Everything about this culinary undertaking is against the
law. This taqueria. My fellow luncheoneers (few as they
are). This drink in my hand. The food on my plate. The immigrant woman
cooking it. All of it:
illegal. But word on the street decries these tacos now before me as
some of the best a Washingtonian will likely ever eat, so long as that same
eater deigns to risk robbery, arrest, or poisoning by third-world food handling
practices for what this underground eatery promises (on its own
business card, no less) as
sabrosos tacos Mexicanos, and what local
chef friends swear to be the most authentic Mexican in the entire mid-Atlantic,
even if eating it might land you a night in the pokey. But arrest for food reportedly this
good is a chance I’ll take. Because
if a life spent seeking kicks in such adrenaline-based and ill-advised enterprises
as boxing, or motorcycles, or a Hunter S. Thompson-inspired flirtation with the
American handgun, has taught me anything, it’s this: when in doubt, never hesitate. Just fucking do it.
Jump. So here I am. In this high-rise immigrant filing
cabinet of an apartment building.
In this old lady’s teeny, tiny kitchen. To break the law with the simple act of buying food. So I lift a taco, one of four on two
plates, and begin to eat. What
happens next defies retelling. It’s
the stuff of hallucination. A
synesthetic experience second to none.
I suddenly hear imaginary voices.
And accordion music. And
feel all-too-real heat from a Sonoran sun calling water onto my face, but from a
fire within. It’s as if I’m suddenly
back in extreme southwestern Arizona, but a mile from the Rio Grande, where, in
my wayward youth, I encountered the best tacos of my life. This now is the kind of culinary
out-of-body experience that has the angels of gastronomy telling me to walk
toward the light. And when I come
to my senses (a sip of horchata breaks the spell) I see the
duena standing there, behind the counter
of her tiny kitchenette. She’s
nodding at me. Grinning. Beatific. Implacable. And
all-knowing as the smiling Buddha.
She asks me a question in Spanish, a language I strangely now understand
even better than my native own.
Te gustas? Do I like the food?
A simple question requiring but a monosyllable, one way or the other,
for response. And for the first
time in a very, very long time, I really have absolutely no idea what to say.
The trick to eating in an underground restaurant is, of
course, to actually first
find it. They are elusive as Bigfoot. Hard to hunt as the mythical
snipe. And their pursuit is, more
often than not, a dupe’s errand that breaks hearts, ridicules appetites, and
imparts the kind of self-loathing that makes you want to break shit with your
fists. How many times have I
entered abandoned basements, snuck into apartments, all in the pursuit of
carnitas or ramen, only to find an empty room in ruin with broken bottles, condoms
wrappers, and the detritus of my own shattered dreams. But my “intel” on Taqueria X (as we’ll
call it) is solid. It’s jake. I have an address. I have a phone number. And best of all, I have a dining
companion. Someone who’s actually been
here before. So on a sunny Sunday
after a brisk morning run, we head over to that strange and liminal space that
bridges the equally strange neighborhoods of Chinatown and Dupont East (not the real neighborhoods, yo). We find the find the building
and call the number we’ve been given.
Someone answers, mutters something in Spanish, and hangs up. A second-story window opens above us and
a key fob flies out. Everyone
around us is watching this. We are
the only gringos around, conspicuous as Secret Service agents (my friend’s built
like a brick house and rocking the blonde-and-blue thing), but no one contests
our being here. No one will meet
our eyes. So we enter a building
that smells powerfully of every ramshackle immigrant flop house I’ve ever been
in. You know the smell. Laundry detergent. Pet urine. The odor of unending physical toil. But it also smells of food. Boiled chicken. Fried corn meal. The promise of a full stomach. The smell of hope. So we take the stairs and find the door
and knock. We wait. Nothing. So we knock again.
The door opens and we are admitted into one of the smallest apartment
kitchens I have ever seen. There
is an old man cooking. And an old
woman at the four-burner electric stove.
And their son. The son
invites us to lunch and we sit within arms reach of the kitchen counter at a
card table next to four fellow lunchoneers who flirt dangerously, but wholly successfully,
with
hipsterness. With six at the table, Taqueria X is
now officially at capacity. Maxed
out. Bulging at the seams. Before me is a television playing
Telemundo. Behind me: a wall of Mexican perfumes and beauty
products, should the need arise.
