Raúl and Lupe Martinez opened King Taco and served up soft corn tortillas like they remembered from home. The rest is—now officially—history, thanks to a vote from the Los Angeles City Council

The original King Taco location in the Los Angeles Cypress Park neighborhood is now a historic-cultural monument. Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

In the mid-1970s, Raúl and Lupe Martinez opened a casual, walk-up counter in Los Angeles’ Cypress Park neighborhood, where they served soft corn tortillas topped with meat, salsa, cilantro and onions—a novelty in the United States at a time when hard-shelled tacos reigned supreme. Their tender creations caught on quickly, giving many Angelenos their first taste of authentic Mexico City-style tacos.

“The hard shell was an Americanized version of what’s done only in a very small part of Mexico,” Casandra Martinez, the couple’s granddaughter, tells SFGate ’s Karen Palmer.…