Notes From the Underground - Lunch at Taqueria X

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.

Bob's Barbecue and the Ballad of Butner, North Carolina

Every serious eater I know has one:  a culinary ground zero.  Be they taquerias for some, or Vietnamese noodle shops for others, these ground zeros are places of gastronomic reckoning where everything these eaters might have known (or thought they knew) about food is suddenly and irrevocably blown to smithereens, destroyed by that otherwise innocuous morsel of street food at the end of their plastic forks.  They are places of epiphany, agencies of awakening, these eateries, and they show the newly hatched culinary enthusiast that food is not merely fodder for one’s own gob hole whose sole purpose is to kill the biological imperative of appetite, or to negate the physiological response of smoking a joint and jonesing for a jumbo cheese pizza.  No, these places are the holy places of cuisine where the oracles of gastronomy labor in near-total obscurity under mysterious shrouds of grill smoke and in whose cuisines are secreted a thousand tales telling of who they are and from whence they came.  In such places, an eater can learn about the world in a single afternoon, and it often tastes of salvation.

For me, that place is Bob’s.  Situated in north-central North Carolina just off I-85 at the end of an otherwise unremarkable service road where weary travelers go to gas up and buy smokes, and where culinary ambition would seemingly want to crawl off and die, Bob’s Barbecue, with it’s naugahyde chairs and V.F.W. karaoke-night vibe, was where I first became the eater I am today, where I was first dimly able to decode the signs and signifiers on my plate, and where I first realized I had my head so far up my own ass I was incapable of really and truly understanding anything about American cuisine.  You should forgive me that.  I was then a young culinary turk from Missouri farm country newly embarked on a career in the Washington food world, and like all recent converts insecure in their convictions, I was comically overzealous in my adherence to the orthodoxy of my new faith.  If the food wasn’t somehow a derivation of Franco gastronomy, I wasn’t fucking eating it.  No poulet basquaise on the menu?  No coq au vin?  I’ll go hungry thank you very much was the vibe I was throwing at restaurateurs in those days.  Quite a bold culinary stance to take on a road trip from Washington to Atlanta, I know, because Wendy’s, then as now, wasn’t exactly down with the whole sous vide thing, and McDonalds didn’t offer cote de boeuf on its 99 cent menu.  But it was lunchtime and I was hungry.  Really, really hungry.  As in:  eat or black out at the wheel.  So I pulled off the interstate at Butner and navigated the blight—the McDonalds, the Sonic, the Hardee’s—that American road food has become, determined, in my delirium, that I would rather capture and consume a local house pet before capitulating to the culinary menace of those evil golden arches.  No cocker spaniels died that day, I am pleased to report, because I happened to find Bob’s, looking for all the world like a shopworn Veterans of Foreign Wars bingo palace, but promising authentic North Carolina barbecue by the pig smoke adrift on the mid-day air. 

So I rolled into the gravel lot and entered Bob’s, convinced, as any twenty-something culinary know-it-all would be, that the food before me was going to be bad, hardly worth eating, food for rednecks, a simpleton’s cuisine.  But I was hungry enough to eat my left hand, and no matter how bad Bob’s might be, it would be infinitely better, I knew, than the shit purveyed by the evil laughing clown down the street.  So I ordered.  Grudgingly.  Then I sat.  And ate.  And when I emerged from Bob’s, thirty, maybe forty minutes later, I was different somehow.  Forever changed.  For what I encountered inside Bob’s was an American cuisine so pure, so elemental, so fucking good, that I realized with the kind of clarity that comes only to fools and idiot savants, that I was wrong about everything.  My fixation on haute cuisine, on so-called molecular gastronomy, on the cult of Escoffier, all it had been misguided, a fool’s errand, all of it deeply and profoundly wrong.  I hail from Missouri, after all.  Both sets of grandparents were farmers for crying eye.  I could ride a horse and shoot a gun before I could write my own name.  Bob’s food reminded me of this.  It was a looking glass, of sorts, in which I saw who I really was as an eater, and that this culinary identity of mine was somehow eternally fixed by the topography of my birth.  A new world of gastronomic possibility opened up for me inside Bob’s, a decidedly working-class, farm-and-labor culinary landscape decidedly devoid of the fussy, ephemeral, and sauce-heavy cuisines so central to the largely unsuccessful apprenticeship of my own food self-education.  Driving away from Bob’s after that first visit, I resolved to toss my black turtlenecks, chuck my Gitanes, and pawn my well-thumbed copy of La Technique the moment I got home, and I felt suddenly unencumbered, light-headed, and free at last.

I visited Bob’s Barbecue last week on a road trip to Asheville.  It was as I had remembered it:  a squat and Post Office-like building marooned at the barren end of a Carolina service road.  And if the women behind the counter were not the same woman in person, they were the same in type:  sweet little old ladies in aprons and hair nets and rose water perfume whom you might imagine having just arrived from a Southern Baptist bake sale and who call you darlin’ as they serve you the kind of barbecue that changes lives.  For Bob’s service methods employ a relic of the old South; Bob’s serves cafeteria style.  You take a tray (by the glass pie case loaded with sweet goodness) and order your protein (presumably pork, though fried catfish and chicken livers are available) from a lady whose job it is to scoop an enormous dollop of chopped pork (with creamy cole slaw) onto a Frisbee-sized bun.  She plates your pork sandwich on Styrofoam, then passes it to the hushpuppy lady.  The hushpuppy lady deposits a gloved handful of hushpuppies into a paper basket, then pushes your tray to the green bean lady.  The green bean lady scoops an enormous portion of bacon-infused beans onto your plate, then hands you the tray and sends you down the line to the cashier.  The little old cashier smiles and asks you if you’d like tea.  You do.  She hands you a Styrofoam cup filled with shaved ice, takes your money, and sends you off with yet another smile and the promise of bottomless hushpuppies.  Oh, yes.  That’s right.  Unlimited fried corn meal.  So you fill your cup with (very) sweet tea, take a seat at a simulated wood grain table, and tuck into some of the best barbecue you’re likely to ever encounter. 

