This Family Takes Taco Tuesday Very Seriously — Every Week for Almost Six Years

When Scott Warnick and his wife divorced in 2019, he got custody of his daughters every other weekend and on Tuesdays. Weekends were easy to plan, with outdoor activities and festivals and events (he took the girls to celebrate Juneteenth mid-month). But he wanted to come up with a cool — and replicable — dad/daughters experience every Tuesday, and the phrase "Taco Tuesdays" from that old Taco John commercial bounced around his head like a corny earworm song he couldn't shake.

And so for over 300 weeks  — that's five years, almost six — Warnick and his daughters, Scarlett and Alice, have gone out for tacos every Tuesday. That's five years of Taco Tuesdays. They've kept track of their favorites and taken photos of themselves at every restaurant. Warnick is 45 now; Scarlett is nine and Alice is seven.

They go to restaurants for tacos, as well as food trucks that people have recommended. During the COVID pandemic when restaurants were closed to indoor dining, they researched which places were open for takeout and picked up their tacos to eat at home. They don't go to Taco John's despite the marketing campaign that started the country's Taco Tuesday obsession, and they avoid Taco Bell and other national chains as well.

Although he prefers supporting local, mom-and-pop Mexican eateries. Warnick says he isn't being snooty when he skips the chains. "When people ask me, 'Why isn't Taco Bell on your list?' My response is, 'Someday there's gonna be a blizzard or whatever on a Tuesday, and we're gonna need a place that doesn't close.' I can't burn it on a regular week ... it has to be in my back pocket."

In the beginning, Warnick says, "We stayed close to my condo in Cherry Creek, and then it's sort of now expanded to everywhere in the Denver metro area. The girls have not only seen the highest grade, like La Loma downtown across from the Brown Palace, with $20-plus tacos, to an industrial park where we find a food truck and go get tacos there. So we've done it all."

Since their first taco night out at Que Bueno Suerte! on South Pearl Street, they've eaten tacos from 306 more spots, and they still have 95 places to try on their list. There have been no repeats, and though they have had tacos on Tuesdays in the mountains when they're away from Denver, their meals have mostly been in the metro area. This summer, they're planning to improvise a Taco Tuesday during a trip to London (their expectations for quality aren't exactly high).

They'll celebrate their sixth anniversary Taco Tuesday on July 29 at Chubby Unicorn Cantina.

When they started, Alice was pretty young for tacos, especially spicy ones. "Alice was two when we started, and clearly she wasn't gonna eat hot salsas and, you know, anything wild," he recalls.

Scarlett was four when she had her first tacos. "I remember, like, where we went and what it tasted like," she says.

Alice doesn't remember that, "but my dad showed me a picture of me being mad at him for no reason," she says of that first meal. Her dad asserts that the girls were "tired and hungry and took it out on me."

The pictures are part of the experience. "We take the same picture every place," Warnick says. "I have about 300 pictures of us, not in the exact same clothes, but very similar, just the three of us at each of these restaurants."

Now that the girls are older, there's a little more leeway in the ordering. "Any salsas that come out, all of us have to dip a chip in and try it," Warnick says. "I have to normally be the icebreaker. 'Out of one to ten, how much is this gonna hurt?' The girls are good now they at least try one chip before we eat."


Whenever the three are out and about, they're on the lookout for more tacos to try. "So the way it works, any time we drive by taco places — like, there's a new one we haven't been to — I put it on a spreadsheet. You know, I'm very detail- oriented," he says.

Every week, they also add more memories. At a Fuzzy Taco Shop just a couple of months into the project, Alice stood up on a bench and almost fell, and Warnick split his shorts when he lunged to catch her. They still laugh about that night. "She was probably two-and-a-half when Fuzzy's happened, and they loved the churro cookies and cream," he says of the dessert that mollified the girls after the near-disaster.

During another incident they can laugh at now, "at El Coco Pirata, Alice ate off my plate, and I had ordered way too spicy a taco, so the kitchen staff heard what happened and came running out with milk and a Fudgsicle for her," he says. "We've had a couple moments like that. Years later, we still laugh about them."

On the drive home after each meal, the three discuss their experience and come up with a score. "When we leave some places, to be fair, you never know what you're going to get," Warnick notes. "It's tough to say, 'Oh, this is the best taco in Denver or the worst taco,' because we might have gone on a Tuesday when the chef took the night off. So we sort of coached ourselves into you can't judge them, but at the same time, we know the food was great, or there's a couple that the girls have marked down with an asterisk because they liked the fried ice cream dessert or a memory stood out."

The discussion can get serious. "No matter how it is when we're in the restaurant, it's always a thumbs up. We're good," he adds. "But when we get in the car, we talk about it. We've been to some places where it was too hot, too spicy or, you know, that it was too chewy, or whatnot. We sort of break it down. But mostly the girls share the same thoughts. You know, it's very rare where one of us says, 'Hey, that was the best I've ever had, and the other says no. We're able to talk to sort of dissect and dive into it on the way home."

Warnick and his daughters are disciplined and organized about their ongoing project. He's a project manager for a finance firm, and his way with data and spreadsheets shows off his organizational skills. The three are planning to expand their private obsession to the public sphere by launching an Instagram page for a larger category of Dad/Daughters Adventures, and have created an email address where people can suggest things they can do together ([email protected]). And, of course, Warnick has an email for people to offer more Taco Tuesday destinations ([email protected]).

The three will have an empire of content — not to mention a ton of food to consume for that content — before the girls get to college. They're not about to stop now.
"The girls and I've had to talk about it," he admits. "It's like sometimes everyone's tired or we get out of dance practice or whatever, and we have to power through it. The conversation came up, what are we going to do next? And right now, the latest decision we had is, we would start at the top again. I really try not to be the autocrat here and take the fun out of it. I think we all sort of have fun keeping the streak alive. And also, it is daddy-daughter time."

But Scarlett has a suggestion that might take the family through the next few years: "How about Sushi Saturday?"

The top tacos as ranked by Scott, Scarlett and Alice Warnick: Tacos Selene, Kike's Red, Que Bueno Suerte, La Calle, Los Vaqueros, Garabaldi, Khalos, Adelitas, Federales, Palenque and Chakras,