Eating San Francisco - 72 Hours in the City by the Bay

San Francisco.  I can’t say I wasn’t warned.  Cautionary tales abound in travel writing and in song.  And they all tell the same story: that of an unsuspecting traveler who visits San Francisco for the first time, only to end up falling deeply, madly love with the place, never wanting to go home.  I am no exception.  I visited San Francisco for the first time last week with intentions no grander than to run all 26.2 miles of the San Francisco marathon, and run them well.  Maybe I would eat.  Maybe I would drink.  But running an 8-minute mile for most of the race was all I had on my dance ticket.  Simple enough, right?  What happened instead was a break-neck 72-hour gastronomic thrill ride through what is easily North America’s best town for eating.  Call it the culinary love child of Seattle and New York, vibrant and vital, yet awash in drugs and urban filth.  Call it a two-fisted drinking town that looks eastward to Europe for its morning beer, before looking westward, to Asia, for its lunch and dinnertime gastronomic cues, for its frenetic pace, for the way it sprawls across its hills and around its bay.  Ride a city bus long enough and you’ll witness violence (good old fashioned fisticuffs, in my case) and be offered all manner of vice, from discount blow, to the strangely discounted blowjob (I can only imagine what manner of sexual thrill those six dollars would have bought me).  But you’ll also see things, hear things, smell things that are truly exotic to everyday American life points east and north of the bay.  San Francisco looks like nowhere else; it tastes like nowhere else.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon begotten in one of the most beautiful cities in the Western hemisphere.  My love for San Francisco, for its food, its people, was instant and unlike anything I’ve ever felt for an American city (with possible exception of my immortal beloved, New Orleans, but that story is for another day).  Seventy-two nearly sleepless hours in San Francisco was hardly time to sufficiently express for my ardor for the city, but it was time enough to fall forever in love.  Just nine meals in three days (there was a marathon in there, after all) and I knew with utter certainty that I’d finally found my favorite city in which to eat.  And eat is exactly what I did. 

DAY ONE

Breakfast – Chipotle – Washington Dulles Airport (IAD)

I know what you’re thinking:  only a certified douchebag and culinary poser would embark on a gastronomic tour of the greatest restaurant town in America by eating breakfast in a fucking airport Chipotle.  No doubt you regard such an affront to all that is good and sacred in the food world as tantamount to standing at Robert Johnson’s culinary crossroads and making the absolutely wrong deal with the food devil.  I don’t blame you.  Really I don’t.  But before I lose what little street cred I have left, please understand why I would buy three perfectly edible (dare I say delicious?) barbacoa tacos (they’re cooked sous vide, yo) at Chipotle:  because I fucking could.  Because it was 6:30 in the morning.  Because I was hungover.  Because I was in an airport at sunrise and tacos were being served.  Hallelujah.  Tell me you wouldn’t do the same.  Be honest.  Tell me.  You know you would.  That’s what I thought.  Enough said.  On to San Francisco.  

Lunch – Cordon Bleu – Nob Hill, San Francisco

I chose this quirky little Vietnamese eatery for everything that it wasn’t.  It wasn’t Chinese, of course.  It wasn’t expensive.  It was most certainly not crowded.  Cordon Bleu couldn’t possibly be so.  It’s tiny.  More lunch counter than Asian diner, it seats roughly eight on swivel stools around an elbow-shaped counter of deeply worn Formica and offers a delightfully limited menu of protein (chicken, pork, and beef are your options), starch (white rice or meat-filled imperial roll), and vegetables (shredded raw cabbage, in my case).  All the real cooking at Cordon Bleu is done upstairs in someone’s apartment and brought down, as needed, to be held at temperature on the tiny range (as the rice and meat sauce were), or held (not at temperature) in a metal hotel pan beneath the counter or on the floor (as was the parboiled chicken).  But anyone who knows me at all well knows my attitudes toward immigrant home cooks and their third-world food-handling practices, and that those practices, however dicey-looking, will never, ever dissuade me from eating what’s offered me, and that only in the rarest, most freak-of-nature cases would a home-cooked meal distress the eater or remand him to freckling the home bowl.  That nineteen-year-old wake-and-bake line cook at TGI McFucksters will gladly poison you (jalapeno poppers, anyone?), but not immigrant cooks like this.  No way.  So I ordered what was advertised on the marquis outside; I ordered the 5-spice-rub chicken, a parboiled version of which was taken from under the counter by the lone proprietor and cook, rubbed with spice, and charred over open grill flame.  I was soon served perfectly carbonized chicken (half the bird, mind you), white rice, and cabbage slaw, all of which was topped was a strange “meat sauce,” which resembled a Vietnamese take on Campbell’s tomato soup avec an irregular, if ubiquitous, mince of mystery meat.  It was good, even epic, a truly staggering amount of food.  It was food befitting longshoreman and firefighters, the kind of lunch you’d want under your belt before embarking on a long, cold-water swim to Alcatraz.  It was also utterly delicious, and it spoke well of San Francisco that a place like Cordon Bleu would be allowed to exist at all, let alone well able to proffer some truly tasty fare.  Onward and upward, Cordon Bleu.  Your chicken is divine.  Cash only.