Barbecue aficionados will be quick to point out that Bob’s, by decree of its location, is necessarily of the Lexington school of barbecue, which emphasizes pork shoulder (Eastern Carolina utilizes all parts of the pig except the squeal) and whose approach to sauce is milder and relatively more laid back on the topic of catsup (it usually contains but a dram) than Eastern Carolina orthodoxy allows.  I strongly favor Bob’s pumped up, eastern-styled counterpart (see my earlier blog entry on Wilber’s Barbecue of Goldsboro for that) and yeah, Bob’s pig could certainly benefit from a much bigger dose of hickory smoke, but I dare you to find a barbecue joint anywhere in the state that serves up a superior or more highly distilled essence of rural North Carolina itself.  I can find really good barbecue almost anywhere in that great state, sure.  But nowhere else in my extensive Carolina adventures have I ever found a truer, purer, more crystalline specimen of what it means to eat smoked, chopped pig, shoulder to shoulder with farmers, with mechanics, with sweet little old ladies from the local Southern Baptist Church.  It’s why we eat.  Nourishment.  Reprieve from toil.  Communion with the people at the true still point of this turning world.  And for this eater, Bob’s is my church; it’s patrons, my Carolina congregation.

For the record:  Bob’s serves the best hushpuppies I’ve ever eaten.  And when you visit Bob’s, as I know you will, please wear rose water as your perfume, ladies, and gents, make sure that’s pomade billowing your lovely locks, and for the love of Pete, one and all, enjoy the aroma.  It gets no finer anywhere else in Carolina.

They have no website, praise Jesus, so there is no link to offer.  But there is this.  An address.

Bob's Barbecue

1589 Lake Road

Creedmoor, North Carolina 27522

919.528.2081

Talking Italian With A. Litteri

It’s a dirty little secret of mine that I am now ready to confess:  I hate Italian food.  But wait.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am NOT talking about the Italian food of, say, that mad Italian genius from the Le Marche region, Fabbio Trabocchi of Fiola fame, who is not only revolutionizing Italian cuisine as we know it, but who has cooked some of the best food of any kind I have ever put in my mouth.  Nor am I talking about the kind of Italian food produced in the home kitchens of friends like Tom and Erica Petrilli, whose Italian dishes are so deeply delicious, and whose collaborative culinary prowess is so profoundly beyond my own, that tasting Tom’s red sauce makes me want to bang my head on the table, dent my soul, and cut a hole in my heart, because I know I will never, ever cook as well as Tom does, no matter how hard I try.  So maybe it’s not Italian food I hate, after all.  Maybe it’s that other stuff, the fake stuff, that basest and most low-brow culinary detritus that tries (and fails) to pass itself off as “Italian” food that I truly and deeply despise.  That stuff produced in the very non-Italian Sysco industrial faux-food processing facilities around the United States and later passed-off as “authentic” Italian cuisine by such Slobodan Milosevic-caliber gastro-war criminals as Bertucci’s, the Olive Garden, and Carrabba’s Italian Grill.  I know what you’re thinking:  Only an idiot with a culinary IQ of 6 would confuse Fabio’s cooking with the garbage that comes out of an Olive Garden kitchen.  Only a fuckwhit would fail to notice the shared gastronomic DNA of what comes out of an Old Spaghetti Factory kitchen with what comes out of a can of Chef Boyardee.  Agreed.  But where I’m from, the American Heartland (re:  “fly-over” states for you perennial coastal dwellers) the “authenticity” of these culinary shit holes is almost always without dispute.  In Iowa, in Kansas, in my native Missouri, the dross purveyed by the Macaroni Grill is Italian food for most people.  This means that for army of Midwestern eaters, Olive Garden’s fried fucking calamari is surely as authentically “Italian” as Fabio’s own and purely transcendent pine-smoked venison (with cipollini onions, foie gras, and rosemary, and likely the best venison dish anywhere in America, folks).  This also means that for a legion of farmbelt gastronomes-in-utero (as I was once) a Ragu red sauce-styled cuisine of laughable kiddie-food complexity (sugar, salt, and the occasional shot of dairy fat) is all they’ll quite possibly ever know of one of the world’s great and most sublime of cuisines. 

Unless.

Unless Fate seizes them by the short hairs and drags them half way across the country to A. Litteri, Inc.—that Holy Roman epicenter of all Washington-area Italian groceries, that Caesarian godhead for all D.C.-area Italian sandwich shops, and that veritable Puzoian Paradise where all Italophiles go to have their livers fattened and their bellies distended on an almost pharmacological array of Italian victuals that no Brando-in-waiting could ever possibly refuse, nor any garden variety Scorsesean wanna-be could forego without being considered a total mook. 

