Nati's Mexican Restaurant

Nati's Mexican Restaurant is a long-running Mexican restaurant on Bacon Street in Ocean Beach, San Diego, known for hard-shell ground beef tacos and crisp quesadillas in the old San Diego style.

Overview

Nati's sits a short walk from the Ocean Beach pier and has a patio that draws a beach-neighborhood crowd. When the San Diego Reader surveyed the city's tacos in 2015, the restaurant had been open for about 55 years, placing its start around 1960, and the paper presented it as a keeper of old-school San Diego Mexican cooking. It also noted that Nati's pours Mexican-style Coca-Cola from a fountain.

Menu

The Reader recommended the ground beef tacos in fried hard shells and the crisp quesadillas, dishes that predate the arrival of Tijuana-style carne asada and adobada stands in the city. The hard-shell taco, folded and fried and filled with seasoned picadillo, lettuce, cheese and tomato, was the dominant taco across Southern California in the mid-twentieth century, and restaurants such as Nati's continue to serve it in that form.

Reviews

See also

• Hard-shell taco

References

1. "Easily the best carnitas in San Diego". San Diego Reader. Retrieved 2026-10-10.