Amazing taco website plug

[scottdisco]

out to my man Bandini (the taco hunter), our man Zhao and all SoCal Dissensians


i used to read the Great Taco Hunt but had not seen his new one until today (i know he acquired a love of Greco-Turkish kebabs from a year in Europe)

Daily Taco

 

[baboon2004]

that is unfair.

#1 - I am so fucking hungry right now.

#2 - I don't live anywhere near southern California.

Some of the tacos on that page look amazing. One thing (as far as I know) you can't get for love nor money in the UK - great Mexican food. I may be wrong tho....

 

[scottdisco]

how many times can i type 'to be fair'?

One thing (as far as I know) you can't get for love nor money in the UK - great Mexican food. I may be wrong tho....

you and i share a bug-bear man, heh-heh

the following are worth noting:

Mannamexico, Cambridge

Boojum, Belfast

the Westfield branch of Wahaca definitely 'works' (also in the more sit-down side of the menu, they have a commitment to various moles and stuff, so it's not just head cheese and hard shell tacos-type stuff to be fair), it's probably helped by the overall chain vibe of a load of fast-food/mid-range family chains in the food corridor at the mall there, i can't speak for the version in central Ldn, but i have a feeling that would work less well (a third is opening in Canary Wharf soon)

still you're right, slim pickings. there is a foul van attempting to peddle some attempt at a burrito on Broad Street in central Birmingham near one of Brum centre's few good pubs, i wolfed one down whilst pissed once mind you.

i have had my gripes w local Mancs Barburrito (they researched the American chain Chipotle, which is not bad all things considered - though my fave Mexican street food/Tex-Mex chain in the States is Baja Fresh FWIW), but to be fair since they moved to Liverpool as well, it might be better to ask Swears or somebody if they've ever been in the one in Merseyside, i can't really rate them objectively for various (tedious) parochial reasons i won't bore you with. though i must say they had a superb salsa verde (the single best thing i've ever had from them tbh) that they stopped for admirable reasons - they could no longer get fresh tomatillos and didn't want to use canned stuff.

i had a decent herby potato and chorizo quesadilla, a bowl of chips and some nice guac and a very pleasant long, minty drink there (Westfield) the other week, i would go again. guys to my left chowing down on various big meals w lashings of chips and pico de gallo, various meejah ladies breaking burritos and discussing what booze to have off the menu to my right, good buzzy air one weekday lunchtime.

that taco guy has some epic 'whilst mullered in Baja California' anecdotes...

 

[scottdisco]

i am extremely eager for Ldn Dissensians to share any reports about Mexican/Tex-Mex-type street fare in Ldn, that joint called Taqueria (ha!) is top of my intel wants list.

cheers anyone.

also bagels, are Brick Lane and Stoke Newington's 24/7 joints the pinnacles for you?

ta.

the bagels in and around NYC are top and i know Nomad has bagel intel but i must say Montreal remains tops for me.

 

[scottdisco]

i recall w fondness PeterG giving us some great San Diego Mex scran anecdotes.

and obviously the San Francisco burrito is a legend in its own lunchtime.

doubtless Padraig (US) has ate a great many things south of the border..

 

[mistersloane]

i am extremely eager for Ldn Dissensians to share any reports about Mexican/Tex-Mex-type street fare in Ldn, that joint called Taqueria (ha!) is top of my intel wants list.

When I lived that way I used to reaaaaally like Taqueria - it's quite pricey (Westbourne Grove prices) and don't go in the evening cos it gets fucking really packed, but daytime weekday easy lunch used to be great. It really turned me on to Mexican food.

So then we started buying stuff from the Cool Chile Company, and eventually ended up buying this :


which I'd recommend to anyone. The Cool Chile Co have a stall at Borough Market so you can buy all the ingredients. I haven't tried Wahaca or Tortilla since finding Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz' book, but would like to know if they're any good. The burritos in Tortilla look like they're decently priced.

