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FOOD AND DRINK

France’s national fast food: What exactly are ‘French tacos’?

If you're from the north American continent, you are probably familiar with the (traditionally Mexican) taco - but in France you will meet 'French tacos', a different beast entirely.

France's national fast food: What exactly are 'French tacos'?
People have lunch at a fast-food restaurant on October 23, 2014 in Villeneuve d'Ascq, northern France. (Photo by PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP)

If you walk the streets of any French city or large town, you will likely stumble upon a fast-food restaurant called O’Tacos. But if you are expecting to be able to order a delicious Mexican al pastor taco with salsa verde, you will find yourself sorely disappointed.

As staff writer for the New Yorker, Lauren Collins wrote in 2021, “French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers”. In fact, one Mexican chef in Paris told Collins that she once had a customer “throw his order in the trash, saying it wasn’t a taco”.

French tacos (always spelled in the plural sense) are a popular and distinct fast food in France, often decried by health experts as highly caloric – an average French tacos clocks in at about 1,348 calories, and an XXL can run up to 2,300, above the recommended daily total caloric intake for an adult woman.

What many imagine when thinking of a taco is the traditional Mexican food, eaten by hand, which consists of a small corn or wheat tortilla filled with meat, beans and/or vegetables, topped with condiments like salsa or guacamole.

In contrast, the French taco is a flour tortilla filled with meat, sauce, and French fries, folded together and grilled to build a panini-burrito-kebab mélange. You can add plenty of other ingredients inside too – from cheese to turkey bacon. Most French tacos are halal-certified to accommodate Muslim customers – so do not contain pork.

The biggest chain is the strangely named O’Tacos – France is home to 300 O’Tacos restaurants – an amount that has doubled in the last five years, as French tacos continue to pick up popularity among the youth.

And you are not limited to O’Tacos for your French taco needs – plenty of smaller fast-food shops and chains across the country, particularly those selling kebabs and those that remain open late into the night – offer French tacos too.

The origins of French tacos

There are various claims regarding the origins of French tacos – or whether there is a single inventor of the fast food at all – but many point to the diverse suburbs of France’s gastronomy capital, Lyon. 

In a documentary by Bastien Gens, titled ‘Tacos Origins’, claimed that French fast food was created toward the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s in Lyon suburbs of Villeurbanne and Vaulx-en-Velin. 

According to Collins, the “earliest innovators of the French tacos were probably snack proprietors of North African descent in the Lyonnais suburbs.

However, some claim that the concept originated in Grenoble first, which is also the site of the first O’Tacos restaurant, opened in 2007 by a former construction worker, Patrick Pelonero, who told Collins he had never visited Mexico but simply enjoyed eating French tacos on his lunch breaks.

Tacos’ popularity 

One thing is certain – French tacos, typically priced around €5.50 are distinctly French.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Loïc Bienassis, a member of the European Institute of Food History and Cultures, said that: “For decades, France has been an inherently urban, industrial, and culturally diverse country. The French taco is a mutant product of this country. It is its own national junk food.”

In the past few years, French tacos’ popularity has spread beyond the l’Hexagone – to Morocco, Belgium and even the United States.

The sandwich has become so trendy in France that some even refer to traditional Mexican tacos as a “taco mexicain” to differentiate between the two.

In 2021, over 80 million French tacos were consumed in France, making it more popular than the hamburger and the kebab.

In the same year, French youth also took to social media, joining in an O’Tacos challenge #Gigatacos. The goal was to consume a giant French tacos, weighing in at 2kg. Anyone who succeeded would be automatically refunded. Videos of the challenge coursed through French social media networks, with several million views.

While France is known for its classic cuisine, which relies heavily on fresh ingredients, the country also has a history of loving fast food, so it may come as little surprise that it would invent its own highly caloric dish.

As of 2019, France was home to the second biggest market for McDonald’s per head of population after the United States. 

READ MORE: Krispy Kreme, Popeyes, Five Guys: the American fast-food chains taking on France

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FOOD AND DRINK

Could your French baguette taste a little different in future?

The baguette is an enduring feature of life in France, where some 320 baguettes are consumed every single second. New rules mean they might taste slightly different in future but at least they will be healthier.

Could your French baguette taste a little different in future?

Breakfast, lunch or dinner… there is never a bad time to eat a baguette in France. 

And the good news is: they are about to become healthier. From October 1st, new regulations mean that baguettes sold in bakeries should contain no more than 1.4g of salt per 100g, down from the current legal limit of 1.5g of salt per 100g.

The salt content in French baguettes sold in bakeries has already plummeted by 20 percent since 2015. 

The new rules form part of a wider government strategy to reduce salt consumption in France by 30 percent by 2025. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged all countries to follow the same target in a bid to reduce health problems such as hypertension. 

WHO guidelines say that adults should not consume more than 5g of salt per day, but the average French adult consumes between 7-8g. 

France’s National Confederation of Bakers is on board with the incoming regulations and acknowledges that bread contributes to about 20% of the average French person’s salt intake. 

Will this change the taste of baguettes? 

The salt content change is only very marginal – 0.1g per 100g – so it is unlikely to have a significant impact on the taste of baguettes.

The National Confederation of Bakers has said that the new rules will impose a “real challenge” to bakers who will now have to adjust other elements of their recipe to make a like-for-like product. “There are alternative solutions such as live sourdough, extra yeast or yeast extracts that can be used to compensate for the reduced salt content,” it said.  

It said that slightly adjusting the temperature at which the baguettes are baked could also go some way to compensating for this loss.

Other bread products also affected

It is not just traditional baguettes that will be affected by the new regulations. 

So-called pains spéciaux will also see a new salt threshold imposed of 1.3g per 100g. 

Pains spéciaux are breads that either use grains and flour distinct from those used to make traditional baguettes or plain white bread.

Examples include le pain de campagne (which uses regular wheat alongside rye sourdough), les pains au levain (sourdough breads), le pain complet (wholemeal bread), les pains aux céréales (which use multiple varieties of wheat) and les pains aux grains (which are generally covered in things like sesame or pumpkin seeds). 

The National Confederation of Bakers has said that various analyses and tests would be performed using samples taken from bakeries all over France, to ensure that salt limits for both pains spéciaux and pains traditionnels were being respected. 

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