Link:  Cordon Bleu - San Francisco Restaurant - MenuPages Vietnamese Restaurant Search

Dinner – Bocce Cafe– North Beach/Telegraph Hill    

Dinner was a no-brainer.  It was decided for me the moment I decided to run the San Francisco marathon, all 26.2 miles of it, that my dinner before the race had to be pasta (runners jones for glucose around mile 17 the way junkies jones for smack, yo).  But in a culinary world rife with barely-mediocre Italian red-sauce joints, the question was whose pasta to eat.  As with most decisions in my life, I decided just to wing it and hope for the best.  So I took the city bus through Chinatown to the glorious (and crowded) neighborhood of North Beach, where really, really good Italian-American food can be had at any number spaghetti houses.  I chose Bocce for no other reason than I didn’t have to wait for a table; there was one for the taking and I took it.  Call it Kismet.  So I entered.  I sat.  I drank beer.  I felt good.  Bocce is, after all, kind of nice.  One might say it’s even pleasant.  Think wood tones and very non-sucky dinner jazz.  It’s secluded insofar as you leave the street and walk a short (and enclosed) distance to find Bocce and all that awaits you inside.  But let’s be clear about this:  our friends at Bocce are not trying to reinvent the gastronomic wheel.  Their menu is a veritable greatest hits playlist of Italian-American cuisine.  What Neal Diamond is to rock, Bocce is to Italian food.  No surprises there lurk, but it’s pleasant once you get into it, even fun.  Clearly Bocce’s approach is to offer food that is familiar (and good) to a public that wants, well, familiar and good.  What I went for, let the record show, was both:  I ordered the cioppino, a fish stew, and easily the city of San Francisco’s most celebrated dish.  Brought from Old World kitchens by Portuguese and Italian fisherman, who settled North Beach in the late-1800s, cioppino has amassed a cult-like following.  To order cioppino in San Francisco is like asking Tony Bennett to sing “I Left My Heart In…”  You get the idea.  It’s a culinary chest bump.  A way of saying, “hit me with your best shot.”  So Bocce did.  They brought me cioppino in a light tomato/wine sauce with a side of linguini, and the stew contained every manner of oceanic protein any marathoner would ever require:  crab, shrimp, calamari, clams, mussels, and salmon, all stewed in a tomato-and-wine based broth perfectly balanced between brininess and acidity.  It was delicious.  And I don’t mean merely good.  I mean Bocce’s cioppino was the kind of delicious wherein the eater grows hungrier the more he eats.  I remember being social, even chatty with my tablemates before my food arrived.  But half way into my bowl of fish stew, I had stopped talking.  Nearing the bottom of my bowl, were you yet inclined to watch me dismantle my meal, you would have heard nothing from me but primal grunting and the click of my teeth against empty shells.  I was fed, body and soul, and deeply satisfied in the reptilian part of my brain.  But more importantly than being merely satisfied, I was ready for the next morning's run.

Link:  http://www.boccecafe.com/

DAY TWO

Breakfast – Hotel Mayflower – Nob Hill

The ugly and twisted little truth about the gastronomic proclivities of long distance runners is this:  we don’t eat much before a race, and what we eat can hardly be called food.  What you see pictured left represents my paltry, even dismal, pre-race meal.  The hard-boiled eggs delivered protein and fat; the orange juice tweaked my blood sugar and nicely quelled those ubiquitous pre-marathon jitters.  As for the Gu Energy Gel, I hardly know what to say other than guilty as charged.  It’s not food.  But it is a magical elixir of sugar, amino acids, electrolytes, and caffeine conjoined in a gag-inducing pharmacological paste.  My flavor of choice:  Espresso Love.  And while it’s far from delicious, it’s something that runners consume like crack before and during a race.  It works.  It’s fuel for the fire, and it makes us faster.  And as every runner knows:  the faster you run, the faster you reach the post-race beer tent.  The beer served at the WiPro Marathon is not the seven ounces of weaker-than-water Michelob Ultra-Light swill served in D.C. race tents.  Oh no.  Not here.  In San Francisco, runners are rewarded with pints of Sierra Nevada Torpedo, Porter, and Pale Ale.  We drank four before ten o’clock in the morning because that’s what runners do after a race.  It’s why we run.  For the beer.  So the secret’s out.  Now you know.

Lunch – Golden Boy Pizza – North Beach/Telegraph Hill

Carbohydrates.  The race might have been over, and while my head might have been full of beer, my body was still screaming for sugar.  Pizza, greasy, protein-dense pizza, I knew, was the quickest path to feeling fully restored.  So I returned the Italian-heavy restaurant scene of North Beach and scored three slices (pictured left) at Golden Boy Pizza, then three more (of a very different style) slices at Tony’s Coal Fired Pizza and Slice House.  Competitive running does that to you.  It makes you a glutton.  So I took my pizza and repaired to the gloriously sunny, grassy knoll of the cathedral-like Saints Peter and Paul Church to tie into my slices and really chow down.  The good folks at Golden Boy offer a California-style square slice, in that the pizza is as much about the bread as it is the almost focaccia-like crust.  And when you’re in San Francisco, why not make it all about the bread.  But for my money and East Coast tastes, I’ll take the pizza offered by Tony’s any day.  Each slice Tony’s pizza was the kind of big, sloppy, glorious mess you’d find anywhere in New York’s Times Square, the holy land of truly thin crust, whose sole purpose is to deliver, with only minimal triangular interference, the greasy goodness of pizza cheese and essential toppings.  Tony’s Coal Fired Pizza did that for me.   It acted as dietary ballast and my physiological equilibrium was soon back on track.  And so was my thirst.  I looked at my watch.  Just what I thought:  time for libation, a potent potable, a stiff one, for in San Francisco, more than anyplace I’ve ever been, it’s always, always beer-thirty.