 

[viktorvaughn]

i am extremely eager for Ldn Dissensians to share any reports about Mexican/Tex-Mex-type street fare in Ldn, that joint called Taqueria (ha!) is top of my intel wants list.

cheers anyone.

also bagels, are Brick Lane and Stoke Newington's 24/7 joints the pinnacles for you?

ta.

the bagels in and around NYC are top and i know Nomad has bagel intel but i must say Montreal remains tops for me.

Brick Lane salt beef and mustard and smoked salmon and cream cheese ones in Stokey at 6 in the morning after raving and nght bus is such happy memories! Dunno if best ever but I think they are great.

 

[viktorvaughn]

Wahaca is not that great and a bit gimmiky IMO. I want that type of food to be cheap, greasy, really spicy and it wasn't really.

 

[scottdisco]

Brick Lane salt beef and mustard and smoked salmon and cream cheese ones in Stokey at 6 in the morning after raving and nght bus is such happy memories! Dunno if best ever but I think they are great.

Sloane, that book is legendary, i want.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

doubtless Padraig (US) has ate a great many things south of the border..

tis true. hella (dodgy) street food in the cities - nopales, tamales, tortas ahogadas. the Pacific coast - Sinaloa and all that - is great for seafood, fish tacos and ceviche and all that. gotta say that Oaxacan cuisine really kills it though - fried grasshoppers, moles (Oaxaca is famous for its mole), chocolate, etc. also a lot of roadside food - there's this one area of the highway between Mexico City and Guadalajara, around Irapuato, that is famous for its strawberries & there's a strawberry stand like every few hundred meters for a good long stretch. then down south in rural Mayan villages when I was working for the water program it was on some whole other ish - mostly it was tortillas/beans/coffee (hella weak w/way too much sugar is how they make it) but once we ate some kind of crazy wild boar that this dude had shot, like a tapir or something. he invited us to his house and we had it in a stew with chayote. plus this foul cornmeal drink called atole that dudes would drink in the morning before going off to work.

plus - you'll like this, Scott - the booze. tequila, of course - its capital is the state of Jalisco (I've passed through the actual town of Tequila a couple times - not a very impressive place tbh) but also mezcal, which is like a really gross version of tequila. it comes from Oaxaca. and when in Chiapas and the Yucatan, aguardiente, which is sugar cane liquor. now that's some disgusting stuff, kind of the equivalent of fortified wine. the best is pulque though. it's made from maguey, like tequila & mezcal, but a different kind, and it's really only popular in Mexico City and the surrounding area. it's served in these incredibly seedy bars called pulquerias. I dunno, I can't really convey the experience of drinking in a pulqueria through a keyboard. once I was invited to like a speakeasy pulqueria somewhere by San Salvador Atenco (like an hour north of DF) - not only was the pulque way, way stronger than usual - we got absolutely hammered - but it was also run by this ancient, wizened like 90-yr old man who told us possibly apocryphal but totally awesome stories about his older brother riding with Zapata during the Revolution.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

oh and this wont apply in England but the best rule of thumb here about the quality of Mexican & other Latin food - if most of the people eating there are Latin, it's probably good (actually this is probably just a general rule about ethnic food anywhere). if they have broccoli & tofu burritos on the menu, probably not. I'm not against broccoli or tofu - the opposite, in fact - but that is a wrap, my friend, not a burrito. Chicago, as Scott will know, is great on the Latin food. my favorite burrito place is a 24-hr joint on Clark a couple blocks north of Montrose, just south of Andersonville.

