Why Blue Plate Taco matters.
Blue Plate Taco is a breezy Baja-inspired restaurant where Downtown Santa Monica's oceanfront energy meets Jenny Rush's locally sourced cooking, house-made tortilla tradition and seafood-centered interpretation of Mexico's Pacific coast.
Set along Ocean Avenue near Colorado Avenue and just steps from Palisades Park, the restaurant occupies Santa Monica's coastal edge between the bluff, Shore Hotel's glass frontage, the descending route toward the beach and downtown blocks extending inland toward Third Street Promenade. Designer Tim Clarke paired stainless steel and earthy finishes with ocean-blue accents, vintage French and Spanish floor tiles and a woven basket chandelier that draws the eye upward from the open dining room. Jamey Garza's saddle-leather chairs reinforce the natural textures as glass walls preserve broad sightlines toward the Pacific. A large street-facing patio extends the dining room toward Ocean Avenue, placing tacos, cocktails and group tables directly against the movement of the waterfront corridor. The result is a coastal restaurant whose open frontage, tactile furnishings and Pacific-facing patio translate its Baja inspiration into a physical setting inseparable from Santa Monica's shoreline.
What defines Blue Plate Taco.
Blue Plate Taco is best known for extending Jenny Rush's Santa Monica restaurant group into Baja-inspired Mexican cooking when it opened at Shore Hotel in September 2012. Rush had begun Blue Plate on Montana Avenue in 1999, creating the neighborhood restaurant that preceded Blue Plate Oysterette and supplied the name for her expanding group. Plans for the Ocean Avenue project emerged in 2011 under the working name Plato Azul before the concept became Blue Plate Taco. The restaurant became Rush's third Santa Monica project and the first restaurant operating on the Shore Hotel property. Its opening culinary premise drew from the fresh coastal cooking of Mexican seaside towns, with local sourcing, organic meats, house-made tortillas and chips, grilled seafood and an unusually broad salsa program shaping the original menu. Lobster truffle tacos became an early signature, combining lobster, Jack cheese, shredded lettuce, truffle oil and green onion inside a crisp corn shell. Kiowa Bryan, then associated with Eveleigh, developed the original cocktail program, extending the coastal concept through tequila and fruit-driven drinks. Tim Clarke directed the interior design, Garza Marfa supplied saddle-leather seating, and imported vintage tile brought patterned color beneath the otherwise spare combination of steel, glass and natural finishes. The restaurant has outlasted the original Blue Plate, which closed on Montana Avenue in 2017 after eighteen years, leaving Rush's Ocean Avenue projects as the surviving branches of the original Santa Monica restaurant family. Blue Plate Taco continues daily service with Baja fish tacos, margaritas, fresh seafood, brunch and agave spirits forming the core of its coastal Mexican program.
Contrast drives the taco cooking through hot proteins, cool vegetables, concentrated chile, fresh herbs and tortillas that bring those elements together within a compact format. Corn or flour tortillas supply a soft, pliable base whose mild grain character leaves room for grilled, braised or fried fillings to control the first impression. Steak gains browned intensity from direct heat, then tomatillo contributes tartness as raw onion and cilantro cut through the meat's richness. Braised carnitas develops the opposite texture through orange juice, Mexican lager and cola, liquids that soften pork and build sweetness before guajillo salsa returns chile depth to the finished taco. Red snapper exposes the role of cooking method particularly clearly since plancha cooking preserves a tender surface and Baja-style frying builds a crisp shell around the same fish. Mexican slaw, radish and chipotle aioli then layer crunch, freshness, smoke and fat that seafood foundation. Shrimp shifts the balance toward seeds and vegetables through pumpkin-seed pesto, cucumber, jicama, cabbage and cilantro crema, giving the shellfish a sequence of nuttiness, crispness and cooling dairy. Pickled onion and tomatillo perform recurring work across richer meats by supplying acidity that refreshes the palate before the tortilla returns grain and softness to the next mouthful. Salsa extends the same structure through chile, tomato and aromatics, letting heat and acidity rise or fall around proteins whose cooking method already determines their principal texture. Blue Plate Taco builds its tacos through this controlled layering of soft tortilla, concentrated protein, chile, acid, cool vegetables and creamy finishing elements, keeping each component distinct enough to register before the next one changes the bite.
How Blue Plate Taco fits.
Blue Plate Taco works as the meal anchor for an oceanfront route connecting Santa Monica's surviving nineteenth-century optical attraction, a Depression-era coastal hotel and the carousel building created during the city's early amusement-pier era.
Begin at Camera Obscura, whose optical device entered Santa Monica's seaside recreation culture in 1898 through Mayor Robert F. Jones, nephew of city founder John Percival Jones. The apparatus uses a revolving turret, mirror and view to project a moving exterior image onto a viewing surface inside a darkened chamber, adapting an optical principle with roots in antiquity to beachfront entertainment. Jones initially operated the attraction on the beach for ten cents per viewing before its later return to Santa Monica after a period at Westlake Park. Municipal ownership followed in 1910, and Weldon J. Fulton designed its permanent Palisades Park home in 1955. Continue to Georgian Hotel, designed by M. Eugene Durfee and completed in 1931 during a period when Santa Monica's beachfront hospitality culture still supported ambitious construction despite the Depression. Its Art Deco design and prominent Ocean Avenue position drew affluent clientele, with Hollywood figures among those associated with the hotel during its early decades. A concealed drinking room operated during Prohibition, tying the property to the private nightlife culture that flourished before repeal in 1933. The building subsequently became one of Ocean Avenue's most recognizable surviving examples of interwar hotel architecture. Conclude at Looff Hippodrome, completed in 1916 as part of amusement entrepreneur Charles I.D. Looff's Pleasure Pier beside Santa Monica's municipal pier. Looff began as a furniture carver before entering carousel construction during the 1870s and later building amusement operations across the United States. His Santa Monica structure mixed Moorish, Byzantine and Spanish references around an airy carousel hall whose towers and large openings advertised the attraction to people moving along the pier. The original Looff carousel eventually disappeared, and a Philadelphia Toboggan Company machine built in 1922 later took its place, bringing forty-four hand-carved wooden horses into the building. The progression moves from a nineteenth-century optical amusement through an Art Deco hotel shaped by Santa Monica's interwar resort culture and culminates inside the carousel hall that joined architecture, mechanical entertainment and the Pacific waterfront during the city's early pleasure-pier era.
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