The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding, Peter Luna opened Peter’s Crunchy Red Tacos at an opportune moment. Region-specific Mexican food, already a given in, say, California, is starting to gain a good head of steam in New York. Birria, a stewy culinary staple of the central-west Mexican state of Jalisco, hasn’t been exactly difficult to find in New York for a long time; but according to Luna, good birria is a recent development.

The young restaurateur, whose vividly designed truck sits on Wyckoff Avenue less than a block from the Jefferson L Stop, isn’t shy in admitting why that is: Birrialandia.

Responsible in large part for New York’s current obsession with birria, Birrialandia is an absurdly popular food truck permanently ensconced on the corner of 78th and Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s been written about glowingly by Pete Wells of the New York Times, among other professional gourmands who normally pen odes to, or screeds against, Manhattan’s crystal palaces of fine-dining.