Taps & Tacos: Smart & Tasty

Taps & Tacos: Smart & Tasty

Like many Port Moody locals, we at Port Foody were excited to see, after a long wait, Taps & Tacos finally open, adding another local, independent eating option. We dropped by early Friday night and we were pleasantly surprised to be seated right away.  We just made it; a queue formed not long after our drinks arrived.

The restaurant occupies a distinctively round architectural footprint. The atmosphere inside is cool, clean and befitting Port Moody’s more urbane sensibilities with a good portion of the interior walls and ceiling left raw concrete. From our perch on the mezzanine, we could survey the main floor and the view to the northern and eastern mountains and Burrard Inlet. A spectacular setting with the generous windows adding to the lightness and brightness of the space and showing our server’s fantastic new tattoo to great effect.

Taps & Tacos is truly a locally-focused food enterprise with one of the three owners living in Port Moody and with Chef Jeffrey Fagan hailing from Port Coquitlam and Sous Chef Ty Beausoleil coming from further to the east in Maple Ridge. The local ingredients feature pork from Abbotsford’s Gelderman Farms, chicken sourced through Meat Craft Urban Butcher and a rotating selection of local craft beer from Port Moody’s Brewer’s Row and others within the local Lower Mainland craft brewing community. It’s not hard to imagine with so much great local beer that the taps will thankfully be rotating with some regularity.

Taps & Tacos has created a small, focused food menu. While we did not find a special or featured taco for the evening, Taps & Tacos assured us of Chef Fagan’s intent on experimenting and developing new tastes with ideas to possibly introduce rotating seasonal tacos or other special offerings in the future. And, given the addition of new tastes along with rotating local taps, we would support the introduction of suggested beer and other beverage pairings in future iterations of the menu. On the subject of beverages, with six beer taps,  six bottled and canned beer options, six tantalizing cocktails and eight wines, there are many tasty pairing options to explore.

Our meal started with a couple of local beers accompanied by a plate of tortilla chips and a selection of fresh salsas: mild pico de gallo, black bean and corn and salsa verde. The black bean and corn salsa was a huge hit followed closely by the salsa verde. One of our Port Foody family is a longstanding vegetarian and loves spicy food (the other is not and enjoys more mild flavours). It is always refreshing to see creative and unique vegetarian fare especially those that eschew simply using cheese as a meat substitute. Taps & Tacos has two vegetarian options that are deliciously vegan: the very spicy Jackfruit taco and the Cajun Tofu taco. The other half of Port Foody was pleased to sample the Yucatan Chicken (featuring Happy Valley Chicken) and Korean Pork (with the pork from aforementioned Gelderman Farms). We missed the fine print and had our tacos served up in flour tortillas and on our next visit, we will be sure to take in the corn tortilla option.

After a long period of anticipation, Taps & Tacos is here and in a few short weeks already well on its way to being a Port Moody staple and a colourful addition to the city’s burgeoning food scene. With its late night hours throughout the week, it provides a brilliant addition to Port Moody’s nightlife and will no doubt also provide an excellent service to the city’s artists and creatives.