The following is a guest post from my friend Jeff Timpanaro. He’s got five kids, and he needs a new kidney due to an odd condition called Lupus. If you can’t give him a kidney, buy this guy a camera because his taco photos are terrible. Also, be sure and check out his website.
Enjoy! – G&T
It was one of those days that I’m embarrassed to admit how little I had to do. 3/5 of my kids were at school, while the other two were playing the blood-pressure-skyrocketing game of Hi-Ho-Cherry-O Confetti, where pea-sized cherries from the popular board game become projectiles, choking hazards, and eventually painful foot-lodgings. O childhood gaiety.
I had to intervene.
Intervention, of course, meant getting my ass of the couch and setting aside my laptop. With Twitter full of commuter rage and work litanies, and our living room raining tiny cherries, I hatched my plan like any good parent: “TACO TRUCK!”
My Lil’ Taco Warriors (Lachlan, 3, and Vigo, 2) snapped to attention instantly upon hearing my plan. “TACO TRUCK? FIRST WE HAVE TO GET A TORTILLA, AND THEN WE EAT A PIZZA AND A QUESADILLA.”
However vague their recollection of how this worked, our team was amped to have an activity . . . like Phineas & Ferb’s signature saying, “Hey, I know what we’re gonna do today!”
Remember Taco Truck Crawl #3? Matt Hardigree, news editor for the successful automotive site Jalopnik.com, brought his team along in two huge Ram 2500HD trucks. This morning Jalopnik told their story and included some helpful taco trucking instructions and great photos of the event. Check it out!
Taco truck culture is a way of life in Houston. For years, the general public and critics alike have taken great joy in discovering cultural foods that weren’t produced en masse, have never been reconstituted or processed in a factory, and aren’t squirted out of a tube.
The food in these real trucks are created by unsung chefs that come from countries you may be afraid of. These men and women have never been entertained by reality television shows about rich celebrities and their problems. Their teenage daughters have never asked them for fake boobs. They do not use organic soaps purchased from Whole Foods, Bed, Bath & Beyond, or a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
You see, true taqueros won’t be headlining in culinary magazines or appearing in New York Times photo slide shows. They succeed and fail based on our preferences, trials and recommendations. They don’t base their data from internet ads, consultants or think-tanks. They do not subscribe to foodie culture, and I’m certain that a rare few are aware of this or any other Houston food blog that promotes or denigrates them.
To make things more difficult for the proprietors of these authentic food trucks, big city officials constantly try to shut them down due to the restaurant lobby. Why would you pay $12.29 for one fajita taco at El Tiempo when you can get one for $1.75 at the Tierra Caliente truck (the first blog post on G&T) which is in the next door parking lot? You won’t, because Tierra Caliente was slammed by Houston’s inept Health Department and was forced to move to Washington Street (Tierra Caliente is now on West Alabama, in front of the West Alabama Ice House). For a better idea of mainstream Houston media’s take on taco trucks, take a look at J.C.Reid’s expose on the subject, and be sure to watch the video.
Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Brands , the largest restaurant company in the world. In addition to their recent market strategies such as getting 50 Cent to sue them, the “Drive-Thru Diet” campaign, starting a petition to have the Federal Reserve print more $2 bills, and most recently, their effort to replicate authentic taco trucks, Taco Bell has purchased a massive taco truck, which they are taking around the United States. Now they’d like to come to Houston.
This Taco Bell truck expects to drive into popular venues and give away free food items, such as the Volcano Taco which looks a lot like the box of CVS Crayolas that your date’s kid decided to leave in the pocket behind the passenger seat of your ’69 Caprice Classic for two weeks.
The Taco Bell Truck staff will be handpicked by some marketing prick in NYC that uses an emery board in staff meetings, pops his collar at night, and would never consider disassembling a washing machine to see what was wrong with it.
