Legendary Mexican Restaurant Gardens of Taxco Moves On After 45 Years

The nearly half-century old Gardens of Taxco in West Hollywood will indeed soon be no more — at least in its current iteration. Luckily there are still plans to keep the name and menu around in the area, but with a drastically different look and feel.

As first noted back in April, landlord issues had put the 45-year old restaurant on thin ice. With a big rent increase coming, the thought at the time was that the restaurant would need to either strike a more favorable deal with the building’s owner, or move on to some other space for the first time since 1971. Now it looks like the latter is happening.

While the restaurant won’t say exactly where yet, the plan is to stay along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood proper — a move similar to the one Irv’s Burgers was forced to undertake a few years back. Unfortunately though, restaurant management says that the new-look Gardens of Taxco will instead operate as a fast casual alternative to the big, plush sit-down space customers have always known.

With a new takeout only model, a lot could be potentially lost. Much of the charm of Gardens of Taxco is the quirky timewarp sensation of the place itself, and the fact that the restaurant has operated with essentially no menu at all during their long run. Instead, each evening’s order is a conversation between guest and waiter, which seems rather hard to replicate in a takeaway format.

Though the details on the new location are still coming together, a call to the restaurant confirms the new move will happen sometime within the next three weeks or so. After that, expect a short dark period for Gardens of Taxco, and then a reopening nearby — but in a very, very different way.