Because these are some truly mean streets one must navigate to find Litteri.  Because Litteri is located in Northeast Washington’s Union Market, an utterly bombed out four-square-block warehouse and meat-packing district hosting African butchers, Chinese butchers, Halal butchers, and other shady-looking sundries and restaurant supply vendors where you’ll need a business license (or a cool pair of Andrew Jacksons) to enter.  Union Market appears as the kind of place one might visit when needing to purchase a handgun or healthy white baby (in the parlance of the Cohen brothers), or where a person might unburden himself of his own extra kidney or trade-in his poorly used liver for a new one.  Union Market is just that kind of place and it’s what A. Litteri, Inc. has called home (and where the dead mobsters have been buried) since 1926.  It feels like the Capone era inside Litteri.  It smells like it, too.  An olfactory amalgam of spices, pistol oil, and cured meat.  And that’s a good thing.  How so? 

Because to enter Litteri is to fall down a culinary rabbit hole and enter an Italian fairyland of Old World gastronomy.  It’s a Platonic repository of every Italian food ever made exists in its one perfect form.  Floor to ceiling, front to back, Litteri is jam-packed with every Italian foodstuff a hungry gourmand could possibly imagine.  At the very front of the store are cases of highly quaffable wines selling at low-low prices ($3 a bottle and no doubt freshly fallen off the back of a truck).  Beyond that is the olive oil display.  Doubled-sided shelving stretching half the length of the store and crowded with hundreds of brands of olive oil, from the stuff so rare and expensive as to have likely been “imported” inside a human body cavity on a commercial jet liner, to varieties of oil just pedestrian enough to double as lube for your contractor’s nail gun.  Behind the oil display is shelving (and fridge space) devoted entirely to pasta.  Litteri has stockpiled enough fresh, frozen, and dried pasta (in shapes I’d never before seen) to get a person or three through the next plague or apocalypse.  End-capping the oil and pasta displays are shelves devoted entirely to potted fish (sardines and tuna), to capers, to olives, to canned tomatoes, to spices.  It’s easily the most densely stocked market I’ve ever seen.  It’s dizzying in its variety.  Vexing in its bounty.  Overwhelming in its offering.  But none of it, none of it, is why I’ve come to A. Litteri, Inc.

I’ve come for what you’ll find in the very, very back of the store.  I’ve come for Litteri’s made-to-order sandwiches, which, as I’m about to discover, are some of the very, very best that Washington (and Italian-American street cuisine) has to offer.  But tread carefully around the deli counter.  Be smart.  There are rules here.  There is a protocol.  You don’t rush the old man behind the counter.  You don’t bark your order at some pimple-faced, purple-shirted “Sandwich Artist.”  You write down your request in pencil on a form stacked on the counter.  Then you write your name.  Because you are accountable.  Because you will be nice while ordering your sandwich.  Because they know your name and can likely find out where you live.  So you choose two meats for your sandwich (capicola and prosciuttini, in my case).  Then you choose your two cheeses (I go with provolone and fresh mozzarella).  Then you choose your toppings (lettuce, tomato, onions, hot peppers) and condiments (Italian seasoning and dressing, yellow mustard, mayo).  You are then asked to make the most important decision of your sandwich eating experience; you are asked to choose your bread.  I go with the 9” hard roll (and so should you).  I say please and thank you while submitting my sandwich request.  I say it twice, and for my good manners, I am rewarded a nine-inch sandwich wrapped in white butcher’s paper.  I pay a very reasonable $5.95 and carry my sandwich, football-like, across pavement aglitter with broken glass, to the empty Subway parking lot directly across the street.  I sit on a short retaining wall next to a trash dumpster and tuck into what is surely among the best sandwiches of my life.  I bite at it.  I tear at it.  I rip and gnash.  And I know even then, even with a mouthful of prosciuttini and provolone, even with Italian dressing dribbling from my chin, that describing the perfect sandwich will be akin to describing the perfect sneeze in that both, sandwiches and sneezes, are so commonplace in life that describing an encounter with either would be tantamount to describing the properties of something truly banal—like a really good morning shower.  You’ll know it when you find it.  Oh yes you will.  But even as my powers of description fail me then (as they fail me now), I know that A. Litteri is where I will buy all of my sandwiches.  From now on.  For the rest of my time in Washington.  Because Taylor Gourmet is now dead to me.  Potbelly, a cruel, cruel joke.  A. Litteri, Inc has it all.  It’s a veritable Vatican City of culinary spirituality and material gastronomic wealth.  It’s where they’re keeping the good stuff.  It’s where I will from now go like some culinary pilgrim having once glimpsed heaven and hungry, very, very, for more. 

A. Litteri, Inc. is located at 517-519 Morse Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002

Their link is here:  Home Page A. Litteri, Inc.

You should also visit Fabbio at Fiola with someone you love or someone you desperately want to sleep with.  Fiola's link is here:  Home - Fiola Restaurant

And luckily, not everyone shares my opinion of Olive Garden.  Some people actually like it.  Here's Marilyn Hagerty's now-famous review in the Grand Forks Herald:  THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome | Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, North Dakota

The (Un) Dangerous Taco of Pat's Market, Alexandria

It’s what American cities do best.  They change.  When they improve, we call it urban renewal.  Gentrification.  Gastronomic manifest destiny.  Whatever you call it, it first appears, innocuously enough, as the new corner Starbucks.  Then it transmogrifies into a hipster burger joint.  Then it shape-shifts into that Whole Foods built where the old A & P used to be.  And before you can say Kenny G., the entire neighborhood is swarming with white people.  Like it or not, that’s how gentrification works.  For those professionals able to afford such free-wheeling luxury, these newly minted cityscapes represent a fairyland of easy living.  What’s not to like about being able to score a pound of prosciutto, your own dry cleaning, and a cup of bubble tea in the space of one city block?  I, for one, will cop to it.  Guilty as charged.  Without a doubt.  Were I to live in such a neighborhood, I would certainly be that guy carrying a chai latte in one hand and my pet Chihuahua in the other.  Or, well, maybe not.