This week I’ve been working with Taconmadre, arguably the greatest taco truck business inside the 610 loop. When the Taco Bell truck attempts to set up shop here, Taconmadre’s magnificent green bus is going to park nearby. While Taco Bell hands out free tacos and gets their media coverage, the Big Green Bus will be right there, selling the real thing. Taco Bell might bring a crowd with their free tacos and tested marketing, but I’m hoping their patrons will see what’s going on next door and get a bite of a real taco.
Hopefully we can get the Taco Bell mega-truck to agree to a taste contest, but that wouldn’t make much sense on their end.
Taco Bell, I hope your folks have a great time in Dallas, but please don’t bother stopping in Houston.
UPDATE: A few hours after publishing this post, I received the following message from @TacoBellTruck on Twitter:
If you’ve come across previous G&T blog posts, you’re probably familiar of my acrimony towards Taco Bell. This rage is endless and everlasting, and keeps me alive.
“Think Outside the Bun”. Really? It sounds like something The Onion’s Jean Teasdale came up with. The kind of lady that knits Christmas ornaments and records soap operas with VHS tapes. A person that intentionally writes in Denelian.
Why do I despise Taco Bell so much? Hum.
1. I worked at a Taco Bell at the age of sixteen, and I saw dry, non-constituted bean powder for the first time.
2. Lettuce, tomatoes and a dollop of sour cream is not the definition of “Supreme” in my book.
3. Mild Sauce, Hot Sauce, and Fire Sauce are actually the same thing.
4. The male actors in their commercials, which represent their target demographic of 18-25, all wear knit stocking caps. Probably catering to potheads with munchies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that as a marketing standpoint, it works. But potheads wore stocking caps in that Dazed and Confused movie, which came out in 93, and was set in the 70’s. Potheads now wear Fidel Castro hats.
5. When I was growing up, there was a jukebox in the Taco Bell on Center Street in Deer Park, TX. I told some friends I’d play a few songs on it, and by some technical glitch, the jukebox played “I Touch Myself” by The Divinyls instead of “Mic Checka” by Das Efx, effectively canceling out my street cred and henceforth the rest of my teenage life until I bought a pistol and sold drugs.
This is the part where I should probably delve into the history of Taco Bell, explaining how an ex-Marine came up with this brilliant concept to make Mexican food more approachable to other white folks that were afraid of visiting Mexican taquerias. But you already know the story. We know what Taco Bell is. We understand that it is far from Mexican cuisine. And some will perpetually choose Taco Bell over a nearby taqueria, because they mistakenly believe that a corporate conglomerate is more concerned with food safety than a family-run truck, or maybe because they don’t want to get out of their car to order food for fear of getting robbed by a Mexican.
So it did come as great surprise to me that Taco Bell is now offering “Cantina Tacos”- their version of the Real Deal Holyfield. Taco truck tacos- complete with corn tortillas, chopped cilantro and onion, with a slice of lime. A real lime that was grown on a tree.
When I heard the news, it was as if I had initiated a chess match with Deep Blue, and after three moves, it was like, “You know, let’s just watch Power Rangers instead”.
You don’t expect Taco Bell to make a move like this. They are expected to come up with idiotic things, such as getting 50 Cent to sue them, or a “Drive-Thru Diet” campaign. I mean, seriously. Taco Bell is a company that gets Shaquille O’Neal to endorse their food. Their most recent ad campaign involves starting a petition to have the Federal Reserve print more $2 bills. Ad execs get paid for this.
As a self-proclaimed tacologist, it was my solemn duty to give these tacos the Pepsi Challenge. I stopped at the recently remodeled Taco Bell on Shepherd and Vermont and ordered all three Cantina tacos. My voice dripped with sarcasm as I ordered word-for-word:
“I’ll have the Premium Fire-Grilled Chicken, Premium Cut Carne Asada Steak and the Carnitas Shredded Pork Cantina Tacos with Fire Sauce and a super turbo sized Mountain Dew, bro”.
The nice young lady behind the counter obliged, and I brought the stuff home so nobody would see me there. I looked in the bag and saw three tacos wrapped in real aluminum foil. I grinned and shook my finger at the tacos.