 

[scottdisco]

i love you Padraig.

i ending up hanging out w an elderly Mexican chap in Seattle once (interesting backstory to the guy, he'd worked in ports in Europe as a younger man, Denmark, England, though also spoke fondly of Prague, but was very eager to discuss Copenhagen and northwest England w me) and the back bar (yes i was in a bar, shocking i know) was stocked w quite a few tequilas so he and i and my two buddies (they spoke Spanish fortunately) went through quite a bit, but as we were drinking he was just running down to us all sorts of info about tequila, varieties etc, a true eye-opener.

i've always wanted to try aguardiente since i first heard about it, but from the sound of it i may not be missing much!
this pulque stuff sounds amazing, as does yer man at the bar who ran that one place.

fried grasshoppers: have you had them? i am assuming they are crunchy?!

i've always really enjoyed tamales when i've had them, which is not often enough.

re Chicago: i read a couple of pieces in the Houston Chronicle (this was a few years ago mind you) that said that your city is (was) currently the best for straight up Mexican eats in the States, they figured, more so than anywhere near the border or what have you, because of the amount of recent Mexican immigrants cooking w out pretense or adding anything to their repertoire, i know Oaxacan food is a bit of a cracker, and first generation recent Oaxacan arrivals were some people mentioned IIRC, that rich stew (no pun intended) of different regional migrations to the Windy City enriching the eats there no end.
don't know if you would know anything about this.

The story begins in a high priced Windy City Mexican eatery named Hacienda Tecalitlan, where Carlos Garcia, the moneyed owner, has built a reproduction of his two-story elaborate Jalisco abode, itself a copy of a 17th century courtyard-lush Mexican hacienda. At Tecalitlan, Walsh feasts on savory, authentic-tasting, hot, pork-filled corn dumplings, mole poblano, tortilla soup and empanadas. Next, Walsh visited a variety of other upscale, as well as down-home Mexican eateries, including a birrieria, a small joint noted for its jalisco-style spicy stewed goat meat.

also: Costa Rican gaffs, Peruvian joints, Ecuadorian groceries, Colombian restaurants, Trinidadian grub, Cuban hole-in-the-walls, that Garifunan pad on the South Side, Puerto Rican, Belizean, neighborhood tortillerias, Jamaican shacks, churrascarias, the list is endless, you guys are blessed w all manner of good eats from latin america and the Caribbean, no doubt; it is truly hard to convey how much respect i have for your town food-wise

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

aw hell I love you too, man.

aguardiente, it's alright I guess. I don't like any hard liquor very much so you can't go by me. it's like hella cheap - like 30-40 pesos for a liter as I recall - whiskey I guess, just from sugarcane instead of grain mash. it's the kind of the drink of choice for winos in southern Mexico. if you've had whatever the European equivalent of Old Crow is you could probably handle it.

pulque,seriously, is great. it's made from the sap of the maguey rather than plant itself (like like mezcal or tequila), so it's hella thick. the pulque in the city comes in different flavors - like lemon, oat, and then there's unflavored which is kind of like a slightly sour milkshake, maybe not that thick. how to explain pulquerias? every one I've been to, which is like 3 or 4 other than that speakeasy w/the old guy, was full of like the saddest, loneliest, most hardboiled dudes you could imagine listening to sad songs on a jukebox and looking surly. you definitely want to go with a big group of people. pulquerias are notoriously, uh, grimy. I remember walking into one where the urinal was, no jokes, a trough in the middle of the room. dudes would just get up & piss & go back to drinking. there's a slightly more hospitable one by the zocalo, though, that the punks go to. tho again the really good stuff is outside the city in the State of Mexico.

grasshoppers - chapulines - yeah, crunchy. kinda salty. they sell as street food in Oaxaca City. the other great Oaxacan thing I forgot about is the tlayuda, which is just this enormous tortilla that you just put whatever on & that's the meal. I think I said this in the cities we applaud thread but Oaxaca City is just where it's at, period.

it's funny the first time I went to Mexico I was strictly vegan so I missed out on a lot of stuff. but veg/vegan Mexican punks have all these ways of hooking up like, vegan ceviche or whatever, usually subbing in TVP for the meat or fish. also there's a Krishna restaurant in downtown Guadalajara that's pretty good..