But what do we call it when this kind of renewal happens in reverse?  What do we call it when a brown person improves on what a white guy first tried?  What do we call it when a Salvadoran cook and entrepreneur buys a terribly rundown but long-cherished family marketplace in a traditionally all-white neighborhood (with a golf course across the street) and turns the place into one of the most unlikely and easily most delicious purveyors of Salvadoran food around?  I call it progress.  I call it Pat’s Market in Alexandria, Virginia, and Pat’s is exactly what culinary revitalization tastes like. 

I won’t kid you; imagining culinary excellence coming from a place like Pat’s takes more than creativity; it requires the kind of blind faith known only to sky-divers and bungee jumpers, and which tells them, against all reason, that everything is going be all right in the end.  That no one is going to get hurt.  Pat’s is more than down-at-the-heels and rough-around-the-edges.  It’s dangerous-looking.  The kind of place that looks to serve up complimentary sides of hepatitis and botulism with every order.  The kind of place that appears to have brought a third-world sensibility of safe-food-handling practices to compliment its third-world cuisine. 

But that first-take on Pat’s would be shortsighted.  Myopic.  For what the true gastronome sees when he enters Pat’s is not the shelves of potted meats, the hanging bags of pork rinds, the displays of LIVE BAIT.  No, what the real eater first spies is the Salvadoran couple behind the counter.  The el who is filling an old ketchup squeeze-bottle with salsa.  The ella who is swaddled in a white cooking apron and stands beside a four-burner range and a flat top grill.  Ah!  Food is cooked here, is the gourmand’s first epiphany.  What the savvy eater next essays is the menu printed on copier paper and taped to the counter like the report card of someone else’s honor student, someone else’s kid.  The hanging menu offers cheeseburgers, French fries, wings, pizza.  The menu is a red herring, a gastronomic sleight of hand, an expert exercise in culinary misdirection, is the gourmand’s second insight.  Something strange is afoot here.  Pat’s Market has my full and undivided attention.

So I ask the man behind the counter for something to eat.  Lunch is what I need.  The request makes him go all shifty-eyed, makes him nervous.  That or my short-hair/Ray Bay aviator approach to personal aesthetics which screams health inspector and la migra to guys like this everywhere.  The proprietor motions to the menu and suggests the cheese steak.  The cheese steak?   I tell him I work in the food business.  Not some pinche zapatero, but a careerist.  A lifer.  I tell him I won’t eat gringo food on my day off.  This makes him relax, visibly.  His shoulders fall forward and he lets out his breath.  I think I even detect a smile.  When the man suggests pupusas I know we’re destined for friendship, he and I.  When he suggests a tongue taco, I know it’s going to be a culinary love between us, real and true.  Such things happen when a perfect stranger reads the secret desires aflame in your soul.  And sometimes a tongue taco is all it takes.

But as with all young love, things can get really strange really quickly.  The proprietor comes around from behind the counter and walks to the very back corner of the store.  There, he enters a mid-century walk-in unit that looks like a bank vault, and once in, stays inside for a good seven minutes.  I know it’s a full seven minutes because the cook doesn’t speak English.  Because there’s no one else inside the store.  And because I take out my iPhone (that requisite douchewear accessory of foodies everywhere) and seek an app designed to somehow defeat awkward situations such as this.  Just as I thought:  there is no app for that. 

The proprietor emerges with two metal mixing bowls filled with meat.   The cubed tongue in one hand.  A bowl of diced flank steak in the other.  He passes by me without a word and once behind the counter, begins to season and toss the meat with his bare hands.  The woman warms the pupusas and tortillas on the grill, and once brown at the edges, removes the starches to make room for the meat.  And in what feels like just seven exhilarating seconds, I am presented with two styrofoam clamshells full of what smells like really good Salvadoran food and for which I am charged a pittance (two tacos, two pupusas and Mexican Coke for well under ten dollars).

I smile, pay, and abscond to a nearby park where I plan to eat what I hope might be, at best, barely-eatable Salvadoran food consumed in the warm sunshine of a late-winter’s day.  At the very least, I hope to be full at meal’s end.  And if I am to get my greatest wish, if there is an Easter Bunny after all, the food will not make me sick. 

What I discover on my first, second, even third sorties into my two clamshells is something approaching short-order genius and nothing short of the best Salvadoran food I have yet tasted.  The pupusas are rich, almost springy and fresh tasting (most unusual for pupusas).  They are paired, in their clamshell, with two dollops of fresh slaw, topped with salsa, whose flavors are shocking in their brightness and freshness.  I am thunderstruck.  I am also confused by flavors this vivid in Central American cooking.  So I move on to the tacos.  Temples of my familiar.  My favorite go-to meal and something I can happily eat every day of my life.

The beef taco is rich in flavor, vibrant, grassy, highly seasoned and, somehow, altogether familiar tasting.  The tongue is, simply put, the best tongue taco I’ve ever tasted insofar as the flavors are spot-on and that it is more of a melting process (as opposed to the regular seven-chews-per-bite gringo mastication routine) that delivers the tongue down my gullet.  The tacos are made of the freshest tortillas I ever recall eating.  And the pico de gallo that comes in the clamshell—fresh enough to be called bombastic.  I pick it apart to discover a rough and irregular dicing of the tomatoes and onions that delivers the most significant epiphany of the day:  this food is homemade.