“I see what you did there”.
Again, it is odd that Taco Bell made this decision, but at the same time, it is believable. Taco truck tacos are inexpensive, and so are their ingredients for the most part. Cilantro and onions are some of the cheapest produce you can find, and corn tortillas are less expensive than their flour counterparts. With the exception of avocado slices (which you generally see out West or near coastal towns), you can put a decent taco together for nickels with the bulk buying power that Yum! Brands has. The aluminum foil is probably the most expensive element. They have everything to gain from this decision, and nothing to lose.
I tried the chicken taco first, even though chicken tacos are a little odd for me to order. Reason is, if I want chicken tacos I’ll just buy a whole chicken from Pollos Asados el Regio and eat it with tortillas. I couldn’t tell if this was white or dark meat- it was kind of in between, like the inside of a McNugget. It had a nice color to it, with those charred stripes that make it look like it was once cooked on a grill or painted by some kind of grill-striping machine. Some chunky salsa verde would have gone nicely with it, but I doubt if Taco Bell knows what tomatillos are.
The beef taco wasn’t bad either. They were a bit stingy on the beef, and again, eating any kind of taco with Taco Bell’s Fire, Hot or Mild sauce is about as pointless as enrolling Justin Bieber in the Boy Scouts.
However…
I bit into the smokey, juicy and tender pulled pork taco as Johnny Cash played “When the Man Comes Around” in the background, hanging my head in shame as I chewed and swallowed my onions, cilantro and pride. I genuinely enjoyed this taco, as the images of the hundreds of hard working taqueros, shaking their heads in disapproval, flashed through my mind in order of their appearance in my traitorous life. I was disturbed by this, but then my mind halted with an epiphany.
You’re probably in Texas, so you’ve seen chili cook-offs and barbeque showdowns everywhere.
That’s right, Mr. Spell Checker. Barbeque with a Q in it.
Some good folks in Arizona are putting together the first annual Arizona Taco Festival, and challenging chefs and other culinary badasses across the nation to compete in one or all of four taco categories- beef, pork, chicken, and fish.
Why didn’t I think of this?
The event will eventually be a multi-city competition. The first event will be thrown in Scottsdale on Saturday, October 9, 2010. The grand prize is $7500.00.
The competition will also include a Sidecart Category that awards prizes for Best Salsa, Best Guacamole, Best Anything Goes Taco, Best Tamales, and Best Booth. Proceeds will go to Waste Not, a Phoenix charity that distributes perishable food to the homeless.
You can find the team entry form, sponsorship opportunities, and other pertinent info at their website. To keep up with new event info, follow @AZTacoFestival.
I’ll be one of the judges in this showdown. Let’s get some Texans out there to show them how it’s done.
In August of ’09, Jeff Balke wrote a great blog post about Washington Avenue in the Houston Heights, which coined and immortalized the term “douchefication”. If you cruise down Washington around midnight, you will find a large quantity of wealthy and intoxicated patrons that listen to pop music intentionally and think they can tell the difference between Grey Goose and Stolichnaya in a Long Island Iced Tea.
The good bars and music venues are long gone and have been replaced with trendy, packed dance clubs with unimaginative bartenders and top 40 remixes playing on booming sound systems intended as a conversation preventative.
In the last month or two, Taqueria Tierra Caliente has changed their location to Washington, and a new player has moved into town: Taqueria Maya Quiche. Stationed in front of The Lot, this truck has been drumming up a good bit of business since its arrival.
I had never ventured into The Lot before so I thought I’d case the joint. I tried to ignore the two straight girls making out at the bar, but they were in between me and the bartender. The speakers thumped some kind of Michael Jackson techno remix butchery that made my stomach turn. I had to shout.
“AHEM. EXCUSE ME, MA’AM”.
No response.
“MIND IF I ORDER A DRINK?”
“Oh thanks baby! I’ll have a Patrón shot and she’ll have a Grey Goose and Red Bull! Hee-Hee!”