Chicago almost definitely has the best Mexican (and Latin, generally) food in the States. only maybe L.A. comes close, and it's such an awful place in general that it loses on principle. Miami's got cafe cubano and arroz negro and all that on lockdown, and NYC's got the Dominicans & Puerto Ricans (Chicago, too on the latter) and a whole bunch of high-end like Peruvian or Chilean or whatever restaurants in Manhattan, but it's true Chicago's got everything, and in abundance. dude I didn't even know about that Garifuna place! that's a great look - I'm going to hit it up ASAP. not Latin but in roughly the same area - not quite as far West - there's the vegan soul food joint run by the Black Israelites.

 

[scottdisco]

What is a pupusa? I suppose now would be a good time to talk about their deliciousness. A pupusa is a wonderful treat which comes to us from El Salvador. However, instead of using a thin tortilla like our amigos mexicanos, these salvadorenos use maize flour dough to create a thick flat bread which they will with all sorts of things like cheese, pork, chicken and many others. The best way I have found to describe pupusas to most people is that they are a lot like a mexican gordita but their bread is much thicker.

yum yum yum in my tum

 

[Slothrop]

Wahaca is not that great and a bit gimmiky IMO. I want that type of food to be cheap, greasy, really spicy and it wasn't really.

Witness ye the slothrop grand unified theory of restaurant cooking (assuming that you're chosing places sensibly and not going to somewhere overhyped or rubbish):

Wahaca is on the climb out of the trough, but nowhere near the initial peak. I think it suffers a lot from not having a cheap tasty carb dish, so you always end up buying lots of little things and paying more than the quality of food really justifies.

 

[scottdisco]

Wahaca is on the climb out of the trough, but nowhere near the initial peak. I think it suffers a lot from not having a cheap tasty carb dish, so you always end up buying lots of little things and paying more than the quality of food really justifies.

heh-heh, great graph. i must admit although the quesadilla i described ^ was pretty bloody nice, it was a very small thing, and i was a bit taken aback at first when i got it wrt sizing. their salsa verde was OK mind.

also Slothrop, nice one on your Scottish drinking and the rocket = arugula (didn't know that, always wondered!) on other food/sauce threads... ...i like how chickpeas are chickpeas, and are also chana, and are also garbanzo beans, and etc etc etc

 

[viktorvaughn]

Witness ye the slothrop grand unified theory of restaurant cooking (assuming that you're chosing places sensibly and not going to somewhere overhyped or rubbish):

Wahaca is on the climb out of the trough, but nowhere near the initial peak. I think it suffers a lot from not having a cheap tasty carb dish, so you always end up buying lots of little things and paying more than the quality of food really justifies.

Haha, very good! It's like in London there are places that are cheap, tasty (gourmet san, tayyabs, ocakbashis etc) then a stretch of polite stuff that isn't really worth bothering with. I'm not sure about street food being sold in a restaurant in the manner really..

 

[baboon2004]

Wahaca is on the climb out of the trough, but nowhere near the initial peak. I think it suffers a lot from not having a cheap tasty carb dish, so you always end up buying lots of little things and paying more than the quality of food really justifies.

brilliant graph. Again, middlebrow restaurants are the ones to avoid.

reminded me of this: http://www.b3ta.com/challenge/graphs/

i think 'suffer' is the wrong word however, and that the absence of a cheap carb dish is no accident...so many bullshit restaurants do this.

Re Chicago and Latin food - it sounds amazing. Haven't been there myself yet, but would love to. my experience of Latin food is limited to ceviche in Cubana in Llondon (very good indeed, as it happens, but prob not authentic), and trips to Mexico and Colombia. From the former, little stands out other than mole and food in Merida, because i had la turista for about ten days; as to the latter, I have bizarrely been to tons of vegan restaurants in Bogota (I'm a fully-signed-up meat eater) - it's a good advert for vegan food.