So I do something I’ve never done before.  Something foolish.  I go back.  I get in my car and drive back to Pat’s Markets.  I want an explanation.  I want an answer to a single question:  how can their food be this fucking good?  The couple behind the counter does not look happy to see me again.  Have I come back to bust them on the internal serving temperature of their flank steak?  Or have I come back to avenge the bone in my throat?  The same gringo in the space of half and hour surely means bad, bad things are about to happen.  Things involving knife fighting and deportation.  So I smile and offer my business card and try to put them at ease with assurances that their food is, in my opinion, easily the best Salvadoran fare in the area.  They already know this.  But saying so puts the proprietor at ease.  Introductions are made.  His name is Manuel, hers Janira.  They purchased the already-distressed Pat’s Market six-years before from an Indian family, all Hindu and vegetarian, who sold (but never ate) high-end deli meat (the market was built in 1960 and named for the long-dead original owner’s still-living wife).  Manual does a respectable business selling traditional Salvadoran food to always-ravenous Latino laborers, breakfast and lunch.  The menu taped to the counter is for the benefit of stray gringos who wander into Pat’s without fully understanding that the United States end in the parking lot outside.  Inside Pat’s, they’re in El Salvador, no two ways about it.  You're off the reservation, pal.  

But the food, I ask Manuel, how do you do it?  How do you make it taste like that?

Manuel’s answer to my first question does not surprise me:  everything is made in-house at Pat’s; the slaw, the pico de gallo, the tortillas, even the pizza, all made fresh, daily, by hand, by the lovely Janira.  It’s Manuel’s answer to the second part of my question that catches me totally off guard.  It shocks me.  Manuel tells me the secret ingredients in the pupusas are the two cheeses Janira uses—mozzarella and provolone.  Then Manuel leans in closer and imparts the holy trinity of seasoning used in Janira’s beef tacos:  French’s yellow mustard, mayonnaise, and Italian salad dressing.

My first impulse is to bolt.  I’ve been had.  Taken for a sucker.  Played for the kind of gringo fool who can’t tell the difference between authentic Salvadoran food and gastronomic hocus-pocus.  But one hard look at Manuel convinces me otherwise.  Here is this sweet little man who came from profound third-world poverty with no money, no English—just the dream of taking some ruined old gringo grocery and piloting that leaky old thing toward culinary greatness.  One hard look at Manuel reminds me to ask myself on just what third-world gastronomy is based, after all.  Third-world cuisine is about taking whatever ingredients are at hand, be they queso fresco or provolone, alguashte or French’s yellow mustard, and making the most delicious food possible.  So the very impulse that drives Manuel and Janira to season their food with North American condiments is exactly what make their Salvadoran tacos and pupusas authentic.

Manuel and I shake hands as I am leaving.  He tells me he hopes I will return for more tacos.  Come back for the best and most authentic Salvadoran food I’ve yet had the pleasure to taste?  Of course I will.  Because Pat’s continues the heritage of culinary revitalization of America.  Because it’s what the future tastes like.  Because it’s deeply and truly delicious.

Pat’s Market is located at 1401 Belle Haven Road, Alexandria, Virginia, 22307.

I can’t wait to see you there.

[Reader's note:  word on the street is that Pat's has closed.  Bummer.]

Fire Walk With Me - The Adana Burger at Balkan Grill

Let's consider the hamburger, shall we?  The average American consumes over 230 pounds of the stuff a year.  Be it the evil, ammonia-drenched, feces-covered 99 cent shit served out of the typical drive-thru window, or the truly good stuff from Wagyu stock, bathed in beer its whole life and routinely serviced by a Geisha’s right hand, then sold, later, in trendy burger joints for upwards of $25 a pop, gastronomy in America, or whatever it is we call the daily business of cooking and eating, would, for most, be unthinkable, a strange and alien culinary landscape, a place truly un-American.  So what happens when our national dish goes abroad?  What becomes of the burger in, say, Europe?  Does it travel the continent like some well-meaning but dimwitted Jamesian waif, the victim of incessant ridicule, the object of depthless contempt, a symbol of all that is wrong with America?  Or is it something else?  Does the hamburger go abroad like a culinary assassin and rogue agent of the American empire, secretly warring upon centuries of European culinary tradition, and loosed upon the continent like some gonzo-gastro Colonel Kurtz armed with trans-fats, intent on making everyone fat, dumb, and happy?

I once lived in Europe.  I lived there just long enough to discover that everywhere (and I mean everywhere) I went, there would be hundreds of white-shoed, khaki-pants-and-fanny-pack wearing Americans lined up twenty-deep beneath the Golden Arches of, say, Paris, Amsterdam, or Oxford, clamoring for a taste of Omaha, shouldering their way forward for a whiff of old Debuque.  To this day I can’t decide if my fellow travelers sought Big Macs as a panacea for being homesick, or if their ruin as eaters was already complete.  Were they intimidated by the culinary unknown, or had Ronald already had his way with them?  Were they the psychologically damaged suckers who identified with their abusers as described in psychology’s proto-Freudian object relations theory?  Or was it more simple than that?  Was it just that these Americans were the typical monoglots who go abroad too frightened to order off menus printed the local language?  Were they, as eaters, forever lost?

