Jill P./Yelp
In the season finale of the Netflix series Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, is faced with two major dilemmas—first, how to salvage his relationship with his girlfriend, and second, where to find the best tacos in New York City. His frenetic, multi-tab Google spree is not only a reminder of our current priorities, but also our obsessive — if not at times, rocky — relationship with tacos here in America.
“Mexicans have been putting stuff in a tortilla, pinching it, and then eating it for thousands of years,” says Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. But the taco didn’t formally seep into the American consciousness until after WWII, when veterans looking for opportunities to make money coincided with the rise of restaurant chains. That’s the scene Glen Bell, of Taco Bell fame, entered in San Bernadino, CA, deciding he’d focus on a hardshell-and-ground-beef combo after watching the McDonald’s brothers’ financial success soar from their hamburger operation.
“Glen would sit in the parking lot and seethe,” says Arellano. “He was very jealous.”
The 1950s also introduced the DIY taco kit, courtesy of George Ashley from El Paso, TX, who is credited as the inventor of tortillas in a can (#staywoke). The kit included a metal taco shell scaffold along with an instructional pamphlet, making it easy for housewives across the country to whip them up for Sunday supper.
“My hat is always off to the pioneers,” says Arellano. “It’s easy to hate on [places like] Taco Bell, but they whetted the palate for Americans to try new food.”
As the taco became a part of the American vernacular, Glen Bell’s chain spawned derivatives like Del Taco, and eventually fast-casual operations like El Torito, setting the stage for the second phase of its cycle: the soft taco. “Technically that’s what it is, but no one calls it that,” says Arellano. Their emergence in the ’70s can largely be attributed to legendary SoCal chain, King Taco, which “basically created the taco truck as we know it,” says Arellano. “No one believed people would eat them from the truck format, but the King Taco founder knew something others didn’t. From there, everyone started copying him.”
This opened the floodgates for pioneers like Roy Choi, who helped popularize the multicultural taco and bring Kogi to the mainstream. “Now we’re in the era of Chicano chefs like Wes Avila who have the culinary training to create artisanal tacos,” says Arellano. As the Chipotle E. coli scandal continues to compromise the burrito’s seemingly untouchable status in America—”it’s the Altamont of burrito culture,” says Arellano, equating it to the violent 1969 Northern California concert that ended the blissed-out hippie era—the void is wide open for the taco to inch its way up the ladder. “The taco is getting its proper respect right now,” says Arellano.
To celebrate this moment in time, we’ve tapped a handful of authors, writers, taco bloggers, and even a couple of globe-trotting deejays to provide some intel on the scope of tacos here in the U.S. (And, yes, pardon the heavy West Coast coverage; it is, after all, the spiritual home of domestic tacos in many respects.)
Janessa M./Yelp
Address and phone: 4610 International Blvd, Oakland, CA
Website: N/A
Birdsall says: “The thing about food in a place like Oakland’s Fruitvale, where families with roots in Mexico have settled for more than a generation, is that it’s reflected pueblo culture, mostly: life in the small towns and ranchos of Jalisco or Michoacán, where the birrias and menudos suggest the quietness—sometimes the diffidence—of pastoral home life. El Paisa@.com, with a fake-web name that gestures at contemporary life, is an urban mess in the best way possible. No other place I know in Oakland has El Paisa’s surge and flow, the hustle of taquerías in Mexico City. At midday you file through the aisle-thin space of this long-ago burger stand, tell the lady, who doesn’t have patience for your nonsense, how many tacos you want, pay, and then inch to the taqueros, chopping meat on boards through windows like ravaged DMV counters. The cabeza—beef cheeks, primarily—is sweet in that concentration-of-protein way, and the lengua’s good, but what you really want is suadero, that muscle from the belly region of the cow—an emblematic cut at street taquerias in DF—which isn’t so much tender as it is smoothly grained and pale, like organ meat. El Paisa’s tacos express the perfectibility of food on a small scale, in a culture that respects it. But hey, this is East Oakland! You’ll hunch at a table along with queer Latinas with facial piercing jewelry and big Asian guys who look like club bouncers. The Fruitvale families smart enough to grab the good seats before they got in line: They’re just focused on the tacos.”
Gary B./Yelp
Address and phone: 1725 W 18th St, Chicago, IL (312-226-2654)
Website: carnitasuruapanchi.com
Hofmann says: “There is no mystery to what Carnitas Uruapan is all about. You walk in under a pig-adorned awning to a small, cafeteria-style dining room teeming with pigs: cartoon pigs, carved wooden pigs, ceramic pig figurines. There is only one thing to order, and of course it is pig—carnitas, pork that’s flash-fried then braised in more fat until it’s reduced to gleaming, shuddering hunks of meat, ready to fall apart at the touch of a knife. Order at the counter, where slabs of lean meat, rib, belly, stomach (buche), and skin are rough-chopped in whatever mix-and-match combination you like (get a little bit of everything for a textural thrill), piled onto obscenely fresh, corn-perfumed tortillas, or weighed out by the pound. Maybe add a chunk of one of the great sheets of chicharron that sit in the window—you know, for a snack—but don’t look for superfluous onions or cilantro; there’s salsa and pickled jalapenos, but they’re just a distraction. The inspirational mottos on the wall and cartoon-adorned menus may not look the part, but the 40-year-old Carnitas Uruapan may be the closest thing we have to the dining temples of Japan, where dedicated practitioners of kitchen zen spend lifetimes making the same dish, the unattainable pursuit of perfection their only goal.”
via Greg W./Yelp
Address and phone: 7612 Brodie Ln, Austin, TX (512-221-4248)
Website: valentinastexmexbbq.com
Rayo says: There are two food groups in Texas: Barbecue and Tacos, and you can get the best of both worlds when you eat at Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ. In Central Texas, we have plenty of choices for slow-cooked meats, but none push the envelope like Miguel Vidal’s San Antonio and Austin mash-up cuisine. Although he operates out of Austin, Vidal is a San Antonio native with strong ties to its culinary traditions. On weekends, his father would smoke and grill las carnes while his mom and tias would make fresh tortillas, salsas, guacamole, rice, and beans. That’s what makes Valentina’s tacos so special—it’s a mix and true representation of Tejas. The Smoked Brisket Taco is probably one of the best tacos in the Lonestar state—smoked brisket on mesquite with guacamole, sea salt, and serrano salsa on a freshly pressed flour tortilla. If you cruise by at 2am or 2pm, you’ll see Miguel and his team cooking up some of the best barbecue and tacos in Texas. Now that’s what I call a one-two punch.”
