The truck at 3546 Maybank Highway serves birria tacos made with beef that Josefa Figueroa starts braising at 5 a.m. in a Goose Creek commissary kitchen, about 30 miles north. The beef simmers for three hours before it is shredded and assembled into tacos.
A Post and Courier profile describes Tacos La Familia: sisters Yesica and Lizbeth Castrejon own the truck with their mother, Josefa Figueroa, and the paper has traced the business to the pandemic and the recipes to decades earlier, just outside Mexico City.
A Window With a Long Braise
The truck's reported menu is tacos, burritos, quesadillas and sopes, built on seven seasoned meats. Birria is the specialty the paper singled out. It has also listed hours of 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Those hours belong to that reporting, not to a fresh check of the service window.
The family tells its own version on its website. It calls the operation entirely family-owned, says it started with the 2020 pandemic, and says growing word of mouth turned the truck into a popular lunch stop on the island. The site also says locals consider it one of Charleston's best taco trucks. That is the family's boast, not a ranking anyone else has established.
More Than One Stop on Maybank
Maybank Highway is a corridor, not a single address. In a July 2024 taco guide, the Charleston City Paper sent readers south of downtown to James and Johns islands, especially along Maybank. It called La Fogata a Johns Island favorite for tacos, quesadillas, tortas and burritos.
The same guide looked north for comparison. In the seven years after a 2017 taco trek, it said, a solid number of trucks had set up along North Charleston's Rivers Avenue, Remount Road and Dorchester Road. On Johns Island, Maybank Highway is another corridor for tacos.
Johns Island's dining scene includes taco trucks, newer restaurants and a Southern café. Gallina Loca is at 3247 Maybank Highway.
Tomato Season, Then a Resident Community
Many of the seasonal workers who came to Johns Island for the tomato farms came from Mexico. The island has a Hispanic community.
The family behind Tacos La Familia moved from Mexico to Johns Island. The truck profile kept the useful distinction: the business is new by comparison, and the recipes are not. The family's recipes have a home at 3546 Maybank Highway, while birria preparation begins before sunrise in Goose Creek.
