Beef Hit a Record High. Silver Lake's $7.49 Asada Taco Didn't Budge.

Ground beef averaged $6.92 a pound in August, nearly double its price a decade earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The asada taco at Tacos Royale, the mesquite-fired stand at Sunset Boulevard and Rampart, costs $7.49. That's the price on the stand's online menu Thursday, and it's the price LAist reported back in July, a few weeks after the stand opened.

Since then, the meat under every taco in town has gotten more expensive. On Wednesday, L.A. TACO reported on how taqueros are handling record beef prices, talking with the owners of Sonoratown, Tacos Royale and Luis' Butcher Shop. The number I keep coming back to is the one that didn't move.

Ground beef averaged $6.92 a pound in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, higher than any month in the bureau's figures going back to 2016. The bureau's table puts that August 2016 price at $3.66. Its September average slipped to $6.79, which the bureau's numbers show is still close to 50 cents more than a year earlier.

L.A. TACO lays much of it on the drought. Dry pastures drove up what ranchers pay for hay and feed, so they sold cows they'd usually keep for breeding, and the national herd is now the smallest it's been in 75 years. Scientists expect drought in cattle country to come more often and hit harder, and herds can't rebuild that quickly.

Tacos Royale started out with a pricier shopping list than most. Founder Saúl Pérez García told LAist in July that his USDA Prime steak costs about three times what a typical taqueria pays for beef. He also said each of his beef-tallow flour tortillas costs him about 60 cents, compared with roughly a nickel for an ordinary one. As he laid it out to LAist, the whole idea was a steakhouse dinner squeezed into a taco that runs about $7.

Record beef hasn't shrunk the schedule, either. In July the stand grilled Thursday through Sunday, 6 p.m. to midnight, LAist reported. Its November hours now start at 1 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and at 11 a.m. on weekends, with a promise on the site of "more time at the grill."

The price was always the risk. By LAist's math, a single Royale taco already cost more than a whole In-N-Out Double-Double, which goes for about $6. Now beef has set a record and the taco costs exactly what it did in July. Pérez had his answer ready back then, and he put it to LAist as a question: "How much are you spending at In-N-Out for a combo?"

Source: lataco.com, retrieved November 5, 2026. Other sources: the Tacos Royale website, LAist, data.bls.gov.