His love of tacos and Fresno sparked a food-truck scene. And a thriving business

It’s Tuesday afternoon, less than a week out from the Taco Truck Throwdown and Mike Osegueda is making his rounds.

He’s out on Cherry Avenue in south Fresno, where Tacos La Vaporera is set up behind a shade tent and picnic tables on the dirt shoulder off the road. He’s surprising the owners with a camera and microphone and an Ed McMahon-sized invitation to the competition.

It’s part of a social media blitz building up to Saturday’s competition at Chukchansi Park in downtown Fresno.

Fairly quickly, someone shouts out from a waiting car:

“Why don’t you give them the trophy right now?!”

Such is the reach of the Taco Truck Throwdown.

One could do worse on picking a winner of the annual foodie contest. Sure, Tacos La Vaporera (the name is a reference to its signature steamed meat) is one of two dozen trucks competing this year. But it also won the People’s Choice Award three times since it started competing in the throwdown in 2019. It was back to back to back.

“I look at it like a sport,” Osegueda, 46, says of the throwdown, which he co-founded 14 years. He still does the heavy lift of organizing, too.

It’s why he’s out here, getting social media visuals and soundbites. It all helps build the drama.

“I know it’s not the Olympics,” he says. “But it’s kind of the Olympics.”

14 years of Taco Truck Throwdown

In its earliest form, the throwdown was just another in a string of triple-A promotions. It was a rather small gathering of trucks, the waiting customers zig-zagged in lines around the back concourse at Chukchansi Park, home of the Fresno Grizzlies minor-league baseball team.

The trucks represented the best not just from Fresno, but from across the central San Joaquin Valley as curated by Osegueda and co-founder Sam Hansen — guys who took the work seriously.

As Hansen tells it (in this recent podcast, for example), the idea was sparked by a story Osegueda did as a writer for The Fresno Bee, where he mapped out and visited trucks as a kind of Fresno County Taco Trail. And also the fact that Fresno invented the taco truck. That’s Hansen’s assertion, which he says is backed up by plenty of evidence. It’s also a slogan he put on T-shirts for the event.

As the throwdown has grown in size and popularity, it’s became an ode to, and celebration of, Fresno’s taco truck culture.

For awhile, tacos became core to the Grizzlies’ identity and the very aesthetic of the team. There was a whole line of taco-themed merchandise (hats and shirt that are still sought after to this day). The team went as far as buying the taco emoji, just to prove Fresno as the taco capital.

Eventually, the throwdown separated itself from the baseball game, if not from the Grizzlies.

The team still co-promotes and co-produces the Taco Truck Throwdown as a signature event. But it’s moved from the concourse to the field and now takes over the whole stadium as a large-scale food festival/concert extravaganza.

Over the years, it has featured headline musical performers like Ramón Ayala and Cypress Hill, and collaborations with organizations like Major League Eating. This year, the competition includes a pair of bonus-throwdowns (between the area’s best Michelada and salsa makers), plus Lucha Xtreme wrestling, a taco-themed art show and a headlining concert that could stand on its own as a major ticket draw.

The lineup includes E-40, The S.O.S. Band, Baby Bash and Connie.

A Bay Area transplant falls in love with Fresno, discovers tacos

The irony is Osegueda didn’t really like tacos before he came to Fresno in the early 2000s. He was a transplant from the Bay Area; first an intern at The Fresno Bee and then hired to cover music.

He really wanted to be sports writer, but he took the gig that was available and didn’t see Fresno as long term.

“I was fresh out of college and thought I’d be here for two to three years before moving on to my next job.”

But over the next decade, he built a name for himself as “Mike Oz,” an award-winning writer and darling at The Bee and stalwart among the community of creative peoples coalescing around downtown Fresno looking to create a pride and scene of place in the city.

He helped create the pop culture blog The Fresno Beehive, hosted a weekly radio show on NewRock 104.1 and was instrumental in putting together any number of local events, including the throwdown, but also the FresYes Fest (which started, in part, as an anniversary for his radio show) and a series of Tweet-Ups (back when the social media platform served to bring communities together).

It was after one of these Tweet-Ups that Hansen pitched the idea of taking The Bee article and turning it into an event.

“I went out and started finding the trucks,” Osegueda says.

“He went out and got the OK from the Grizzlies.”

When Osegueda actually landed his dream job, covering major league baseball for Yahoo’s Big League Stew, he could have moved anywhere he wanted. By then his wife Tanya Osegueda, had started her own PR firm. The couple had a pair of young boys and also a love for Fresno and the community.

“We chose to keep our family here,” he says.

It’s been a positive for the area’s taco and food-truck scene.

“He’s a quiet, instrumental catalyst,” is how Justin Torrez describes it.

Torrez is a long-time friend and development director at Fresno Street Eats, the booking and marketing company Osegueda started to help local food trucks in 2019. A lot of people like to talk about things like community building and engagement, Torrez says.

You don’t necessarily get that from Osegueda, but only “because he’s out actually doing it.”

What is Fresno Street Eats?

Fresno Street Eats is a direct offshoot of the Taco Truck Throwdown: A way to showcase the emerging scene of food trucks that didn’t fit into the competition because they didn’t do tacos. It started as a series of once-a-month themed events that were less about competition and more about inspiration.

The first, was all about bacon, which was riding a national trend at the time.

The latest, which happened Friday at Tioga Sequoia Beer Garden, was noodle-themed; as in cup noodle ramen, but also Thai, fusion and other takes on the ingredient.

“It was really important,” Osegueda says, “just to give opportunities to other people.”

For awhile, Street Eats was Osegueda’s side gig.

It was good way for him to get out of the house, especially following the pandemic, when everybody was working for home. But it became much more.

When he was laid off from Yahoo Sports in 2021, Osegueda took the side hustle full-time. The story of his transformation from a well known blogger-journalist to small-business entrepreneur (who was also dealing with the tragic death of his sister) earned Osegueda a feature in The Athletic in 2022.

These days, Fresno Street Eats bills itself as the Central Valley’s food truck destination.

It still does its signature events, including the Taco Truck Throwdown, FresYes and others, but the daily work is connecting food trucks with spaces that need them.

It plays the logistical middle man to some 150 vendors.

It may have 75 food trucks out and around town on any given day.

On any give week, Street Eats’ staff of 10 employees and contractors facilitates 50 different events at places like Fresno City College (which hosts trucks four days week) and River Park Shopping Center and the area’s various hospital facilities. In 2021, it became an exclusive partner with Fresno State Athletics to provide trucks for the football game tailgate parties.

The anti-gate keeper

While the work has changed, Osegueda’s drive to spotlight the best parts of Fresno remains true.

“This is a way the journalist in me lives still,” he says. “We’re still trying to tell stories in different way.”

That’s Tacos La Vaporera and its owners Sarah and Diego Alvarado, but also last year’s Taco Truck Throwdown winner Tacos Don Chicho, which can be found set in an empty field on Belmont Avenue.

They’re a whole lot busier than they used to be, Osegueda says.

There’s a generation of Fresnans, who have historically sought validation from outside the city, Osegueda says. These are the people who judge a place or event based on how “unlike” Fresno it seems.

Osegueda has always worked against that mentality, with the Taco Truck Throwdown and Street Eats, and during his time at The Bee. “It’s recognizing and highlighting the things that Fresno does well,” he says, “and then saying, ‘How can I get more people to enjoy this?’”

“I want to be the anti-gate keeper.”