Link:  Golden Boy Pizza Home Page

Link:  Tony's Pizza Napoletana | San Francisco

Drinks – Toronado Pub – The Lower Haight   

You have to look no further than the miraculous Toronado Pub for proof positive that San Francisco is a two-fisted drinking town where midday drinking is not only tolerated, but, for many, a way of life.  I took the 6 bus.  Part bombed out punk-rock dive bar, part sacrosanct shrine where beer nerds worship before tap upon tap of the West Coast’s finest craft beers, the Toronado is the apotheosis of all that is right in the drinking world, a perfect collision of cultural zeitgeists both low and high, where drinking really rare craft beer in the middle of a summer afternoon is somehow made to feel like an act of subversion, and as if you’ve found a way to really stick it to the man.  I drank two pints total at the Toronado:  one pint of the Allagash White Ale (delightful), and one pint of the Death and Taxes Black Beer by Moonlight Brewing (even more so).  I played two songs on the no-Grateful Dead-allowed jukebox.  One song by Waylon Jennings; the other by his son, Shooter Jennings.  And no Grateful Dead.  The Toronado Pub is, surely and without question, one of the best bars in America.  It’s led by one of the best barman in America, our bartender that afternoon, and the incomparable don’t-bullshit-me, don’t-waste-my-fucking-time, know-what-you-want-before-you-order Tad (last name unknown), the high-priest of go-fuck-yourself craft beer authorities in the lower forty-eight.  If you drink anywhere in San Francisco, the Toronado it must be.  Go.  Drink.  Listen to music.  Be nice to Tad.  And bring cash.  It’s all they take.  You’ll thank me.  You know you will.

Link:  Toronado Pub, San Francisco

Dinner – House of Nanking – Chinatown

Like any food adventurer worth his salt, I always consult local wisdom when making a culinary choice as important as where to eat dinner in a new city, especially when that city is as gastronomically important as San Francisco.  So I asked every Bay area resident I could corner.  Where, dude, where?  One after another, they offered up the same name:  House of Nanking.  That was a problem.  For while I might delight in Chinese food, I am famously adverse to the corn-starched, MSG supercharged charms, as they are, of Chinese American restaurants.  My native San Francisco sources remained insistent:  House of Nanking, and then they would smile.  Why so?  I visited Nanking to find out why.  What I found was a line out the restaurant twenty deep.  I loathe restaurant lines and resolved to pull my ripcord and bail on the joint.  But this line of intrepid eaters was not your usual gathered tribe of slack-jawed tourists in Mom jeans and khakis.  All appeared to be locals; some were even—gasp—hipsters.  So we waited, my friends and I.  And waited.  And waited.  Every now and again, a scowling middle-aged Chinese lady would burst out of the restaurant and choose which patrons would be next.  The line, we quickly saw, was not so much a progression as a really good way to keep waiting patrons from blocking the sidewalk.  After thirty minutes, we were chosen to sit.  We followed the scowling, middle-aged woman through the crowded dining room to a long, bench-like family-style table.  We sat.  It was loud, very.  Our waiter appeared.  He was sweating and scowling.  He appeared…angry.  We attempted to order, but he shook his head, took our menus, and scowled some more.  You ordered two beef dishes, he said.  Not allowed.  We are famous for the chicken.  I bring you the chicken.  You have that instead.  We were astonished, even nonplussed.  No where in our collective dining experiences had our dietary wishes been trumped by those of a fucking waiter.  We would eat what they brought us.  Simple enough.  All we could do was laugh.  For now I suddenly understood why everyone who insisted I try House Nanking had smiled after making the recommendation:  the restaurant was Chinese food as performance art, a Cantonese riff on Seinfeld’s own “Soup Nazi” episode, hostility made hilarious by its own naked aggression.  I loved every minute of the performance, the highlight being when we were given our check and asked to pay just midway through our entrée course, which, alas, made it difficult to concentrate on the food (or now conjure its recollection).  Suffice it to say, the food of Nanking was decent, even flirting, at times, with kinda delicious in the precise way the General Tsou’s Chicken on the Whole Foods hot bar so nicely scratches that I-need-bad-Chinese-food itch that flares up in all of us all too rarely.  Perhaps not rarely enough, however, for the scowling hostess of Nanking.  Another blow-by Nanking on the way back to the hotel, hours later, saw her still at it, shrieking at patrons lined up like soldiers, evidently happy to stand in line.

Link:  House of Nanking Chinese Restaurant 南京小馆 - San Francisco, CA

DAY THREE

Breakfast – La Boulange Bakery – Russian Hill

The plan was not to eat breakfast.  The plan was to starve ourselves and go crazy at lunch.  But we were hollowed out by the previous night’s drinking, and hung over on Nanking’s heavy dosing of MSG.  So we decided to breakfast on something light, on fare familiar to us, food unchallenging in every way.  A glorious morning walk through Russian Hill produced the equally delightful La Boulange Bakery, a low-key Bay area chain that manages to achieve Franco rustic without being too cute by half.  The bakery (in that early morning light) felt actually, well, kinda French and perfectly unchain-like.  The menu offered hot breakfast items and the bakery case boasted all manner of baked goods, but what caught my attention were the sandwiches.  I went with a perennial favorite:  prosciutto with arugula, Swiss cheese, and Dijon mustard on olive roll, all for $3.50.  But what made an already delicious sandwich experience special was the fact that La Boulange offers a free compliment of Occidental sides (arranged by themselves on a wall-hugging side table).  Fava beans.  Olives.  Cornichon.  They’re all there.  So what turned out to be a very reasonably priced breakfast turned out to be the best breakfast deal in all of San Francisco.  That much salt for breakfast, that much flavor, all for $3.50, and I was ready, body and mind, heart and soul, for what was about to happen to us.  And what might that have been?  In a word:  lunch.

