Taco Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
95 free Taco trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
54 free Taco trivia questions with answers. Tacos are older than the word for them, and the word may have started life as a stick of dynamite. This taco trivia quiz covers the whole story: the fish tacos eaten in the Valley of Mexico before Cortés, the silver miners' 'plugs', the Lebanese shawarma that became al pastor, Jalisco's birria and Tijuana's quesabirria, Baja's fish tacos, and the limewater soak that turns corn into masa. It also follows the taco north: the hard shell that America made its own, Glen Bell's 19-cent tacos and the Mitla Cafe across the street, the Chihuahua that wanted Taco Bell, the Doritos Locos Taco, the Choco Taco, and the two-word trademark that Taco John's, LeBron James and Taco Bell all fought over. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups, a third are for regular taqueria customers, and the rest are for people who know what a codzito was. Use it for taco night, a food-trivia round or a solo test. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which chopped fresh herb, paired with raw onion, is the standard garnish on a Mexican street taco?
Cilantro
Cilantro and chopped onion usually go on automatically at the stand unless the customer says no; the salsas are then left out for everyone to add to taste.
Q 02Aside from food, what does the Spanish word 'taco' also mean?
A plug or wedge
A plug or wedge: the Spanish word also covers a wad, a ramrod, a billiard cue and even a short, stocky person; the edible sense is a later Mexican innovation.
Q 03One popular theory says the culinary word 'taco' was coined by which Mexican workers?
Silver miners
Silver miners: the popular theory holds that 18th-century Mexican silver miners called their paper-wrapped gunpowder charges tacos, and the name passed to the wrapped food.
Q 04Before 'taco' became Mexico's national word, states such as Guanajuato and Michoacán called the same rolled snack by which name?
Burrito
Burrito: an 1895 dictionary of Mexican Spanish defined it as a rolled tortilla with meat inside, known in Mexico City as a taco; the capital's word spread and burrito came to mean something else.
Q 05In 2024, El Califa de León in Mexico City became the first taco stand to receive what?
A Michelin star
A Michelin star: the tiny stand has sold its beef Gaonera taco since 1968; within days of the award, a queue stretched down the avenue outside.
Q 06Tacos al pastor are cooked on what?
A vertical rotisserie
A vertical rotisserie: marinated pork is stacked on a spinning upright spit, charred on the outside and shaved off in thin slices to order.
Q 07Tacos al pastor grew out of the spit-roasted 'Arab tacos' that immigrants sold in which Mexican state in the 1930s?
Puebla
Puebla: Middle Eastern immigrants settled in the city and served their spit-roasted lamb on pita-like pan árabe, the taco from which Mexico City cooks later developed al pastor.
Q 08What does 'al pastor' literally mean?
Shepherd style
Shepherd style: pastor is Spanish for shepherd; the tacos were first made with spit-roasted lamb, and chile-marinated pork took over only later.
Q 09Where did fish tacos originate?
Baja California
Baja California: fillets of the day's catch are dipped in batter, fried and served with shredded cabbage, a street-stand recipe that crossed the border into California in the 1980s.
Q 10Which U.S. chain is credited with first popularising fish tacos north of the border?
Rubio's
Rubio's: Ralph Rubio first tasted fish tacos at a stand in San Felipe on a college spring-break trip, then opened his own restaurant selling them in San Diego in 1983.
Q 11What are tacos dorados better known as in the U.S.?
Taquitos or flautas
Taquitos or flautas: instead of being folded soft, these 'golden tacos' are rolled tight around their filling and fried hard; flauta means flute, after the shape.
Q 12Tacos sudados, 'sweaty tacos', take their name from being kept warm in what?
A cloth-covered basket
A cloth-covered basket: made at home and wrapped in cloth, the tacos steam in their own heat, which is why bicycle vendors also sell them as tacos de canasta, basket tacos.
Q 13Tacos de lengua are made from what?
Beef tongue
Beef tongue: lengua is Spanish for tongue; the meat is boiled or steamed for hours until tender, and the tough skin is peeled away before it is chopped for tacos.
Q 21What does the word 'tortilla' literally mean in Spanish?
