The chef is a real person
Gabriel isn't a mascot or a licensed name. He develops every recipe, and he's in the taqueria most days. You can go eat his food tomorrow and decide for yourself.
Origin
One man's twenty years of cooking, written down for the first time.
Gabriel Muñoz left Tulcingo del Valle, Puebla in 2000. He didn't arrive with a business plan or a cookbook. He arrived with a way of cooking he'd learned at home, and spent the next two decades refining it inside other people's kitchens across the Bronx.
How we got here
2000
Puebla to the South Bronx
Gabriel and Yarely emigrated from Tulcingo del Valle and settled in the South Bronx. No restaurant, no plan — just the way his family had always cooked.
2000–2024
Twenty years behind other people's stoves
Two decades leading kitchens across the borough. This is where the recipes actually got built — not in one moment of inspiration, but across thousands of services, adjusting a little each time until they were right.
Nov 2024
Taqueria Muñoz opens on East 170th
Gabriel and his son Jonathan put the family savings into a taqueria of their own. Neither had run a restaurant before. What they had was twenty years of recipes and a willingness to work from eight in the morning until midnight.
2025
4.9 stars, and profitable in fourteen months
Then something started happening at the register. Customers stopped asking for extra salsa on the side and started asking whether they could just buy a jar of it. That question, asked enough times, became this company.
2026
The recipes leave the restaurant
Salsa roja and salsa verde first, because they're the ones people asked for. The birria consommé follows this winter. After that, the rest of the kitchen, category by category.
Inside the kitchen
What we're careful about
The recipes weren't invented for a shelf
These are the exact recipes served at the restaurant, scaled up with food scientists so they're safe and consistent. The flavor target is what Gabriel already makes — nothing was reformulated to hit a price point.
We're not speaking for a region
This isn't a museum recreation of one town's cooking. It's one chef's interpretation, built over twenty years of his own work. That's a smaller claim, and it's a true one.