Link:  La Boulange Bakery

Lunch – Swan Oyster Depot – Nob Hill

This is why I travel.  This is why I eat.  To find a place like this.  The restaurant of my dreams.  A place so absolutely perfect, so absolutely fucking good, that it makes me want to quit the food business and the business of writing about food altogether, because there's nothing more, or better, I can contribute, nothing more I can say.  Just walk away from it all, and leave it to the people who do it better than anyone else.  San Francisco has such a place.  It’s called the Swan Oyster Depot, and it’s easily the best of its kind in America.  So what kind of restaurant is it?  It’s twenty old-fashioned swivel stools strung along a narrow hallway and set against a marble diner counter, where you sit, simply enough, and eat some of the best seafood of your life.  It’s that simple.  There is no cooking.  There is just shucking.  And laughing.  And eating shellfish.  And drinking beer.  It’s also you thinking to yourself:  so this is what it feels like to be really and truly arrive.  It’s also to arrive at ten o’clock in the morning (with breakfast still in your teeth) and find yourself and your best friend nineteenth and twentieth in line for a restaurant that holds exactly twenty (or so, but who’s counting) at a time.  It’s also to be seated at exactly 10:30AM and have a frosty pint of Anchor Steam staring you in the face.  A basket of bread comes next.  Then comes the seafood:  a large cocktail glass stuffed with every conceivable variety of shellfish and seafood on the menu that morning (the Combination Cocktail, it’s called), followed by a dozen (in six amazing varieties) of the best oysters you’ll ever put in your mouth.  And just like that, gastronomic Nirvana is achieved on a culinary transaction as simple as cold beer and raw oysters eaten with your bare hands.  Swan Oyster Depot is, for this eater, at least, a slice of true culinary heaven, and one place you must, must go.  Cash only.  And go early.    

Dinner – Andale Mexican Restaurant – San Francisco International (SFO)

So where does the culinary explorer dine after one of the most glorious, most sublime eating experiences of his adult life?  He goes to the airport.  He eats tacos.  Then he flies home, precisely in that order.  But this is still San Francisco we’re talking about, and even in its most remote and transitory of outposts, the food is still really fucking good.  To bookend the trip, (and to atone for my transgression with Chipotle) I decided I must eat tacos.  But unlike Washington’s IAD airport, or any other American airport I've yet visited, San Francisco’s SFO boasted the really good Andale Mexican Bar and Restaurant, which felt like a real walk-up taco stand, airport be damned, and which served me three really good cooked-to-order tacos carnitas.  I sat by two pilots and ate.  All flavors represented (pig, cilantro, onion, lime) were fresh and vibrant.  In any place in America, these tacos would demand respect.  In an airport, they were nothing short of divine.  So with airport food this good, I was suddenly (even deeply) sad to have to leave what is clearly the best food town in America.  San Francisco is, without question, my new favorite place to be.  And like so many other travelers before me, I did indeed leave my heart in San Francisco.  But I left it for a reason.  For I now have excuse to return to the city by the bay and get it back. 

Link:  Andalé Mexican Restaurant. Always Fresh. Always Andalé.

Postscript - The Hotel Mayflower

Every successful expedition, culinary and otherwise, needs a good base camp.  Mine was this:  the Hotel Mayflower.  Built in the 1920s and last redecorated just after the crew of Dirty Harry wrapped up shooting, she’s still a gem of an old hotel.  She is what a San Francisco hotel should be:  formerly glamorous, now a bit down at the heels, a place where you could imagine Chet Baker holed up with an ounce of brown heroin, a hooker, and his beautiful golden horn.  It’s run by a lovely Irish lady, and it’s packed with budget-minded Europeans.  It feels European on foggy mornings.  I loved it.  And it’s where I’ll stay on my return.  

Link:  HOTEL MAYFLOWER, San Francisco

Viva la Revolucion! - Eating at Foodtrucks

They were the first harbingers.  The primary portents of a real and viable American food revolution.  Omens telling of a fundamental shift in modern American gastronomy.  They were food trucks, and they heralded a radical new age in food purveyance wherein eaters found themselves suddenly unfettered from the tyranny of the restaurant, the despotism of the chef, the snobbery of the sommelier, the pencil-lipped douchebaggery of the maître d’.  Food trucks were the culinary war cry in a populist food movement, the gastronomic rebel yell calling an army of newly enlivened eaters into the streets to celebrate liberation by eating the peoples’ cuisine, the food of our mothers, our fathers, the foods of our beginnings, the temples of our familiar.  The act of eating at a food truck was, however briefly, an act of political subversion, a veritable fuck you to the business-as-usual restaurant model.  It was also an act of celebration, a gesture of embrace, for the often-remarkable culinary achievements of these everyday journeymen food truck cooks and operators.  From New York City to Austin, Texas, to L.A., food trucks challenged the very paradigm of what it meant to purchase and consume prepared food.  The food truck movement, for those first, too-brief and shining moments, marshaled a diaspora of legions of eaters away from the brick-and-mortal prisons of wallet-fleecing pretension, and out into cityscapes buzzing and big with true culinary revolution.  It was street food come alive.  And it was a wonder.

But then something happened. 

Something bad.

As with all revolutions, the food truck revolution was immediately co-opted and corrupted by forces antithetical to the original spirit of insurgency.  The food truck movement was suddenly overrun by hacks and charlatans whose menus offered little more than mediocrity, culinary irony, or gastronomic nostalgia.  Gone (or so it seemed) were the aspirants to greatness.  For every soul food truck that went missing, a cupcake truck appeared in its place.  For every middle-aged journeyman cook selling the saltenas of his native Bolivia to go missing in action, there quickly appeared a sock-headed hipster selling ironic macaroni and fucking cheese.  Worse still, cities got in on the action.  Municipalities (and mayors) beholden to the powerful restaurant lobby on coasts both left and right quickly passed laws that made it virtually impossible for food trucks to park, to sell, to operate in the already difficult business of purveying food.  And just like that, the food truck movement seemed over, defeated by that especially potent American variety of governmental shortsightedness and just plain bad fucking taste.

