Quintanar spent years working other people's kitchens and other people's trucks before he decided that the next vehicle he cooked out of would have his name attached to it in some meaningful way. The process of actually getting there — permits, commissary arrangements, the particular bureaucratic texture of operating a mobile food unit in San Francisco — took longer than the cooking part ever did. He will tell you this without bitterness, more as a point of information about how the thing works.

The truck settles into its spot with the kind of regularity that turns a location into a landmark. Regulars know the schedule; newcomers figure it out after one good taco. The al pastor, by multiple accounts from people waiting in line on a recent weekday, is the reason they came back the second time. The tortillas are made to order, which is the kind of detail that sounds like marketing until you're standing there watching it happen.

What Quintanar has built is modest in footprint and specific in ambition — a single truck, a fixed repertoire, a customer base assembled one order at a time. He is not trying to scale it into a fleet. He is trying to make the thing he is currently making as well as he can make it, which is a different project entirely and one the neighborhood seems willing to show up for.

Tomorrow, if you walk past his spot during service hours, you'll see the window open, a short line, and a man at work inside a truck that belongs to him.