Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a street-facing decoy for the glamorous restaurant hidden downstairs. La Esquina abajo remains open, but Santo Taco, unlike its predecessor, is very much its own raison d’être. A renovation has sleeked up the interior, but it’s primarily an outdoor restaurant. Ordering happens at a walk-up window, and the best place to sit is at the sidewalk tables, perhaps while sipping goldfinch-yellow agua fresca, a not-too-sweet blend of pineapple and cucumber. Even the line feels engaging—the queue moves quickly, allowing you to watch taco construction in action through the windows. The star of the kitchen is the steak trompo, a huge beehive of strip and sirloin steaks skewered on a vertical spit, glossy with fat. When a trompo taco is ordered, a cook brandishes a knife of ferocious sharpness, shaving a thin, broad piece large enough to overhang the corn tortilla it’s laid upon. The trompo is worth ordering for the visuals alone, even if the flavor of the meat, seasoned only with salt, nearly vanishes between the tortilla’s dusky masa sweetness and a tangy, pond-green salsa of avocado and tomatillos. I’d more heartily recommend the carnitas, a straightforwardly wonderful taco of pork ribs and belly slow-cooked until a collapsing mess, or my favorite, surprisingly—the mushroom taco. Too often a vegetarian afterthought, here it’s beautifully complex, with moody, silken petals of creminis and shiitakes. With apologies to vegetarians, I loved it topped with crushed chicharron from the self-serve salsa station, a crunchy contrast to the shrooms’ slippery softness. Santo Taco is owned by Santiago Perez, a Mexico City native. He’s a partner in the restaurant group of the famed chef Enrique Olvera, who’s not involved with Santo Taco, but who last year dropped another pin on the new-wave map. Esse Taco, in Williamsburg, draws on some of Olvera’s other restaurants: pineapple butter melting over the tacos al pastor, a corn-husk ice-cream sundae that calls back to Cosme’s iconic dessert. More for the map: Esse isn’t far from Greenpoint’s Taquería El Chato, where you can get a striking tripa taco (crispy, toothsome, lashed with salsas); a few blocks farther still is the sunny Taqueria Ramirez, where the tacos suadero are like velvet, and the carnitas so magnificent that they were spun off into their own restaurant, Carnitas Ramirez, in the East Village. Tacos 1986—known as one of L.A.’s best taquerias, which is saying something—expanded to the West Village last month, with Tijuana-style tacos (and Tijuana-style late-night operating hours); their aromatic corn tortillas are rolled out and cooked just moments before being loaded up with fillings like carne asada and pork adobada.