We are asked what we’d like to drink. Tecate comes cold out of a cooler. My horchata is poured from an erstwhile flower vase. Then we are asked what we’d like to
eat. There are menu cards on the
table, but the menus are
sin precios,
without prices. The
duena is now looking at us, so we are
careful to order much more than we will ever be able to eat. I order chicken tamales, tacos de
lengua, (beef tongue), tacos
de res (beef) tacos
de puerco y cabeza de res
(pork and beef head), tacos
al pastor
(pressed pork). My friend orders
birria, a goat stew. The
duena
nods as smiles, and within minutes, a feast of impossible bounty is laid
out before us. With a second nod
from our host cook, we are invited to eat.
And this is when I begin to see things. When I begin to hear imaginary music. And when I, in the parlance of my
youth, begin
trippin balls. It’s truly hallucinatory. Because the food now before me is much
more than lunch. It’s food
unsullied by gringo notions of food laws or refrigeration. It’s food completely untouched by our
profoundly fucked-up North American notion of food cultivation and often-schizophrenic
sense of national cuisine. It’s
Mexican cuisine in its purest form.
It’s deeply and profoundly delicious. So good, in fact that I’ve managed to dispatch my entire
meal of four tacos and one tamale with such gnashing frenzy that my just-made hipster
friends beside me are now looking at me the way zoo patrons might regard a spotted
cheetah newly escaped of its cage.
But the
duena is pleased. She smiles and brings a serving of
chapulines, or crickets, on a small
plate. My friend asks her in Spanish
if they are fresh. The
duena chuckles and tells us she found
them on the street that morning with the rats we just ate in our tacos. The
chapulines
are at once earthy and refreshing in their crunch and spice. They are, as everything here at
Taqueria X, a revelation, pure and profound.
When it’s time to pay and leave, we ask for the bill. But there is no bill. Prices exist only in the duena’s head and nothing has been
written down. There is, however, the
greater and far more ephemeral matter of how much we owe. The idea rooted
in the shaky calculus of how much food we consumed by a factor of just how much
cash I might be carrying inside my brand new lululemon running pants. The duena
speaks: $45. Not cheap, by any
means, for what we’ve eaten, especially considering that with one well-placed
phone call I could have the lights shut off in this joint. But I’m purchasing far, far more than just
lunch, am I not? I’m paying for
the experience itself, the element of risk, both hers and mine, the thrill of
adventure. I’m buying (if not
merely renting) the culinary love
child of the Aztecs and conquistador Cortes, the product of a five hundred year
old gastronomic miscegenation between European and indigenous American cuisines. All of it embodied in this tiny little woman. All of it housed in this crammed little
apartment with its Telemundo and wall of Mexican beauty products. All of it delicious enough to make me
bug out and lose my shit at a card table already thick with sock-headed
hipsters. That this smiling little woman could be fined, jailed, or event deported for the act of illegally feeding paying strangers in her tiny home saddens me, deeply, and no doubt proves (in the starkest terms, I think) just how fucked up ideas regarding food cultivation and purveyance have gotten in North America. That Monsanto (el Diablo primero) can peddle herbicide glyphosate (that's Roundup, sports fans), genetically engineered (GE) seed, and bovine growth hormone, at mind-boggling profit AND still sleep like babies at night is a far, far greater evil than this sweet little old lady slinging tacos in her home kitchen. That McDonalds (el Diablo segundo) openly and freely puts ammonia-treated "beef product" (the now-infamous pink slime) infused with bovine fecal matter in its burgers is a far, far greater injustice than this immigrant family pouring me horchata from a decommissioned flower vase, no? Can we not agree, to the person, that the risks of becoming sick or developing food-borne disease are far, far greater from consuming the shit that Monsanto is pimping than what this sweet old lady is serving in her own home? Can we not agree that this so-called underground restaurant is emphatically NOT serving protein tainted with cow shit?
The good news in all of this, friends and fellow eaters, is
that for every Monsanto, monolith of un-Godly food cultivation that it is,
there is a duena like this, serving
the freshest and best food she can possibly produce. And fresh and good the food at Taqueria X most certainly
is. It’s more than just good. It’s an affirmation of the culinary
possibilities that yet abound in this country and a testament to the culinary
defiance of poor people feeding themselves through centuries of shared
tradition and on their very own terms.
The only rub is that I can’t tell you where Taqueria X
is. That would be a betrayal. A pinche
gringo move. So here’s the
deal: if I know you well enough,
or if the degree of our separation is, say, less than two, contact me and I’ll
give you the scoop. I can tell you
that Taqueria X is open only on the weekends, from 7AM to 7PM. I can also tell you I will surely be
there when you do visit. I’ll be
eating crickets. And I’ll be
walking Spanish down the hall.
