Every taco al pastor in Dallas traces back to a wave of immigration nobody puts on the menu. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, as the empire crumbled and conscription, violence, and economic collapse pushed people out of the region, waves of Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi families left the Middle East for the Americas. A significant number landed in Puebla, Mexico, by the early 20th century, and they brought a cooking method with them that had nothing to do with Mexican food at the time: shawarma, meat stacked on a vertical spit and shaved off in thin, charred strips as it turned.
What they built in Puebla wasn’t yet al pastor. It was tacos árabes, Arab tacos, and the name was literal rather than stylistic. The taquería most often credited as the origin point, Antigua Taquería La Oriental, opened in 1933 at a stall on Calle 16 de Septiembre in Puebla’s city center. Its founder, Yerbagues Tabe Mena, was an Iraqi immigrant who had arrived in Mexico a decade earlier fleeing the same regional collapse that pushed so many of his neighbors out of the former Ottoman territories.
Other families with roots in Lebanon and Syria dispute exactly who served the first version, and Puebla now has hundreds of taquerías built on the same idea, but the throughline is the same regardless of which family gets the credit: shawarma, reworked with local ingredients, wrapped in pan árabe, a Pueblan take on pita, a yeasted, comal-cooked flatbread thicker than a tortilla but thinner than traditional pita, sturdy enough to hold a real portion of meat without falling apart. The seasoning stayed simple by later standards, salt and a handful of spices, nothing like the marinade that would eventually define the dish’s more famous descendant.
The transformation into al pastor happened a generation later, as the technique migrated from Puebla to Mexico City through the 1950s and 60s, carried in part by the Mexican-born children of those original immigrant families. Lamb, uncommon and not particularly beloved in Mexican cooking, gave way to pork. Achiote paste went in for color and earthiness.
Citrus and a heavier spice blend replaced the simpler original seasoning, and at some point, a piece of pineapple made its way onto the spit, a detail so undocumented that even Alex Stupak, the chef behind Empellón, has called its origin one of the food world’s more delicious unsolved mysteries. Pan árabe gave way to the corn tortilla. The name itself changed too, al pastor, “shepherd style,” a nod to the pastoral tradition those Middle Eastern immigrant families were associated with back home.
None of that history makes it onto a menu board, and most people eating a taco al pastor in Dallas today have no idea they’re eating the third or fourth generation of a dish that started with Middle Eastern immigrants trying to recreate a taste of home in central Mexico. It’s one of the more direct throughlines in the food world: a wave of migration that reshaped an entire country’s most famous street food and then quietly disappeared from the story being told about it.
True tacos árabes, the pita-wrapped original, are genuinely hard to find in North Texas. Al pastor cooked the traditional way, carved straight off a trompo rather than marinated and finished in an oven, is its own kind of rarity here too, since health code requirements around finishing meat on a griddle make the classic vertical spit setup harder to run than it looks.
Two spots worth seeking out anyway: Taqueria Temo in Fort Worth, which started as a food truck in 2007 and has built a real following on genuine trompo-cooked al pastor across its three locations, and Fito’s Tacos de Trompo, an eleven-location chain with more than fifteen years in business, concentrated across the Dallas metro, that’s built its entire identity around the spit. Neither will hand you pan árabe instead of a tortilla, but both are carrying the technique that started with immigrant families trying to recreate shawarma a hundred years and a few thousand miles from home.
