This taco joint nails the one per centers, but you’ll have to wait your turn in a grungy alley

I’m perched on a stool, elbows resting on dusky-pink tiles, taking in one of Melbourne’s most beautiful restaurants. It’s not a flawless stunner; more like a model with a gap-toothed smile. Bare mortar crawls up the brick walls in a windowless room, the kitchen and potwash are in full view, and tables are constructed out of old Coca-Cola crates.

Candles flicker (the main source of light) and at regular intervals sit clusters of flowers in reds, creams and more dusty pinks. It feels like being in a church. The object of our worship? The tortilla. It’s used not just for tacos, but mulitas, gringas, taquitos and vampiros, part of the enormous category dubbed “Mexican food” that we see only a fraction of in Australia.

Taqueria Sin Nombre’s owners Katherine Simkins, Paul Walcutt and chef Isaac Castellano also run Dingo Ate My Taco, a food truck that’s now joined by an Abbotsford restaurant that spotlights the “Texican” border food Walcutt grew up eating.

This spot, which opened last September, is their homage to Mexico’s taquerias: fast, casual, affordable eateries often serving regional street-food specialties. Mulitas and taquitos are part of a bracket of snacky things, although really the whole menu is a collection of antojitos: items you’ll eat in a few bites, most probably with your hands.

Two round blue corn tortillas make up the “sandwich” that is the mulita, cradling a rubble of flame-coloured chorizo and white Oaxacan cheese that stretches into extravagantly long strands. Phones may be whipped out to capture cheese pull content.

The vampiro, a Sinaloan dish, dares you to take it on. Two crunchy tortillas precariously bookend pork, onion, pineapple, avocado salsa and cheese. It will end in a mess. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Prawns zarandeados is a beachy favourite in Mexico, served with the same abandon here. Use your fingers to tear sweet and lime-splashed prawn meat from smoky shells, then dip it in chilli butter.

I’m not sure if it’s the under-the-radar dishes, the mysterious identity (“taqueria without a name”), or the even more cloak-and-dagger location, but this restaurant has become a darling of the internet.

Hidden in a laneway off a laneway in the CBD’s Chinatown, Taqueria is easiest to find by looking for the queue, which starts about an hour before opening time. Staff periodically come out to chat to new arrivals and get their party size, and every 90 minutes or so, they offer snacks. On one rainy evening, they handed out umbrellas.

Inside, things run the way I imagine Taylor Swift’s tour does: efficient and calm, everyone playing their role. There are ample staff to explain dishes and mix cocktails. They might point you toward the salsa station, where you load up on lime and four kinds of salsa – mild to assertive. The bar is the best spot to appreciate the theatre of a restaurant that’s in full swing, every part humming, each moment thrilling.

In AFL, small yet significant actions that can change the result are known as “one per centers”. Taqueria Sin Nombre is built entirely from these.

Four kinds of tortilla spanning flour and corn are laboriously made in-house every day. For the tomatillo salsa, a key condiment in Mexico, the restaurant buys an astonishing two tonnes of the tart green fruit in summer, then peels and freezes them to use almost year-round. The centrepiece of the kitchen, the vertical spit known as a trompo, can take an hour to load up with thinly sliced pork brushed in a chilli-pineapple marinade. The straight-outta-Coyoacan shirts the staff wear, inspired by a classic taqueria uniform, were designed by a Mexican-Australian couple who run Texan design firm Saucehaus.

Tacos rotate often and can lead you down the road of excess – the brisket costra lays butter-soft smoked meat on scorched cheese – or to the crunchy salvation of fried fish with shredded cabbage. A good in between is the al pastor, one of the best I’ve had in Australia, with hot, fatty, crisped-up pork and the pucker of pickled pineapple. The kanga asada, a ’roo taco treated like asada beef, might be a new Oz-Mex delicacy.

A separate vegetarian menu exists; just ask! Squeeze lime on everything and leave happy.

Yes, lining up for food seems silly, especially in a part of the city that’s dense with dumplings, Thai noodles, Sichuan hot pot, Korean barbecue and more. But our Mexican restaurant options are far behind those cuisines, and the yawning gap in anything beyond standard-issue tacos, quesadillas and burritos has only recently started to fill.

This room – with its sense of drama, the clarity of these salsas, the made-that-day tortillas – literally cannot be found elsewhere in Melbourne.

Until that changes, you’ll find me in a grungy alley surrounded by the dumpster bins, HVAC units and kitchen exhausts of Chinatown. And at the other end of the line, I’ll reach the rare breed of restaurant that is both viral and vital.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.