Or so I thought.

This last weekend, I encountered not one, but two area food trucks that suggest, by the seriousness and complexity of the food they’re selling, the food truck movement is far from over.  It’s a still-vital force of true believers hell bent on a little culinary payback and reckoning.  Truck owner/operators like the ones I just visited have clearly decided they are in it to win it.  These guys are throwing down hard.  And they’re pushing back.  Hipster hawkers and city council members beware:  there are a few, very serious food truck operators out there, who are building an army of savvy eaters inured to hipster fare like ironic deviled eggs and fake falafel.  These food trucks, the serious ones, are indoctrinating new recruits one reinvigorated appetite at a time.  Love food trucks or hate them; a declaration of allegiance is implicit in whether or not you eat their food.  And I, for one, know whose side I’m on.  I’m eating.  I’m eating it all. 

Especially this:

The terrifically delicious Borinquen Lunch Box.  It is, to my knowledge, the only Puerto Rican food truck rolling around these mean streets of culinary Washington.  They offer a holy trio of sandwiches:  the Churrasco (skirt steak), the Cubano (roasted pork), and the Tripletas (pork, skirt steak, ham).  They also offer alcapurrias (beef-filled plaintain fritters), and empenadillas (fried pastry stuffed with beef, chicken, or pizza filling).  The sandwich meat is grilled on site, and the alcapurrias and empenadillas are fried-to-order.  Not to mention there is Puerto Rican music on the truck speakers.  We were ten-deep at the window, and despite having oodles of time to suss out I wanted to eat, I choked when asked for my order.  I blanked.  I balked.  I simply couldn’t make up my mind.  Why?  Because I realized, in that moment, I new absolutely nothing about Puerto Rican food.  Nada.  Sure, I spent my twenties in Chicago.  Sure, I’ve had really good twelve-year run in the food business.  But I’ve somehow never knowingly put Puerto Rican food in my mouth.  Ever.  And not for the lack of trying.  I’ve eaten pig’s ears.  Crickets.  Sheep testicles.  I’ve eaten everything ever put in front of me, but Puerto Rican food has, for whatever reason, eluded me.  So I threw a proverbial dart at the menu.  I threw up a Hail Mary.  I asked the nice lady behind the counter to order for me.  She smiled and gave me a Tripletas and an order of pizza empenadillas.  I took a street curb for a chair and ate.  What I encountered was a cuisine not quite like any other I’ve ever tasted.  It was simultaneously Hispanic and Caribbean.  It juxtaposed flavors from both the island and the barrio.  It put two outwardly contrary culinary approaches together on one bun with stern instructions to get the fuck along.  And get along the flavors did, and beautifully.  A massive (though succulent and highly seasoned) three-meat mélange heaped on bread and topped with shoestring potatoes.  I devoured the thing.  I gnashed.  I tore.  The Tripletas was good.  Really good.  And what I was left with at meals’ end was a greasy foil wrapper and a sense of wonder that comes when one’s horizons (culinary and otherwise) have just broadened and you are filled with a new sense of wonder.  My meal at Borinquen Lunch Box left me lightheaded and happy with the feeling that comes from discovering something entirely new and truly tasty.

And I wanted more.

Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait long: almost exactly forty-eight hours later found me standing before the dangerously delicious Curley’s Q.  Less of a food truck experience than a culinary tent revival, owner/operator Curley (so reads his shirt, though his real name is David Cornblatt) quietly, if powerfully, preaches and proselytizes the virtues of hardwood smoked meats through a holy trinity of barbequed proteins of pork, chicken, and beef.  And for the second time in two days I stood, slackjawed and dumbfounded, in front of a food truck.  Not because I didn’t know what to order.  No, no.  Not this time.  This vexation stemmed from a desire to eat everything in Curley’s truck.  So I tried.  I ordered Curley’s Plate.  To wit:  pulled pork, sliced brisket, pulled chicken, and pork ribs; all of it paired with baked beans, slaw, and a perfectly perky jalapeno pepper, jam-packed inside a styrofoam clamshell that, when full, must surely weigh more than two pounds.  Curley offers house-made sauces (one Eastern Carolina, the other a tangy South Carolina/Memphis hybrid), but as any barbeque devotee will tell you:  ignore the sauces, ignore the sides, and concentrate on the smoke inside the meat.  So I sat on the parking lot curb and ate.  I ate with my bare hands.  And what I discovered, was easily some of the best barbeque I’ve yet tasted in these, the most-Northern hinterlands of the great American South.  Curley knows what he’s doing here.  He’s got some serious barbeque mojo working for him; the man’s got serious gastronomic chops, and the gods of wood smoke are clearly his friends.  The chicken revealed such depth and complexity of flavor that it was, on first tasting, nearly indistinguishable from Curley’s truly awesome pulled pork.  The pork ribs possessed that mythical pink ring that lives just under the layer of top char and tells you, the eater, that yes, this rib meat has been smoked to perfection.  But the brisket.  Wow.  The brisket left me stupefied.  Speechless.  The brisket was (and I tread lightly here, as my own mother makes a Southern smoked brisket every time I visit) some of best I’ve ever tasted.  Sorry, Mom, but Curley’s got it all figured out.

