Meeting in the Middle: From Pujol to Pop Culture at Miso Taco
On a busy stretch of Cambie Street, in a room pulsing with neon colour and anime looping silently on the TVs, Diego Delgado is quietly pulling off one of Vancouver’s most delightful culinary contradictions.
Diego has the resume you expect from a chef in a starched jacket. Mexico City fine dining. A stint at Pujol, the modern Mexican institution that shows up on world’s best lists. Hospitality training at home, then culinary school at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts after moving to Vancouver. Time in respected local kitchens like Say Mercy, The Mackenzie Room and the Four Seasons, working the kind of services that run on military precision.
Yet none of that would necessarily prepare you for Miso Taco, his charming and vibey Japanese–Mexican mashup in the Cambie Village.
“I was done with that,” he says of fine dining. “I want to feed the people. I want to have fun. I want to make simple food. I want to make tacos.”
Miso Taco is built on that tension. The energy in the space is casual and loud, with poppy colours, a bar that hums, and a dining style that never takes itself too seriously. At the same time, the food is quietly technical and deeply considered. The base is very much Mexico City, the city where Diego grew up, cooked as a teenager in friends’ family restaurants, and watched his parents’ plate-and-platter business keep them in close orbit with chefs.
“My core cuisine is truly Mexican,” he explains. “From there I add elements of Japanese cuisine. I marry them in a way that makes sense, where it is fun, exciting and tasty.”
The spirit of Miso Taco is one of juxtaposition, forging an identity between opposing forces. Diego’s approach was born from a lifetime of cooking in two parallel worlds. Mexico City shaped his instincts first. A place he describes as electric, crowded, and endlessly hungry, where five to six thousand people can move through a single restaurant in a day and still keep the energy going. In a city of more than 20 million, Mexican food isn’t precious. It’s loud, fast, improvisational, eaten in torta shops, taco stands, and bars where the real action happens long after dinner service ends. Even after working in elite kitchens like Pujol, he still points people toward the taco stalls and street food counters. That’s where he believes the real story of Mexican cuisine lives.
Japan, meanwhile, entered his life early. Growing up in Mexico, “Japanese food” meant sushi rolls stuffed with cream cheese, jalapeños, fried beef, or anything that felt good and broke rules. When he moved to Vancouver, he found a different version of Japanese cooking: one grounded in discipline, technique, and balance. That contrast, riotous Mexican flavour and razor-sharp Japanese craft, is the spark he chases at Miso Taco. His fusion isn’t a gimmick; it’s a conversation between two food cultures that have quietly shaped him for decades. For Diego, the fun is in finding the overlap: the way umami and acidity can echo each other, the way a technique from Tokyo can sharpen a flavour memory from Mexico City, the way a taco can hold both identities without losing itself.
That philosophy is written all over the menu (which just had a major revamp). The new lineup feels like a greatest hits album and a punk EP in one. The headline act is the return of the deep fried fish taco that gave the business its name, reimagined as the “Miso Taco 2.0”: crisp fish, a miso dressing and a bright pickled salad. It was once the underdog of the menu. Diego rebuilt it until it felt worthy of the name on the door.
Another dish that tells you what Miso Taco is about arrives sizzling in the centre of the room: the Sizzling Cheese and Mushrooms. It starts as a Mexican queso fundido, collides with a béchamel and salsa idea, then gets finished with pan seared mushrooms, chili oil and green onion. Guests tear into it with soft flour tortillas and, if they like, add carnitas or birria on top. The dish is messy, communal and indulgent, but behind it sits technique that could hold its own on a white tablecloth.
That same thinking runs through the tacos. Chashu carnitas, a cross between braised pork belly and classic carnitas. Chicken karaage tacos that became so popular they were running out of marinated chicken early in the night. A cheesy teriyaki taco built on a house teriyaki sauce that Diego created from instinct rather than a recipe, finishing it with a hit of Coca Cola, a nod to the Mexico he grew up in.
If Miso Taco feels like it belongs on Cambie now, it is only because a few big gambles paid off. The business began in the old Union space on Union Street, where regulars mourned the loss of a legendary kimchi fry. Diego wrote his own homage in the form of kimchi nacho fries, a dish that still anchors the new room. Moving from Union to Cambie was terrifying. “We were happy,” he admits, “but my partner said, ‘Diego, let’s do it. I believe in us.’” The new space gave the concept room to breathe, and it shows in the way the music, anime and cocktails all fold into the experience.
The bar program is a big part of that. It leans into playful, story-driven drinks. El Coco Verde was born from a lonely bottle of absinthe Diego could never convince friends to shoot, turned now into a dangerously drinkable combination of absinthe, tequila and lime. The Dirty Horchata-da riffs on iced horchata with espresso, built with bourbon and Licor 43 into a boozy dessert in a glass. A matcha martini nods to current obsessions, while the draft list champions local breweries in the same way the kitchen champions Mexican and Japanese flavours.
Then there is the Megarrito.
Diego describes it with the same mix of pride and mischief that animates the dining room. It started as a simple idea to work jalapeño poppers into a burrito. The burrito kept growing until one tortilla was not enough. Two wraps later, the thing tipped the plate and the scale, landing at roughly one kilogram. “It would be hilarious if we made this into a competition,” he laughed to himself.
It didn’t take long for the impish notion to become a reality.
The result is a one kilo burrito challenge, the Megarrito. It’s timed at four minutes and, in addition to the gourmand satisfaction, a custom T-shirt featuring a chubby Godzilla gripping a burrito is the prize for those who finish before the clock runs out. Diego has done it in five and a half minutes himself. For everyone else, it is just as good shared between two, the kind of table centrepiece that turns strangers into co-conspirators.
For all the cheek, Miso Taco is very serious about longevity. Diego talks about HR, finances and social media with the same intensity he once reserved for kitchen hierarchies. That business focus is showing up in an ambitious next chapter. A downtown location at West Pender and Thurlow is already in the works, a fresh build across from the American consulate. North Vancouver is next, with plans to bring “wicked beer and delicious tacos” to the North Shore.
Through it all, the room at Cambie Village, just across the road from other local hotspots June and Elio Volpe, remains the beating heart. Anime flickers over the bar. Local beers and cocktails land next to sizzling cast iron and glossy tortillas. The music is up just high enough that you have to lean in to talk. It feels as far as you can get from a hushed fine dining room, yet every plate carries the fingerprints of someone who has been there, learned the rules and then chosen to break them in the most joyful way possible.
For Diego, the juxtaposition is exactly what it’s meant to be. A wink-and-a-nod tension that plays on your expectation and overdelivers in a setting that’s as simple as it is thoughtful. It could be a Monday or a Saturday night and Miso Taco is perfect for a social bite and drink with friends or a personal journey of indulgence featuring great flavours and absorbing anime.
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