Villa’s Tacos just made its Super Bowl debut — and it wasn’t outside of Levi’s Stadium serving up scrumptious fare to football fans.
The restaurant had a cameo in Bad Bunny’s fast-paced halftime show.
Right at the start of the Puerto Rican singer’s performance at Super Bowl LX, as he wades through faux sugarcane fields, he passes a series of small businesses. He takes a piragua — a traditional Puerto Rican shaved ice dessert — from one seller, then hands off the cone to Victor Villa, as the Villa’s Tacos owner stands behind a cart emblazoned with the business’ name. The singer thenducks beneath the sparring fists of boxers Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas.
Villa, who started the taqueria as a pop-up in the Highland Park neighborhood in 2018, took to Instagram to express gratitude for the opportunity, underscoring his family’s immigrant background.
“We sold our first taco in the front yard of my grandma’s house in Highland Park more than 8 years ago & I feel that every taco along the way brought me here. Today. For this moment!” the post stated. “I couldn’t have sold that 1st taco if my parents didn’t make the difficult decision to leave their homeland for a better life & immigrate to the U.S.”
The Los Angeles establishment — known for its freshly pressed blue corn tortillas, char-grilled meats and cheese-encrusted tacos — has been featured three times in the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurants list, and also is in the Michelin guide. The restaurant’s ambitious, maximized layering of mouth-watering ingredients has been hailed by L.A. Times restaurant critic Bill Addison as “deftly engineered chaos,” ultimately epitomizing the “L.A. dreamer, the go-getter.”
Villa’s Tacos was also featured on Season 3 of the Netflix series “Taco Chronicles: Cross the Border.” The restaurant has two locations in Highland Park and one in downtown L.A.’s Grand Central Market.
In a subsequent Instagram post, Villa thanked the Grammy winner again for the opportunity. “It’s crazy where a taco can take you,” he wrote.