Revolutions are messy; their architects, imperfect.  The food truck movement is no exception.  It is rife with lowbrow culinary approaches and gastronomic mediocrity.  But it is also peopled with aspirants to greatness like the good folks at Borinquen Lunch Box and the maestro of food truck barbeque, David Cornblatt of Curley’s Q.  Folks who aspire to change the face of American fast food.  Journeyman cooks who endeavor to wean an urban American workforce off food purveyed by laughing clowns and sandwich shops named after underground mass transit systems. Owner/operators who seek to enliven palates and broaden culinary minds.  I, for one, am ready.  I’ve got a pocket full of cash, and I’m more than happy to stand in line.  But this time, I'll know what to order.

Your link for Borinquen Lunch Box:  Home Page

Your link for Curley's Q:  Curley's Q - Food Truck & Catering | Authentic BBQ in Montgomery County, MD | Curley's Q - Food Truck & Catering

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Rock 'n Rogue @ 24rpm - Culinary Punk Rock, Made in Detroit

I entered Blagden Alley looking for food.  What I found, instead, was revolution. 

Before revolutions come confessions, however.  And this:

I am not supposed to write about Rogue 24.  The purpose of this blog is to celebrate the efforts of journeymen cooks and streetfood purveyors who serve truly delicious, often remarkable food easily within the financial reach of men and women of the American proletariat working class.  Haute cuisine establishments peddling so-called “molecular gastronomy” to affluent eaters with far, far more sophisticated palates than my own have strictly been off limits since I started this little binary enterprise in food writing a year ago, however often I might work with their chefs, or patronize them myself as eater and enthusiast extraordinaire.  The chance encounter with culinary excellence at a roadside diner whose smoking grill cook is ashing his Pall Mall into the homefries holds far more excitement and, in my opinion, is vastly more deserving of celebration than, say, the gastronomy of a three Michelin star establishment whose excellence is expected and is, after all, a matter of course. 

So why Rogue 24?  Why now?  After all the ink that’s been spilt on the restaurant and its Chef/Operator RJ Cooper, why lift my own pen and add to the fray?  Because I think RJ’s detractors have gotten him all wrong.  I think there has been a fundamental misreading of Cooper’s personality, his culinary aesthetic, and what Rogue 24 sets out to achieve every time Cooper and his team suit up in their whites.  RJ could have dumbed it down.  He could have opened a pizzeria.  He could have opened a barbeque joint.  With the street cred surrounding his James Beard Award and all the celebrity chef buzz following his remarkable appearance on Food Network’s Iron Chef, RJ could have opened a cupcake stand and made a killing.  But he didn’t.  Instead, he built one of the finest, most challenging restaurants in Washington and in one of the most unlikely places.  Cooper clearly endeavored to reinvent the restaurant experience for Washington eaters, transforming it into a journey, a thrill ride, while all the time, and with his usual brash, two-fisted swagger, attempting to create a cuisine that Washingtonians had never before seen.  He tried, as is still trying, to reinvent the wheel.  My meal at Rogue 24 last year was easily the greatest single meal of my life.  Do I say that of Cooper and Rogue 24 simply because I’m just a culinary simpleton from Missouri farm stock too easily impressed by the dazzle and flash of big-city gastronomy and the cult of chef celebrity?  Maybe.  Or do I now sing Rogue’s praises because I’m a food careerist with over twelve years in the business and maybe, just maybe, I know what I fuck I’m talking about?  Maybe, just maybe, I’ve put in the hard time to know when chef like Cooper is putting his soul into his work and leading with his heart.  What I experienced at Rogue 24 was, truly, nothing short of transcendent.  More than just a meal; it was an experience, and its why we pay chefs like RJ Cooper to cook for us, because when they cook as well as RJ does, the journey can be transformative, and we leave a restaurant like Rogue totally stuffed, more than a little drunk, and forever changed.  Because RJ shows his patrons what new possibilities in American gastronomy lie in wait, and how thrilling a restaurant experience can be if the patrons are willing to let go, chill out, and enjoy the trip. 

Another confession.

Chef RJ Cooper.  I know the man.  I have worked with him several times over the last few years at fine events in and around the Washington area.  This, however, is not to suggest we were destined to be pals.  If anything, it’s quite the opposite.  It means we were initially disposed to hating each other’s guts in the deep and abiding way dogs hate cats.  He was the celebrity chef with the Beard Award, the awesome motorcycle and the great hair.  I was the front-of-house guy only very briefly famous for a spread done on me in the Washington Post, and whose waiters were going to find a way to fuck RJ’s shit up.  RJ and I have had several successes together, and maybe, just maybe, RJ has, over the years, found something to like in me.  Our luncheon for a Spanish/Japanese interest with world-famous chef and three Michelin star, Basque mac daddy, Juan Marie Arzac, (which I most certainly did not fuck up) comes to mind.  But while I have found much to admire in Cooper, liking the guy does not make me his apologist.  I’m not shilling for RJ here to generate covers for his restaurant, and I’m most certainly not his bitch.  RJ can take care of himself.  He’s good-looking enough to break hearts, and big enough to break jaws.  But I believe that beneath all those tattoos and Harley Davidson smoke and caustic, in-your-face swagger, beats the heart of a poet, a truly nice guy who just wants to cook for a living and, while at it, change the face of American gastronomy one perfect bite at a time.

