I felt more than obliged to offer my take on tacos gobernador, since my travels in Baja are featured on “Pati’s Mexican Table” in my new season premiering in a few weeks (you can watch the trailer here). Yet, I saw the most renditions on the 800 mile drive throughout the entire Baja Peninsula. I had them as far away as Los Angeles and Miami. But, what I do know is, these tacos became so popular you no longer only find them at Los Arcos in Mazatlán. Now, I do not know if that story is entirely true. When the governor showed up to eat, he liked them so much he named them “ tacos gobernador.” So quite a few taco recipes were developed and tested.
The chef was given the quest not only try to match the governor’s wife’s tacos, which no one besides the governor had tried, but to beat them. That bit of information was passed on to the owners of Los Arcos in Mazatlán restaurant, before he headed there to visit. The story goes, governor shrimp tacos, or t acos gobernador de camarón, were created in the state of Sinaloa in the early 1990s to surprise governor Francisco Labastida Ochoa, after he told a few friends how much he loved his wife’s shrimp tacos.
