La Taqueria, the Mission’s most famous taqueria, finds its future in doubt with controversial building sale

Customers at La Taqueria will soon spy a new sign tacked onto the front window: For Sale.

Miguel Jara, 77, and his immediate family have owned the San Francisco taqueria, as well as the building that houses the business, since 1972, and lines continue to spill from the doorway all through the day and evening. But now a court-ordered sale, mediated by a receiver, has Jara bidding on his own building — and threatening to move La Taqueria from its iconic spot if he loses out to another buyer.

The building at Mission and 25th streets, in fact, has been listed online since March. In June, Jara told The Chronicle that it was due to an inheritance dispute that had ended up in court. The troubles that San Francisco’s most famous taqueria faces is a reminder that many kinds of tensions threaten businesses that are assumed to have achieved permanence. Earlier this month, the Mission’s first panaderia, La Victoria, closed due to an intra-familial dispute, and last year Britex moved from its Union Square home of 65 years after the founder’s heirs collectively sold the building while one branch of the family continued to run the fabric store.

“When I opened the taco place, I had no credit, no checking account. My father helped me and put it in my father’s name and my mother’s name,” Jara said. His father, Heminio, died in 1990 and his mother, Clodoalda, in 2000.

Jara said he never took the time to transfer ownership of the building, and his mother didn’t leave a will. However, according to his lawyer Jim Quadra of Quadra Coll, Jara had paid the mortgage, property taxes and upkeep on the building since the 1970s.

Jara said that the sale was unrelated to the more than $500,000 in unpaid health care costs, lost wages and fines that La Taqueria has paid its workers during the past 12 months after four workers filed a series of complaints with the city and state.

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