Seeing a young American wolf down Royale Deluxe (that’s a Royale with Cheese for all you Pulp Fiction fans out there) on the Champs-Elysees broke my heart.  That was it for me and the hamburger for a while.  We were done.  Officially broken up.  Friends no more.  I didn’t eat ground meat in pressed or patty form the rest of my time in Europe.  And that’s too bad.  Because there is a long and still-vital tradition of European hamburger making (and eating) in the Old World.  And no, I’m not talking about the tradition of Hamburg Steak from the 17^th Century (the Germans are on their own here).  I’m talking about the amazingly varied and truly delicious tradition of meat in patty form that is the cornerstone of streetfood in Balkan cuisine.

I now know about Balkan burgers only because a sudden culinary whim brought me into Alexandria’s delightful Balkan Grill to have me staring at an illustrated menu featuring not one, but two burgers deeply rooted in the Balkan streetfood tradition.  Only these pucks of delicious protein are not called hamburgers in Bosnian.  They’re called pljeskavica and are traditionally made of mixed ground meats, then grilled or fried, and served between what Americans would call a bun, but which Serbs call lipinja, and more resembles pita bread in gluten content than, say, does that Sunbeam bun you grew up with.  The pljeskavica is traditionally served with raw onions, peppers, tomatoes, and something magical called kaymak, and which, to Americans, will resemble sour cream on first glance, but which resembles, when tasted, crème fraiche or clotted cream.

This first pljeskavica was billed on the menu as the Bosnian Burger.  Below the Bosnian Burger was pictured something called the Adana Burger, beside which was handwritten the word HOT in ball-point pen.  I knew that Adana was a city southern Turkey not particularly prominent on the Southeastern European culinary map, but the promise of a spicy burger (even hot) intrigued me so much that I ordered it and a second dish called borek (fillo pastry stuffed with cheese) just in case the burger should somehow disappoint.  The proprietor took my order with Old World formality and retreated to the kitchen, leaving me alone to wait.

Balkan Grill is a neighborhood joint in my very own neighborhood of Alexandria south, as it just so happens.  Alexandria’s “hood,” if you will.  Balkan Grill is located in a strip mall that I’ve only patronized when my thirst for a late-night beer outweighs the likelihood that I’ll have to fistfight some hard-case at the local 7-11 beercase (more on that later).  The restaurant itself is tiny, designed for take-away, and seats six on a good day.  But it’s bright and clean and really everything you’d ever want in a local eatery.  There was a reach-in fridge full of soft drinks set next to a nearly sold-out pastry case of homemade-looking Bosnian/Turkish pastry.  Balkan Grill is conjoined to the equally surprising Euro Foods market, which offers all the Occidental canned, bottled, and wrapped exotics you’d hope to find in a European sundry.  I might have walked past Balkan Grill everyday in my six years here in the hood, but others far wiser than I have clearly not made the same mistake.  In my brief time at Balkan Grill, there was a steady stream of Bosnian-speaking and Russian-speaking luncheoneers, all of them women, all of them in search of an American husband were the tightness of their jeans any harbinger of their intent.  That Balkan Grill was on the radar of European expatriates jonesing for the taste of home seemed a very good sign indeed.

And one look at my food as it came out and I knew why Balkan Grill was a favorite among the Southeastern European crowd.  Before me were two huge plates of food.  One with a monster borek on it.  The other with the biggest hamburger I have ever seen.  The Adana burger was huge.  Colossal.  As big around as the top of my head.  It was presented as promised:  a meat patty of epic proportions laid between two slices of lipinja and garnished on the side with raw onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and a large dollop of kaymak.  I looked at the Adana burger, then at the two pretty tight-jeaned Bosnian nationals waiting for their food.  They winked at me and smiled and nodded me on like some fool about to plunge over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel, so I picked up my mammoth burger and took a bite.

Before I describe the Adana, a confession:  when it comes to hot food, I’m that guy.  I’m the guy who carries a bottle of Tabasco in his professional bag of tricks to enliven the staff meal I receive at the end of every event I supervise.  I drown my shift meal in hot sauce both to enliven my food and send my chefs into fits of apoplectic rage.  So I know my heat.  I’ve got the Scoville Scale tattooed on my culinary soul.

The heat I encountered in the Adana burger was, in a word, incendiary for a puck-shaped piece of ground protein.  It lit a fire in my mouth.  It called tears into my eyes.  It made me run for that cooling dollop of kaymak the way a frightened child runs for his mother.  The kaymak worked like magic.  Out went the flames.  And with the fire in my mouth extinguished, I was better able to detect spices in the meat which were unfamiliar but which hinted at the seasoning found in American breakfast sausage.  So I took another bite.  And another.  And another.  And as any heat-junkie well knows, food this hot only compels the eater to consume more and more.  It’s the white-knuckled rush of eating hot food.  That fabled endorphin high.  I ate and ate until my belly was distended, until I was wet as a long-distance runner in July, until the mighty Adana burger was no more than a memory on my plate.  The two Bosnian girls looked at me, rolled their eyes, and laughed.  Only a Bosnian fool would have me as a husband.  Ha ha ha.

Twelve years in the world of haute cuisine has taught me to believe that I know a helluva lot about food.  One late-winter’s visit to the truly excellent Balkan Grill has taught me that I know virtually nothing.  It has taught me there are untold numbers of age-old culinary traditions out there in the great wide world just waiting to be encountered by culinary enthusiasts like me.  As luck would have it, I always travel with my appetite; I’m always hungry for more.  Consider the hamburger.

Your link to Balkan Grill: Balkan Grill

And yeah, the borek was delicious.  Meet me there and I'll bring the beer.  Promise.

