat lamps, that faces out toward the San Rafael Creek waterfront. We parked ourselves at one of the sturdy wooden picnic tables and proceeded to order about twice as many tacos as we had any business eating.

El Tucán’s claim to fame is that it was one of the first taquerias to bring Tijuana-style tacos to the Bay Area, with its emphasis on meats grilled over fire (instead of on a flat-top), supple handmade tortillas, and the dollop of guacamole that comes on every taco by default. Arguably, the restaurant’s calling card is its quesatacos, which come laced with a thin layer of extremely crispy cheese. What experience has taught me, though, is that those cheesy tacos are too heavy for me to eat more than two or three in one sitting.

So for our first meal in San Rafael, we instead started with a round of the standard (cheeseless) asada tacos, which were as phenomenal as we remembered; the steak was chopped finer, and came out so much juicier and more tender, than at your typical taco shop. Topped with a tangle of grilled onions and that big scoop of guacamole, the taco felt luxurious to eat, like a full meal in and of itself.

Diners who want to splurge a bit can try one of the premium ($9) specialty tacos, like the arrachera (skirt steak) taco, which puts an entire mini steak on top of a tortilla. We loved how pleasantly chewy and crisp-edged the steak was — though we probably would have been even happier trading it for two more asada tacos.

The real highlight of the restaurant, however, was another exemplar of Baja California cuisine: Baja-style fried fish tacos and shrimp tacos, which are only available at the San Rafael location.

One of my controversial food opinions is that Baja fish tacos are the only good fish tacos — you can keep your fussy little grilled fish tacos. But I also rarely order them in the Bay Area. There are so few places here that do them well (hello, Cholita Linda!), and you wind up paying twice as much for a taco that’s only half as good as what you can get at, say, any random spot in San Diego.

I’m happy to report, then, that the fish tacos at El Tucán are spectacular. They’re pricey, yes, at $8 a pop. But they’re also huge, with one plump, impeccably fried fillet that’s moist and tender, with an airy-light batter. There’s also limey chipotle crema and a tangle of delicately sliced cabbage and pickled onions. Taken all together, it makes for a flawlessly balanced bite. The Baja shrimp taco, which combines all of the same components with a pile of batter-fried shrimp, is just as good.

Like every other trend-hopping taqueria in the Bay, El Tucán has jumped on the quesabirria hype train, with an assortment of birria-centric menu items that run the gamut from standard quesabirria tacos and consomé-dipped “red tacos” to super-sized birria “pizza.” We tried one of the red tacos with adobada (Tijuana-style al pastor) and found it tasty enough, if a little too heavy and cheesy for how stuffed we already felt at that stage in the meal. What we did enjoy, however, is El Tucán’s take on birria ramen — a rather elegant, stewy version, served with sliced avocado on top. It had a homey warmth to it that was especially nice on a chilly night.

In the end, there was a part of us that still preferred the old El Tucán in Richmond, where you stand in line, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, grab a plastic stool on the patio and wolf your food down in the semi-darkness. Certainly, it’s more chaotic, with a certain kind of romance. But if you’ve come with a group of friends and want to kick it for a while, that big deck overlooking the boats on the water is tough to beat. Especially with ice-cold Pacifica on draft and a couple of fish tacos in your belly.

El Tucán Tacos & Beer is open Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday 11 a.m.–9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday 11 a.m.–11 p.m. at 15 Harbor St. in San Rafael.