If you only had barbacoyero Omar Mejia’s lamb barbacoa at the Richmond Pulga (flea market) on a Saturday, you’d roll your eyes back in ecstasy over delicate cuts of lamb barbacoa on blue corn tortillas, seasoned by a salsa verde mingled with briny chinicuiles (grubs). Take a sip of tangy consomé, made with chipotle, and ask for directions to his Sunday location in American Canyon. There, Mejia offers the pride of Tulancingo: ximbo, a pit-roasted, spatchcocked chicken encrusted in a red adobo and cactus strips. A rare side, pancita blanco, is an offal-stuffed stomach without adodo that goes nicely with the salsa verde. Grab a corn tortilla and tear off a taco’s worth of chicken, cactus, and pork rinds at this home in the gateway to Napa Valley.

Located in the Garden Acres neighborhood on the eastern edge of Stockton, bordering fertile farmland, is one of California’s only Querétaro-style lamb barbacoa operations. There’s lamb barbacoa and consomé, but the top attractions here for offal lovers are the montalayo (regional name for pancita) and machitos (offal wrapped in tripe). Tacos de montalayo here are chopped from a tightly packed lamb stomach filled with heart, liver, and intestines slathered in chile guajillo, while machitos are torpedo-shaped intestines, wound by a continuous string of tripe that’s cooked on a grill. Together, the pair of bold-flavored lamb tacos makes this stand a barbacoa destination. 

While Barbacoa Mejia is the stand to hit up at the Richmond Pulga, there are around a half-dozen competing vendors, all from the state of Hidalgo, selling lamb barbacoa along with essential dishes, including consomé and pancita. This might be the only place in California you can have a Hidalguense barbacoa crawl in one location, all while shopping for cell phone accessories, small appliances, and dishware.  

Get barbacoa to go at a home located in this East Bay suburb, or get there early for the only table, a plastic picnic set four-top, for Hidalgo-style lamb barbacoa, barbacoa de pollo, and lamb heads. The chicken barbacoa is a whole bird stuffed with cactus and pork rinds, rubbed in an adodo and cooked in the pit, along with both beef and lamb heads clotted with adobo. Be sure to call in advance. 

Barbacoyero Rodrigo Chaparro sells Texcoco-style lamb barbacoa at his busy Bakersfield food truck, where customers crowd into a half-dozen picnic benches under a tacked-on tarp, providing shade for his regulars. There he serves a moist, stew-like reddish-brown pancita scented with epazote, and a light consomé to accompany popular cuts of supple lamb barbacoa such as ribs and shoulder. It’s an ideal breakfast stop on Highway 99 from Southern California toward Fresno and Yosemite.

Gonzalo Ramirez has been cooking barbacoa as long as he can remember, first with his grandfather in Atotonilco El Grande, Hidalgo, and today in Arleta, where his son Erik Ramirez is learning the trade. Ramirez’s method includes raising the lambs, butchering them, loading the lamb cuts into the pit, placing pots for the consomé under them, and making the pancita in the pre-Hispanic tradition. The lamb is pink, supple, and perfect in a tortilla with just a little salt. The consomé is a beautiful expression of smoke, adobo, and the essence of the pit, rich with lamb oils. Grab a blood sausage taco, enhanced by green herbs, and slices of chile jalapeno to accompany a memorable breakfast from a true barbacoa artist.

Taquero Ian Leyva’s beef barbacoa stand has put northern Mexican pit-roasting on the LA map, in a city that’s more familiar with central and southern lamb and goat barbacoa. Like his contemporaries in Chihuahua, Leyva slowly simmers beef cheeks and tongue in a large pot on a stove top, until the meat melts and fuses together in juicy clumps to spoon onto tacos, lonches (tortas), and into thin burritos. The buttery-rich must-have consomé is the star of the show.  

From a backyard in Baldwin Park, veteran Petra Zavaleta offers one of the most unique barbacoa styles in LA from her hometown of Tepeaca, Puebla. In addition to tender, flavorful lamb, and barbecued lamb skulls with eyes, tongue, and cheeks attached for making tacos with warming lamb consomé, Zavaleta serves a rich, iron-flavored lamb menudo called mole de panza enchilada that you can only find here.

From his camper taqueria mounted on his pickup truck in East LA, barbacoyero Javier Ramirez serves delicious goat barbacoa, simply salted and roasted in a pit, with a flavorful consomé to complete his pithy menu. The rich consomé stock is cooked with goat bones that leech their marrow into the dish, with some adobo for color, pungent epazote, and garbanzos. Together it all represents Tlacotepec, Puebla, a little-known style of barbacoa from this southern Mexican state.

Tucked into a print shop parking lot, cloaked behind a canvas banner proudly displaying the Mexican silversmith capital of Taxco, Guerrero, Julio Jaimes prepares excellent lamb barbacoa, pancita, and goat birria with fresh tortillas made to order. One of the deepest skills of the barbacoa master is pancita, the offal-stuffed stomach of pit-roasted lamb, which requires meticulous cleaning before being covered in a scarlet plaster of chiles and spices. Julio gets this right — a balance of forbidden flavors of lung, heart, kidney, chitterlings, and liver with a rich chile guajillo that’s both subtle and alarming.

It took a feat of engineering to produce legal and traditional barbacoa inside of a U.S. restaurant. Former engineer and barbacoa master Paco Perez has done just that with his own oven design to simulate the conditions in an underground pit. Pit-roasted tender lamb cuts, pancita, and lamb skulls are served with corn tortillas, papalo (wild greens), and green and red salsas for making tacos, just like back in Texcoco at this large restaurant in Commerce.