 

[petergunn]

oh and this wont apply in England but the best rule of thumb here about the quality of Mexican & other Latin food - if most of the people eating there are Latin, it's probably good (actually this is probably just a general rule about ethnic food anywhere). if they have broccoli & tofu burritos on the menu, probably not. I'm not against broccoli or tofu - the opposite, in fact - but that is a wrap, my friend, not a burrito. Chicago, as Scott will know, is great on the Latin food. my favorite burrito place is a 24-hr joint on Clark a couple blocks north of Montrose, just south of Andersonville.

for sure... which is why i am doubtful about mexican food in places like LDN or Berlin...

and yeah, as someone mentioned i think i did break down my fav San Diego taco spots here once, but i guess it's not worth doing so again unless someone here is going to SD...

for anyone really FIENDING decent mex who is a halfway decent cook, carnitas tacos is a great and easy place to start,,,

google has plenty of recipes, but i usually wing it...

one pork shoulder... dust w/ Adobo seasoning if available, if not, salt, pepper, and cumin...

put in deep pot, add 2 oranges quartered, one can coke, top w/ water, add one or two bay leaves and a few cloves of garlic, chopped if possible...

simmer for like 6 hours... then take out, it should be falling off the bone... trim the fat off and break it into lil chunks... then roast in the oven at about 400F for like 10-20 minutes, until it appears to get slightly crispy... remove and serve on corn tortillas garnished w/ chopped onion and cilantro... squeeze a lime slice onto each taco b4 eating...

it takes all day, but is actually very little labor and a minimal amounr of fancy spices... the coke and the oranges are actually the heart of the recipe...

 

[scottdisco]

cheers Peter! cola marinades - the gift that keeps on giving.

speaking of cola, a midweek European futbol match introduced me to the Turkish pop, Cola Turka.
w that and the fairtrade Ubuntu Cola recently piquing my interest i am suddenly minded to go on a cola hunt!

anyway thought i'd share this NYT article as the accompanying slide-show is full of gorgeous food pr0n, and it does mention some Mexicans in Chicago as the tagline: Big Star taqueria- "There’s country on the jukebox and a complement of tequila behind the bar, but the real draw is the tacos, including spit-roasted al pastor."
(it is also undoubtedly true that it is the Chi that boasts the finest hot dog culture.)

Chicago's Great Culinary Middle Ground

The extremes have long been the best places to eat in Chicago: the city is home to some of the world’s finest temples of haute gastronomy as well as its greatest collection of hot dog stands...Xoco has a casual vibe, like a cheerier, more colorful Chipotle Grill. A quick scan of the menu, though, makes it clear that there’s more to Xoco than meets the eye: there are headcheese tortas, drip coffee brewed to order and served in handsome glass Chemex pots, and a half-dozen more farm names than you usually encounter on a chain restaurant’s menu...The pepito — an assemblage of short ribs, black beans, caramelized onions and pickled jalapeños — is as good as its ingredient list reads, with bread toasted to a wonderful crispness by the oven...The woodland mushroom torta is no mere concession to vegetarians; Mr. Bayless’s decades of mastering Mexican flavors have somehow imbued him with the power to turn a goat cheese, mushroom and arugula sandwich into a bold Mexican sandwich. (Maybe the secret is the three-chili salsa.)...Tortas are available after 11 a.m., and they come off the menu at 3 p.m. to make way for Mexican soups. But the restaurant actually opens at 7 a.m., serving a phenomenal rendition of a combination of foods I first learned about from the title of a Spanish-language textbook I read in the sixth grade: churros y chocolate. The churros are crisp and fresh, dense in the traditional fashion, rolled in a dirty snowfall of cinnamon sugar and served warm. The hot chocolate features freshly ground cacao beans, and the drinks are predictably killer. The Barcelona, one of Xoco’s options, is so thick you can stand your spoon up in it, and so rich with bittersweet chocolate flavor it could do double duty as a dessert.