The first element of Rogue’s genius lies in the idea of removing choice from the restaurant experience.  Instead of being handed a leather-bound menu thick as the Los Angeles phone book, and later in the meal, an equally daunting wine list by a smirking sommelier, you are, at Rogue, asked to make two choices and two choices only.  They are these:  how many courses do you want to eat (a 16-course progression, or the 24-course full monty), and are you drinking alcohol?  That’s it.  That’s all you’re asked to decide.  And with those decisions made, you are then invited to relax, sit back and enjoy the magical carpet ride that will, for the next three hours, take you into a culinary wonderland of startling textures and flavor pairings so daring that before you know it, dinner at Rogue has become a rush.  It’s as if adrenaline is the magical, secret ingredient of RJ’s cooking, and it builds, incrementally, throughout the night, until dinner at Rogue is suddenly more fun than that time you stole your father’s red convertible to satisfy the pure and simple wonder of discovering how fast you could go.  Eating at Rogue is exactly like that.  You don’t exactly know where you’re going, and you don’t know what’s around the next corner, but you can’t wait to find out what lies ahead. 

Even more central to Rogue’s genius, perhaps, is the idea for design of the restaurant itself:  heighten the Rogue experience by putting an open kitchen in the middle of the dining room and having RJ and his team of cooks serve the tables themselves.  Waiters fuck off, who needs them.  If what Food Network peddles is correlative to food porn, then what Rogue is selling is the chance for patrons to lube up, put on a jimmy, and join in on the fun.  It’s also the area where RJ shines more brightly than any chef I’ve ever worked with, for without the Food Network lights and cameras and makeup, there around the kitchen of Rogue, you see how fucking hard it is to be a chef.  You get a real and palpable sense of how demanding it is to forever be on your feet, in the unrelenting heat of a working kitchen, and how taxing it is to concentrate that long, that hard, on each and every plate that leaves your line, night after night after night, year after year.  Putting a chef, any chef (especially a raging perfectionist like RJ), in the middle of a dining room is an act of daring, a recipe for sure-fire disaster akin to burning down a fat one while pumping gas; bad things are sure to happen.  Except at Rogue.  Twice in my meal at Rogue, RJ spotted two things that raised his famous ire.  The first was that my napkin had fallen to the floor and none among his staff had provided me with a new one.  Second was the fact that my plate, for one of the courses, had not received enough fois gras (his estimation, not mine), so over came RJ himself to remedy his sous chef’s error.  I realize these service gaffs may seem like piddly shit to you, inconsequential, undeserving of a chef’s attention.  But to me it meant the world.  This is what I fucking do for a living.  I shape the experience of clients by paying attention to the shit you wouldn’t think matters.  You can’t fake paying attention like this.  So to have a chef of Cooper’s stature noticing napkins on floors and insufficient fois gras amounts on plates tells me (as it should you) that this guy Cooper isn’t phoning it in.  It tells me RJ is the real deal.  It tells me that cooking, for RJ, is much like a street fight, that the dude is always ready to rumble, and that ten-to-one suckers, I betting RJ’s going to drop his man.  

The third and final component in Rogue’s mad trinity of culinary genius is, of course, the food itself.  But I’m not going to write about RJ’s food because I’m not qualified.  I haven’t spent the last twenty years trying to redefine American cuisine by taking it apart and putting it back together again the way you dismantle and reassemble a favorite uncle’s Dodge Charger (only to find that it now runs faster).  For critiques of RJ’s cooking, I send you to Yelp, where every douchebag out there working in a cubicle, wearing khakis, and carrying a wallet deigns himself qualified to publically criticize the life’s work of truly great chef’s just because he doesn’t understand what he’s eating or what the restaurant is all about.  Suffice it to say that when RJ appears tableside with instructions on how best to consume the next course (“inhale the smoke first” or “chug it like a beer”), you realize that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy, and that the dish before you in no way resembles anything served at grandma’s house, and that culinary revelation is waiting for you at the end of your fork. 

 

I’ve followed the press on Rogue for a year now the way a baseball fan follows news of a favorite team.  In none of the coverage, however, have I ever sensed that any critic “gets” Rogue 24.  Why, for instance, has no critic explored RJ’s motives in locating his restaurant in an alley, for fuck’s sake, in one of the most violent (until recently) neighborhoods in DC?  Why has no critic considered RJ’s place of birth (Detroit) and how that might inform the way he approaches gastronomy?  Why has no critic “read” RJ’s own personal aesthetic and decoded the lack of bullshit in his tattoos, his Harley, his taste in music?  That ain’t trendy, people; that’s real.

My theory, posited for your approval, in the form of an equation:

RJ Cooper + Rogue 24 = the culinary equivalent of punk rock.  And not just any punk rock.  I’m talking Iggy and the Stooges rolling naked in broken glass and peanut butter, Detroit style.

RJ and I are from the same place.  Not the same city, mind you (he’s from Detroit; I’m from D.C. via Missouri), but the same mindset.  We are both from happy, white, middle class families.  We were both, as children, fed and loved.  But somehow we both decided to say fuck it to our families for the far more dubious pleasure of inhabiting the punk/post-punk club scenes of our native cities.  And while I was being kicked in the face by the bare-footed Henry Rollins at the original 9:30 Club on F Street, RJ was being stabbed (three times!) in the chest at a 7 Seconds show in Detroit.  And just how tough was Detroit back in the day (as if it’s not now)?  When I first visited Detroit (think early-90s), I was touring with an awesome rockabilly band, Three Blue Teardrops.  I was filling in for my friend Rick on bass.  The minute I first stepped onto a Detroit sidewalk, a man walked up to me and said this:  I’m going to kill you.  Three songs into our first set, someone threw a beer bottle at me, shattering it across my bass.  Tough city.  Such is RJ’s pedigree.

When I look at Rogue, I see perhaps the only haute cuisine restaurant in America that truly and purely embodies the punk rock ethos unique to our generation.  When I look at the place in Blagden Alley, I see a restaurant that says, fuck off, you’re not cool enough to eat here.  But when I consider RJ’s cooking, I see a culinary effort that strives for purity, and that is trying to change the world.  And that’s punk rock in a nutshell, folks.  It’s about brutal honesty.  It’s about trying to change the world by tearing it down and searching for the essential truth therein.  Why no food critic has yet drawn the comparison between Rogue 24 and punk rock is beyond me. 

