The tortilla, tacos and Toronto

Toronto's first taco wave began with a handful of small, Latin American-run taquerias: Rebozos on Rogers Road, Tacos El Asador at Bloor and Christie, Tierra Azteca at Bloor and Dufferin, and the makeshift, weekends-only kitchen at the back of Kensington Market's Perola Supermarket, where until 2010 a pair of enterprising women heaped majestically tasty cochinita pibil and tinga de pollo into steaming tortillas, and charged just $2.50 a piece.

The second wave began in 2011 with Parkdale's Grand Electric, and soon grew into a tsunami. Fairly or otherwise, it is often referred to as the city's "hipster taco" era, and to some extent we are living in that era still. It includes (the excellent) Seven Lives, Xola, Mad Mexican, el Caballito, the short-lived Agave y Aguacate and the Playa Cabana chain, as well as countless other contemporaries. It features cooking by Latinos and gabachos alike, and has taken hold not just at independent restaurants, but also at carpet-bagging megachains. (Shout-out to Cactus Club!) The primary attribute of Toronto tacos' second wave has been the re-situation of tortilla-wrapped meat, chilis and vegetables far outside their traditional realm; you can now get bourbon shots and bellinis – not to mention a Notorious B.I.G.-induced migraine – with your tacos al pastor.

But it's the third wave, so tiny as yet that it's better termed a ripple, that has me rooting for the taco's future in this city. Its standout characteristic is not the fillings or the environments in which the tacos are served or the drinks they come with, but the tortillas themselves, which we've been taking entirely for granted as it turns out.

The standard in this city, even at the bona fide Latino-Americano spots, has always been premade tortillas imported from the United States or, less frequently, fresh ones made from instant masa harina flour. At the third-wave spots, of which I know just three, the tortillas are made in-house, by hand, from 25-kilo sacks of dried whole corn kernels, through a process that can only be described as a labour of crazy love.

Last year, Daniel Roe, a 31-year-old chef who moved to Canada from Cuernavaca as a teenager, returned to Mexico to help a cousin open a couple of taco spots. Mr. Roe was between jobs at the time – he had recently finished a run at the Black Hoof – and while in Mexico, he soaked up as much taco knowledge as he could. Although eventually he had to come back to Toronto, he couldn't get fresh tortillas off his mind.

He learned how to use pickling lime to dissolve the tough outer hulls from maize kernels in the process called nixtamalization, and ordered a specialized mill from Mexico to turn those kernels into masa, the fresh tortilla dough. He spent the next six months locked in his apartment, he said, learning how to make tortillas from scratch.

Last November, he finally opened Campechano Taqueria on Adelaide Street West. It's a partnership between Mr. Roe, his girlfriend Raena Fisher and that cousin in Mexico, Javier Flores. The space is cheery, with white subway tiles behind the open kitchen and bright-painted murals on the walls, showing taquerias and elote y esquite vendors, clucking roosters, Coca-Cola bottles and Virgin of Guadalupe icons. The room is always busy (be warned: there are often lineups), but comfortable, and the music is generally quiet – or at very least unoppressive – by modern taco-house standards. The service, too, is sharp and friendly and the margaritas at Campechano are excellent. But it's Mr. Roe's tortillas that really stand out.

Campechano's tortillas are prodigiously moist and soft and they're gently charred in spots, and they don't crack or break or become waterlogged as with factory-made ones. Although their scent and flavour change subtly depending on the corn the chef uses – he's tried yellow, white and blue, from Mexico state and from Oaxaca – they all smell richly like toasted field corn. Those tortillas are anything but a forgettable, everyday taco wrapper. Trying one for the first time is a little like eating fresh-from-the-oven sourdough when all you've ever had was stale Dempster's sandwich bread.

The fillings, too, are pretty great. Mr. Roe's tinga de pollo is loose and saucy: chicken pieces stewed with the spicy smoked jalapenos called moritas, as well as tomatoes and onions. There's a brilliant, fatty bistek – that's sirloin cap seared to medium and chopped into chunks, with tomatillo and smoky morita chili salsa – and very good chorizo dressed with cubed potatoes.

The campechano – the restaurant's namesake – was my least favourite here; both times I tried it, its mix of chopped beef, crumbled chorizo and the deep-fried pork skin called chicharron tasted far too assertively of iodized salt.