Little cake
Little cake: tortilla is the diminutive of torta, cake; in Spain the same word means a thick omelette of eggs and potato, a different dish entirely.
Q 22Flour tortillas are typical of which part of Mexico?
The north
The north: wheat came with the Spanish and flour tortillas became the tradition there, wrapping the region's grilled-meat tacos, while corn dominates farther south.
Q 23What is the stone slab on which nixtamal was traditionally ground into masa called?
Metate
Metate: cooks worked the soaked kernels under a hand stone called a mano on this slab; today most tortillas come from tortillerías, where machines do the work.
Q 14What is a mulita?
Meat and cheese pressed between two tortillas
Meat and cheese pressed between two tortillas: mulita means 'little mule', and the cheese melts between two corn tortillas like a small quesadilla, usually around al pastor or carne asada.
Q 15Birria, the stewed meat now famous in dipping tacos, comes from which Mexican state?
Jalisco
Jalisco: birria began there as goat stewed with chiles and spices, a soupy cousin of barbacoa, and its name is usually traced to a Spanish word for something worthless.
Q 16The quesabirria, a cheese-stuffed birria taco served with consommé, was first developed in which city?
Tijuana
Tijuana: the city's beef-birria taqueros, who had swapped goat for cheaper beef, began griddling cheese into the consommé-dipped tortillas, and the quesabirria spread north from there in the 2010s.
Q 17How is traditional barbacoa prepared?
Slow-cooked in a pit dug in the ground
Slow-cooked in a pit dug in the ground: the meat is wrapped in maguey leaves and buried over a pan that catches its juices, though city taquerías now often use a steamer instead.
Q 18Carnitas, 'little meats', are traditionally made by cooking pork in what?
Lard
Lard: chunks of pork simmer slowly in the fat until tender and browned, often with orange rind in the pot, which gives carnitas their deep golden colour.
Q 19Corn for tortillas is soaked in what before being ground into masa?
Limewater
Limewater: soaking the kernels in an alkaline solution of slaked lime, called nixtamalization, loosens the hulls and frees the niacin that plain cornmeal cannot deliver.
Q 20Populations that ate untreated maize without nixtamalization risked which deficiency disease?
Pellagra
Pellagra: nixtamalization frees the niacin locked in maize, so when settlers in the American South took up the grain without the alkaline step, the disease became epidemic there in the early 1900s.
Q 24Where did the hard-shell, crispy taco tradition develop?
The United States
The United States: Mexican-American cooks were frying U-shaped shells long before fast food, and Mexican restaurateurs were patenting shell fryers in the 1940s, years before Glen Bell claimed the idea.
Q 25The Kogi truck drew crowds across Los Angeles from 2008 with tacos filled with which cuisine's barbecue?
Korean
Korean: Kogi, with Roy Choi as chef, took to the streets in November 2008 and tweeted where the truck would park next, so hundreds of people turned up at each stop.
Q 26Glen Bell got the idea for his tacos by watching the queues at which restaurant across from his drive-in?
The Mitla Cafe
The Mitla Cafe: Bell tried to reverse-engineer its fried tacos until the owners let him into the kitchen to watch, then sold a simplified version across the street.
Q 27In which California city did Glen Bell open the first Taco Bell in 1962?
Downey
Downey: the first Taco Bell, a 400-square-foot walk-up stand, opened there in 1962; due to be razed in 2015, the building was instead trucked overnight to the company's home office in Irvine.
Q 28What did Glen Bell sell at his first drive-in, opened in 1948, before he turned to tacos?
Hot dogs
Hot dogs: Bell's Drive-In opened in San Bernardino in 1948, just down the road from the McDonald brothers, and Bell came to believe tacos could outsell hamburgers.
Q 29Glen Bell's first taco-shell fryer was a wire contraption built by a man who normally made what?
Chicken coops
Chicken coops: Bell hired a coop builder to bend chicken wire into a fryer, so shells could be fried ahead of time and tacos assembled fast, at 19 cents each.
Q 30Which company bought Taco Bell from Glen Bell in 1978?
PepsiCo
PepsiCo spun its restaurants off in 1997 as Tricon, which later renamed itself.