And just to get it off my chest, I’ll conclude with this:  “molecular gastronomy” happens every time you poach an egg, so let’s move on and look more deeply at what RJ (among others) is really doing with food.

And yes, Rogue 24, is expensive, to be sure.  But you should eat there.  At least once in your lifetime.  Because RJ is easily one of the best cooks of our generation.  And if you care anything about the course of American gastronomy, you’ll want to have something to tell the kids.

A link to RJ's Rogue 24:  Rogue24

A link to the new me:  Proletariateats | Gastronomy For The Masses

Eating In Empty Lots - Part l - The Crab Shack

If farm-to-table is the Platonic ideal for the food production-to-consumption model, the whole pasture-to-pie hole routine, then surely ocean-to-foodtruck comes in a close second.  For what culinary encounter could be better than chancing upon a seafood purveyor beached in a gravel parking lot strangely redolent of Old Bay?  By what gastronomic kismet would have you able to simply (if randomly) roll up to this truly improbable foodtruck, only to drive off, minutes later, with a garbage bag full of steaming crustations and a quickening across your heart?  Because it’s written in the stars.  Because the sensei of gastronomic excellence have so ordained.  You will eat at The Crab Shack, grasshopper, and yes, you will like it.  Such is their decree.

I know of The Crab Shack only because it suddenly appeared in my neighborhood one morning in a weed-choked empty lot, between a rarely-driven schoolbus (shown beside; the owner operates a CDL class when the mood strikes) and a psychic/palm reader’s place of business, if that’s what they’re calling the business of reading palms, these days.  Why would a seafood truck be here, I wondered.  Stolen, I thought.  Left to rust, I speculated.  Tomfoolery, I decided.  Madness.  For what kind of lunatic would find an overgrown, abandoned lot in a mostly-residential (and highly unfashionable) neighborhood of Alexandria South suitable for peddling a highly-perishable food product from a trailer better suited to hauling ponies around the childrens' birthday circuit?

John would.  That’s who.  The sole proprietor of this unlikely enterprise.  And he's no madman.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  He’s comfortably into middle age and wears the hair, tattoos, and complexion of a Native American who has known hard work for most of his life.  An old soul.  Knowing and wise.  But also someone with whom you’d want to address in careful tones of deference and respect.  Someone who you’d want  to have your back in a barroom throwdown, someone who could likely drop his opponent like a bag of rocks.  And if that’s not reason enough to be nice when ordering, John’s elderly father hangs out inside the trailer as well.  Wears a Fedora.  Fingers a cane.  And never blinks through what can only be described as an ex-pugilist’s leer.  Imagine William S. Burroughs in the person of an elderly erstwhile crabber and you’ll have the idea, boy-o.

Seafood stands like this are commonplace across the American South.  Travel the two-lane black tops of the Virginia Tidewater, the Carolina Low Country, north to south, and you’ll encounter an almost-endless procession of shrimpers or crabbers peddling the day’s catch from the tarpaulin-covered backs of their bombed-out F-150s.  But here, in this part Northern Virginia, that never happens.  It simply isn’t done.  Fisherman do not sell their catch from pickups, let alone trailers retrofitted with refrigeration and the ability to steam and season one’s catch for roadside patrons.  The county does not let them.  To have John tell it, he wanted to locate on land he's owned for years.  But Fairfax County shook him down for thousands in licensing fees and permits (to protect, no doubt, the proprietary fiscal interests of such culinary brick-and-mortar fixtures as Hooterbees and T.G.I. McFucksters).

So here he is, beached in a gravel parking lot between the psychic’s place and a big yellow school bus, a place almost existential in the loneliness it evokes.  But John’s loss is our gain.  Because his Crab Shack is exactly the kind of food purveyance my neighborhood (or any neighborhood, for that matter) needs.  Local.  Seasonal.  Fresh as it gets.  Because John sources his crabs and shrimp from Wanchese, North Carolina, a fishing collective on Roanoke Island, Dare County, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, widely known for producing some of the finest crustations in the mid-Atlantic.

I stopped on a recent Saturday afternoon and approached this foodtruck misbegotten in the gastronomic wasteland that is this part of Fairfax County.  John greeted me.  He smiled.  Then he asked me what I’d like to eat.  I looked.  But my cursory glance at the menu was made superfluous by the sudden whiff of Old Bay adrift on the air.  Crabs.  A dozen, I said, followed by an emphatic and most polite please.  John left the trailer out the back door, threw a dozen of the little bastards in his steamer, and, moments later, walked out into the parking lot with a garbage bag full of the most glorious crabs I’ve yet encountered this season.  And as John tied off the bag and handed it to me, I understood by the glimmer in his eye that this was no mere food-for-money exchange.  This was more than that.  A proffering.  A gift.  A bequeathment.  Money had nothing to do with it.  For what John knew then, and what I was soon to learn as I ripped the bag open with my bare teeth, is that the act of sitting down at a wooden table in summer with a bag of perfectly steamed blue crabs and an ice-cold beer is one of the most transcendent culinary experiences a person can have.  Ever.  I experienced it.  And so should you.

The Crab Shack is located in the 5700 block of Telegraph Road in Alexandria, Virginia.  John is open for business (at the time of this writing) on weekends, midday to late afternoon.  Visit him.  Buy his food.  If you’re disinclined to eating in empty lots, I promise you a seat at my kitchen table.  And my beer is always cold.

Call John at 703.507.5607 for insight, wisdom, and directions.

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.