But the camarones taco is a thing of beauty, largely because the shrimp are seared only just enough, so they're clean-tasting and tender still. (His sourcing of those shrimp is a little less beautiful; when asked, Mr. Roe had no idea about their country of origin. He can do better.)

And if I had to pick a favourite, it would be Mr. Roe's vegetarian rajas con crema: sweet corn and roasted poblano peppers stewed with cilantro and cream. It's at once rich and ethereally light, smoky, creamy, spicy and peppery-vegetal, and wrapped up in a little round of bliss.

Mr. Roe is the sort of chef who pushes himself, constantly; this becomes obvious when you talk with him. Making fresh masa for tortillas can't be learned in a few months or a few years – it takes a lifetime of experience, as he's the first to say. He's shut down the restaurant five times so far because his dough wasn't right, he said. Other days, he admits, his tortillas aren't entirely up to scratch.

And Mr. Roe said he laughs whenever he hears people refer to the state of the city's overheated taco scene as "peak taco." We haven't begun to reach peak quality, the chef said – a state that by definition requires top-quality fresh masa tortillas. "Nobody in this city has started making good tacos," he said, "Including us."

I missed Maizal Quesadilla Café ( maizal.ca), an understated spot at the edge of Liberty Village, when it first opened a few years ago amid the crush of Toronto taco mania. But I couldn't in good conscience write about fresh corn tortillas without checking it out, and so stopped in for a preliminary look this week. (Consider this an enthusiastic endorsement but not a full review.)

Maizal has been nixtamalizing and grinding its own corn since 2012 – it was the first, by a few years, of the third-wave spots. As at Campechano, Maizal's tortillas are moist, soft and beautifully flavourful. The best filling here – I thought it was extraordinary – was the chorizo, which the kitchen cooks down with lard, so the flavour is mesmerizingly porky and rough-edged. It comes shot through with melted Oaxaca cheese.

The third of the fresh tortilla spots, called Cafeteria, is part of restaurateur Dave Sidhu's Playa Cabana chain, which didn't give me a lot of hope. The last time I wrote about Mr. Sidhu's burgeoning Mexican-restaurant empire, the cooking was in many cases awful, and his sourcing claims – fresh, local, organic etc. – were transparently fiction. When Cafeteria opened earlier this year, he announced the kitchen would make its own masa tortillas in-house. Who says restaurant empires can't get better with a little age?

The cooking, from 28-year-old chef Lucas Perez, is up and down, but the downs – the dry rice and bland frijoles; the overbattered fish; the ridiculous peanut-butter cup of a dessert – aren't all that bad and the ups in many cases deliver delicious plates.

Cafeteria's carnitas in particular are superb by any standard, hugely flavourful and properly strewn with crunchy, deep-caramelized bits; the Mexican friends I went with one night were pleasantly surprised. The tortillas were excellent, though thicker than you might find in much of Mexico; the thinner they are, the harder they are to make.

There are extremely tasty cebollas de cambray – fresh, stem-on pearl onions – that come grilled to melting sweetness and sprinkled with salt and lime juice, as well as a thoroughly decent flaky empanada filled with huitlacoche, the prized black corn fungus. The house salsas, which include a tonsil-nukeing habanero version and a smoky, soulful burnt arbol chili, are also very good.

I do have a few misgivings about the place, the first being that it's part of the Playa Cabana chain. You will know this from the smiling but aggressively up-selling service and the bumbling floor staff's lack of food knowledge. (Also, guys, there's not a single place in Mexico where "especiales" is pronounced es-spesh-YALLS.) And unlike the much smaller Campechano and Maizal, Cafeteria doesn't appear to have a full-size masa mill, but uses a countertop peanut-butter grinder to process its corn – which leaves me wondering how, exactly, Cafeteria's kitchen is able to keep up.

All that said, I'd happily return time and again for Mr. Perez's standout dish: a sublimely gamey stew of goat shoulder, garlic, onion and three types of peppers (chipotle, arbol and guajillo chili) called birria. The meat, dyed fiery orange-red from those chilis, and pulled from the bone, comes piled in a soupy mess on a cheap-looking platter, with a few of those house tortillas. Both times I tried it, I couldn't stop eating. I happily stained not one but two shirts, with zero regrets.