This SF restaurant might have the best taco deal in the city

When you enter Tato, a taqueria in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, a giant mural with a Day of the Dead-esque blue heron skull and the words "Hecho en Bayview" is painted on the left wall. It's a riff on the official eagle-emblazoned "Hecho en Mexico" trademark that the Mexican government has been using since 1978 to identify Mexican-made products. The emblem has come to represent pride for Mexican identity.

At Tato, the mural represents pride and identity too — in the food, its backstory and the community of the Bayview.

Owner Kristin Houk launched the counter-service Mexican restaurant as a pop-up in 2015 and turned it into a brick-and-mortar at 4608 Third St. in 2018. Houk, who also owns All Good Pizza down the street and Cafe Alma in nearby Hunters Point, serves tantalizing tacos, burritos and even hamburgers at affordable prices. Tato's best deal by far is a Friday pay-it-forward meal called "Taco Love."

When you order a taco plate, which comes with two tacos — either meat or vegetarian — and a side of rice and beans, you pay what you can: anything between $0 and $10. However, when you do pay the full $10 price listed on the menu, you are essentially buying a meal for someone in need. Tato will pay it forward by donating a taco plate to a nearby school, health clinic or community organization. Houk estimates that she's donated over 25,000 taco plates over the years.

"I see food as a currency for myself. There's nothing else that brings communities and people together than food," Houk said while sitting at a high-top table in her restaurant. "I just really wanted to make this restaurant accessible for everybody."

The Taco Love idea started when the brick-and-mortar opened in 2018, but it didn't catch on. Houk thought that maybe people deemed it gimmicky or she didn't do a good enough job promoting it. When the pandemic hit and many people needed food assistance, it was the perfect time to bring Taco Love back.

"Because of the mandated closures, we got a lot of industry people that would come in and be like, 'Oh, this is cool,' and they wanted to pay the full amount," Houk explained. "So during COVID, we were taking meals out all over the city of San Francisco due to people's generosity of wanting to pay for the full meal."

Since then, it's been a part of the restaurant's ethos just as much as the Berkshire pork carnitas cooked in a cazuela de cobre, a traditional Mexican copper pot, or the "borracho" beans, which are marinated in Negra Modelo beer.

BEST OF SFGATE

| The biggest gas station in California is a bizarre fever dream | Guy Fieri on mean memes and what he loves about the Bay | The once-beautiful streets San Francisco ruined | These SF residents are here to defend the nickname 'Frisco'

For Houk, another central part of Tato is Alicia Dominguez Velarde, her son's late grandmother. Dominguez Velarde hailed from Mexico City, where she was a chef, and Houk often gushes about her simple mushrooms in a salsa verde and her roasted garlic and tomato rice. "I would give anything for a big bowl of her rice right now," Houk said, grinning.

Many of the recipes found on the menu are inspired by Dominguez Velarde. When she lived with Houk and her family in the Bayview, the two women would often do a "hybrid cooking thing together" because they loved each other's food. Houk said she always joked with Dominguez Velarde that she would open a restaurant in her honor one day. True to her word, the restaurant is a representation of both women and what they care for deeply — delicious Mexican food and sharing it with the people around them. Even the restaurant's name, Tato, is the nickname for Houk's son, Hudson.

"Something I think that is interesting about the Mexican culinary world and the history of it is that so much of it is oral," Houk said. "So this is one of those things that is really important to me was to remember her by way of preserving her recipes."

As the owner and face of Tato, Houk is a stalwart of the neighborhood. If she doesn't know someone who walks into her restaurant, she goes up to them immediately and introduces herself. If someone walks in and asks to put up a poster advertising their rap performance in a park, Houk is game. That's just the type of community feel she grew up with and champions every day.

Houk is originally from Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to San Francisco in 2000 after working in Colorado, London and Guatemala, where she helped Guatemalan women create sustainable businesses through mentorship programs and microloans.

She already knew San Francisco well, having visited many times to see her godmother, who lived here. "Because of those visits, I always knew I wanted to be in San Francisco," she said. When she decided to live here permanently, she landed in the Bayview and hasn't left.

"I was just blown away by how it felt like Iowa, to be honest," Houk said. "When I moved here, it was like my neighbors helped carry boxes inside and helped with work on my house. People just pitch in and help. It just really felt like a neighborhood that you wanted to raise a family in or that you wanted to invest in."

Although she loves the Bayview, no neighborhood is perfect.

"One of the things that really struck me was how few places and resources there were for people that were living here, like grocery stores, restaurants and cafes," she said. "To this day, we are still very low in numbers in that way."

That's why she wanted to use her love of food and culinary acumen to bring affordable food to a neighborhood that really needed it. She has no formal training but rather learned on the job while living with a family in Italy and working at their pizzeria, for instance, as well as spending countless hours in the kitchen with her late mother-in-law.

"Opening my pizza restaurant was a real eye-opener to just how cool this community is," she said. "People are just really nice here, and it's a real shame how the media spins it. There's a lot of inherent racism when, really, it's a community full of people who just love being here."

If there's anything that the Bayview has in spades, it's a sense of community.

"It's really one of those overlooked neighborhoods. There's a really high percentage of home ownership, so people that live here, they really live here. They are doing things for their community," Houk said.

It only made sense to give back to a community that has given her a home and so much more. That's the whole point of Taco Love on Fridays.

"There's no judgment," Houk said. "Maybe it's somebody who's falling on hard times or maybe someone who is actually homeless, or maybe it's someone in the industry that had a s—ty night the night before, and they're like, 'I'm short on cash, and I want to have a nice lunch.' We don't ever turn anyone away."

Tato , 4608 Third St., San Francisco. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.