Always wearing a cowboy hat and good humor, the Mexican Juan Manuel De la Torre He supervises the chefs who are responsible for creating the iconic dishes that have given Guacamoles taqueria a prominent reputation in London.
The Financial Times, for example, has named it “the best place” to eat tacos in the British capital and, along with its growing fame, its creator has earned the name “Taco Manny.”
Open since 2024, Guacamoles taqueria serves classics of Mexican cuisine such as pastor, lengua, carnitas, and quesadillas. But De la Torre assures BBC Mundo that there is one that undoubtedly stands out.
“The best-selling taco is the birria, my wife’s secret recipe that uses 17 spices along with chiles,” he explains.
“Obviously I don’t give that recipe to anyone because if I don’t, my wife will kill me,” he jokes.
His wife, Gabriella, works alongside de la Torre at Guacamoles. But for the couple, His culinary success was not the product of a planned London dream.
De la Torre was forced to leave his native Veracruz when received threats from a cartel: If he didn’t pay a large amount of money monthly, they would kill his daughter and his wife.
“I asked for help and the same police told me: ‘If we do anything, they will kill us too,’” says De la Torre.
The threats against De la Torre illustrate what in Mexico they call “floor charge”a form of extortion by organized crime that forces businesses to pay in order to continue operating.
His family, dedicated to business, had already been the target of violence. Shortly before fleeing, a cousin of his was murdered.
“I had to run away,” remembers De la Torre.
For a month they took refuge in a cousin’s house in Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos. Given the lack of security guarantees, the De la Torre family contemplated moving to Japan, Australia and Canada. An advertisement on television influenced his final decision.
“I saw a news story that said that the United Kingdom is a country without weapons”share. “Then I told my wife: ‘Well, we’re running away from the guns, let’s go there.’”
“Why don’t we open a taqueria here?”
When applying for protection in the United Kingdom in 2022, De la Torre had to stay in a lodge for asylum seekers for one year and nine months. According to the country’s laws, while an application is being processed, the applicant is not allowed to work.
“The truth is, we do struggle a lot and since they don’t let you cook, they don’t let you work, well it is a hard blow and even more so for a restaurateur,” he confesses.
Above all, it caused him a lot of anxiety to think about what could happen if his application was not successful: “It was the hardest experience of my life”he says.
And he sadly shares: “With the stress and everything, we even lost a baby, my wife and I.”
De la Torre, a Catholic, says he managed to get ahead thanks to his church, which asked him to temporarily take over a Colombian restaurant to raise funds.
The popularity of his seasoning, based on that project, prompted him to want to continue cooking tacos.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we open a taqueria here?’” De la Torre says. “They lent me refrigerators, irons, tables and with £70 that my pastor gave me, we bought a little tortilla, a little meat and we started selling.”
“That same day that I was going to come to learn how to turn on the light, where the stove was, everything, my work permit arrived.”
Guacamoles
Since taqueria Guacamoles opened in Peckham Rye Lane Market, South London, De la Torre has used his restaurant as a channel through which to help other Latin Americans in the United Kingdom.
“All this was an opinion from God for me to be able to have this business and thus be able to help my Latin brothers on this side of the world, since all my employees, the vast majority are asylum residents like me,” says De la Torre with pride.
In fact, one of his employees, Gabriela Martínez, who had to leave Honduras due to personal problems, tells BBC Mundo that she met De la Torre when they were both staying at the same lodge, waiting for their asylum applications to be processed.
Another employee, Emerson Pineda, says that He has refugee status having left El Salvador due to gang violence that he and his family faced.
Although Latin Americans make up only a fraction of asylum seekers in the UK, numbers have been growing. According to government statistics, between 2024 and 2025 there were 1,113 asylum applications by citizens of Central American countries and Mexico.
With a Nochebuena beer (a classic Mexican drink) in hand, De la Torre shares that Guacamoles’ ambitions continue to grow.
“We have very big projects, like creating a chain of taquerias throughout Europe, and let’s hope that it can be done, because if it is achieved, We are going to be able to give a decent place to work for Latinos who are on the continent.“, he says with enthusiasm.
Despite the upheavals that his life took, De la Torre says that he is satisfied with what he has managed to build for himself and his family.
“My daughter is happy, for us it is happiness to see her happy,” he reflects. “At the end of the day we decided to flee to save her life.”
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