 

Finding Religion With the (New) Luther - Breakfast at ChurchKey

There are, we know, two kinds of eaters in this world.  There is the deus ex machina, you-are-what-you-eat variety, who regards the human machine as sacrosanct, as a corporeal temple in the ad maiorem gloriam sense, and whose food consumption is wholly (if angrily) based on a differential calculus of sphincter-puckering complexity wherein derivatives such as nutritional content, sustainability, and ethical harvesting and/or slaughter methods determine the function of whether that Twinkie he is so deeply jonesing for gets shoved into his sanctimonious gobhole, or not.  And then there’s the other kind of eater.  The kind like me.  The kind who believes that within the great bosom of the world beats the heart of assassin, that we’re all just food for worms (the old king-that-ate-of-the-fish-that-ate-of-the-worm-that-now-eats-of-the-king ouroboros of Shakespearian logic thang), and that we’re all just polishing the brass on the Titanic before it goes down.  The kind of eater whose world-weariness and fatalism turns him into a gastronomic bon vivant, a lamp shade-wearing, Hunter S. Thompson-styled fuck-it-I’ll-eat-it kind of omnivore willing consume pretty much anything I come across as long as it wasn’t first tazed or tortured or doused in ammonia or purveyed by a king or laughing clown.

For this kind of eater (and if you’re reading this, that’s likely you) I have the breakfast sandwich for you, friend-o.  It’s the New Luther at Washington, D.C.’s magnificent ChurchKey.  There’s just one catch:  it’s not on the menu (you have to ask your server for it).  And it’s only available on Sunday from Noon to 8PM.  But you already knew that, didn’t you, eh hipster?

In it’s original form (whose progenitor, legend has it, is Mulligan’s bar in Decatur, Georgia), the Luther, named for singer Luther Vandross, is an all-beef patty topped with bacon and sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme donuts.  At ChurchKey, the New Luther is decidedly more haute and high-rent.  At ChurchKey, pieces of boneless, buttermilk fried chicken replace the beef burger, the bacon goes uptown with an applewood smoke, and the Krispy Kremes are replaced with two house-made brioche donuts, glazed with maple-chicken jus, and topped with pecans.  Think of it as a bold new riff on the chicken-and-waffles Southern flavor combinations, with salty and sweet doing those naughty things they do so well together.  The chicken is perfect.  The buttermilk comes through magnificently with a lovely bite of black pepper right behind it.  The bacon is wonderfully smoky.  The brioche is perfectly unsweet behind the perfectly pitched goodness of the maple glaze.  (And all this paired with a truly lovely breakfast stout).  One bite of the New Luther and you’ll likely blush.  And you didn't think you could do that anymore, did you?  Blush, that is.

You could go to ChurchKey for any of their 550 beers from over 30 countries.  You could go to ChurchKey for any of their 50 beers they offer on draught.  You could go to ChurchKey for the 5 cask-conditioned ales they keep in constant rotation.  But you won’t.  You’ll go for the New Luther.  The best breakfast sandwich in America.  Says me.  And you’ll go for the London Calling-era Clash aplay on the in-house system.  And the Lipitor endorsement deal that is surely in your post-New Luther future.

Your link for ChurchKey:  churchkeydc.com

Eating in Gas Stations Part Two - The Taco Bar

Let’s call this the turducken business model for culinary success.  To wit:  if stuffing a chicken into a duck and inside a turkey gives us turducken, then surely stuffing a taco bar into a liquor store and inside a gas station offers us the same misguided entrepreneurial portmanteau that is Taco Bar.  Situated inside a drab and perfectly unremarkable W Express gas station and set contiguous to the Lube Center and your typical soul-sucking suburban strip sprawl, Taco Bar is a culinary dead zone, a no-one-here-gets-out-alive kind of place, beautifully bad, surely, but deliciously devoid of hipster irony and foodie scenester self-congratulations inherent in discovering the worst restaurant location ever, which, following the inverted sentential logic on which our hipster Bizarro Food World now runs, makes it the best restaurant location ever.  But this is Gaithersburg, Maryland.  A place where coolness crawls off to curl up and die.  How better for a restaurateur to attract the culinary life-blood of foot traffic than to locate his business at the great American confluence of petroleum and booze.  Surely the happy motorist, suddenly finding himself peckish, is equally inclined to order the taqitos fritos as is a pro-card-carrying booze hound well into his two-day bender intent on shoving as much choriqueso into his gobhole to keep his blood-alcohol ratio under that magical .08.   It’s pure genius.  It’s so wrong that it’s somehow right.  It’s also why on a cold February day with better things to do I would drive over an hour to a “city” I abhor to eat a fucking gas station taco.

The idea of pairing restaurants and gas stations is old as motoring itself.  The advent of the automobile is arguably the single most important event in American gastronomy since the advent of refrigeration.  It’s the culinary Big Bang of the early 20th Century.  Cars have determined how we eat.  Where we eat.  What we eat.  The idea that road food should not be both delicious and healthful is the cultural blight and condition of late-modernity whose proliferation I blame on those culinary Evil Empires who dispatch black-hearted henchman disguised as kings and clowns to peddle their fecal-infused shit burgers to children while simultaneously dumbing-down the collective culinary IQs of young Americans and saddling them with the burden of carrying Type II diabetes to an early grave.  Some of the greatest meals of my life have been eaten inside gas stations.  I shit you not.  There was the best cheeseburger of my life (so far) in that Bucksnort, Tennessee, Shell station.  The best menudo I’ve ever put in my mouth courtesy of that combination gas station/laundromat in south Phoenix.  Food that enlivens the inner Neal Cassidy road warrior in every American motorist and which sets our highways ablaze with eaters made happy by truly great gas-n-go culinary achievement.   

Taco Bar of Gaithersburg, Maryland, is such a magical place.  Park your car past the petrol pumps, walk inside liquor store crowded with wine bottles, and you’ll find of Washington’s tiniest and most unlikely culinary treasures.  I ordered six tacos.  That’s one of every taco that Taco Bar offers con horchata to wash it all down.  I was soon given a single, white styrofoam plate, on which all six tacos were laid out, concentrically, with laudable aesthetic aptitude, resulting in wrist-spraining heft.  If meat is murder, as a cherished band of my youth alleges, then I was the Charles Manson to this carnage of what was surely a three-pound meat massacre.

Taco Bar emphatically avows strict attendance to a purely Mexican taco making orthodoxy (it calls itself Fast Mexican Food, no less), but what I received was more Salvadoran than Mexican in that my six different proteins were laid atop their twelve corn tortillas (double-ply, yo) naked of any cheese or sour cream or salsa.  The lovely matron who took my order directed me to the Fixin’s Bar (to co-opt the parlance of the Roy Rogers burger joints of my youth) and invited me to partake of complimentary salsas and peppers.  I declined.  I took the naked meat before me as a sign.  A dare, in fact.  For here were food purveyors bold enough not to hide behind the fake beards and Grocho noses of condiments and customer-driven seasoning.  So I picked up my plastic fork and dug in.  (The tacos pictured below were later hired at Taco Bar as body-doubles for that all-important money shot required of this exercise in food porn.)

I expected my first taco to be my least favorite.  Pollo.  Chicken.  The protein of the uninspired eaters and cooks alike and usually a culinary yawn.  But no.  Oh, no.  This chicken was marvelously seasoned, with notes simultaneously hinting at heat and sweet.  And it was delightfully rico, rich, with a true depth of flavor.  It was also tender and moist.  Nothing in the protein was overcooked enough to bite back.  It was a small, quiet triumph and a harbinger of better things to come.

Taco numero dos was the only offering that left me indifferent to the culinary good things at hand.  It was the bistec, the grilled skirt steak, cubed to the verge of being minced, and the only protein at Taco Bar I found under-seasoned and overcooked.  A bit of a culinary snooze fest.  Something I could move beyond and remain untroubled by my decision to sneak off in the middle of the night, on tiptoes, without kissing my sleeping dinner companion adios.

The pastor taco is where I decided hints of culinary greatness were afoot at Taco Bar.  The pork is first marinated in pineapple juice (a fruit whose juice, when not paired with vodka, most resembles, for me, the Libby’s Fruit Cocktail syrup of my 1970s Missouri youth), and then hit with high flame.  Whomever was at the grill this day was a true master.  The pork evoked the perfect meat-to-carbon ratio on the sear and the pineapple juice imparted nothing but acidity and complexity.  Nothing Libby-like going on here and clearly what food enthusiasts consider winning.

Next came the chorizo.  Bold.  Zesty.  But not overly seasoned or greasy.  Good stuff.  A solid, if predicable, offering.  Chorizo is, for me, the veritable culinary spokesperson for Mexican street cuisine.  Chorizo is the guy who tells you how rough he had it growing up around all the cholos and pachucos of his barrio before slipping you the business card of his buddy with the tooth-whitening business.  The authenticity factor just doesn’t jive, but I am always happy to listen to him talk.

And then came the lengua, or beef tongue.  Lawdy Miss Clawdy was this tongue taco good.  Delicate, earthy, succulent, even grassy.  And perfectly cooked.  No.  Let’s not say this tongue was cooked.  Let’s say it was melted, for that’s what this otherwise tough and unforgiving section of offal did in my mouth, bite after bite, time and again.  It melted.  The offal wasn’t awful; it was delicious.

And if that not-insignificant culinary hat-trick we’re enough to place Taco Bar’s offerings in the realm of the real and serious culinary contenders, my final taco was among the most transcendent in recent memory.  The suadero is rib meat grilled and shaved off the bone.  It’s steaming pile of shredded protein, black carbon char, and melted animal fat dashed across a corn tortilla with the kind of haphazard greatness that will have you wondering where such a taco has been every waking moment of your adult life.  Nothing I put in my mouth this day was better than the suadero.

And as for my usual attempts and identifying and quantifying so-called authenticity in “ethnic” eating establishments, I was given these signifiers for consideration:  all-Latina staff who hand trimmed and portioned vast amounts of beef and pork well within plain view of me the entire duration of my stay; a decidedly all-Latino, all-Spanish speaking patronage (no gringos aqui, ese); a sign posted in Spanish warning patrons that eating the suadero might result in traces of rib bone being lodged in their throats; a small dog carried in under the pretense of pleasing the matron with its curly-haired cuteness, but which, I suspect, was brought in, via some unseen Bat Signal, to nibble my considerable all-meat droppings off the liquor store floor.  (I’m bad with a fork, what can I say.)

Tacos at the Taco Bar.  Were they the best tacos the best I’ve ever eaten?  Not by a long shot.  Were they the tacos the best I’ve ever eaten inside a liquor store shoved inside a gas station?  Truly.  Without a doubt.

Go buy some.  Tacos are good for the soul.  But you already knew that.

Your link to Taco Bar:  Taco Bar II - Home