As an amateur anthropologist, I opted to converse with her in her native language by executing a vintage 1991 Shannen Dougherty eye roll.
Some soulless doucheketeer soaked in Axe Body Spray bumped into me, scratching my arm with the rhinestones on his shirt. I tried to stare him down but he was wearing sunglasses.
Sunglasses.
I left the bar before I could get myself into trouble. Taqueria Maya Quiche was in full effect. A dozen wobbling patrons lined up in front of the joint, so I cut in line and ordered some tacos, knowing that none of these guys have ever been in a fist fight in their lives for fear of messing up their hair or damaging their jewelry. They’ve never even watched a Western.
There’s a funny thing about Washington Avenue. I’ve noticed that nobody fights. They will push each other around, yell, take their shirts off while waiting for their buddies to pull them away, but nobody swings. These are a bunch of hand models that practice suggestive faces in the mirror before going out for the evening. They use daily facial moisturizer.
Maya Quiche is an unusual name for a taco truck, right? That’s because you’re thinking of quiche, that awful egg pie thing that old people make for breakfast. That’s not it. The Quiché are a Mayan people from the highlands of Guatemala, mostly from Chichicastenango, or Chichi for short. Guatemalans are just like Mexicans except shorter.
I ordered three tacos al pastor. If you don’t know what those are by now, you’ve got some catching up to do, homie. I hoped they’d have some unique Mayan cuisine or tamales wrapped in banana leaves, but no such luck. I ordered con todo, “with everything”. At most taco trucks, this means they’re going to put fresh chopped white onions and cilantro on your taco. If the taco truck is on Washington Street, I’ve learned that the demands of the audience dictate what goes on your taco.
I can only imagine the remonstrance of the Washington crowd when the truck first opened.
“Where is the lettuce? Where is the tomato? Where is the CHEESE, and why aren’t you playing KE$HA?”
I’ve said before to be warned of taco trucks that acknowledge gringo-ism by replacing onions and cilantro with lettuce and tomato. To placate the hordes, Maya Quiche adds everything to their tacos. Cilantro, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. And you know what? It’s pretty good. The pork was on the dry side, but when you add all of those fresh elements to it and dump some salsa on top, you won’t notice. The red salsa was just how I like it. Bright red and filled with jalapeño seeds, with an ideal texture. Although the meat is the core of the taco, you’ve got to realize that the pastor test is the toughest to pass. I’m guessing that if I had ordered a fajita taco, it would have passed with flying colors.
The beauty is, if you’re in this location you don’t need to serve good tacos. You could sell cans of Spam for five bucks a pop if you were so inclined. These jokers will buy anything. Maya Quiche serves a fine taco with quality ingredients- even though they don’t have to. To someone who has spent the last three hours on the dance floor guzzling shots of high end sipping tequila with a salted rim and dry-humping girls who have been giving him bad phone numbers, this is a king’s feast.
I continued down Washington, seeing people pee in alleys and argue about reality shows. Two guys leaned into the passenger window of a car, sharing a box of pizza and a bottle of Grey Goose with the bar spigot still on it. One guy on the street opted to remove his shirt and tie it around his head. I mean, that actually made sense to him.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike these folks. They’re not too different than me, really- just younger, drunker, richer, and they use hair dryers. I had a good time hanging around on Washington, but I’ve got to admit I felt a bit smug, for one simple reason.
I know better places to hang out.
The facts remain. Some girls need a place to make out with each other to attract guys with Prada shoes or an Audi key chain, and some guys need a place to dress like characters in The Fast and the Furious and break up pseudo-fights that would have never occurred. I don’t hold it against them- it’s not their fault they have never spot welded, caught a saltwater fish, or changed their own tire.
I submitted a taco photograph to the online New York Times for a reader-driven feature, and they published it on their website. This was taken with a Canon G10 I borrowed from a friend. I like this photo because the whole image appears to be in focus. The slight haze you see is the steam coming off of these superbad Taconmadre tacos. Check it out!
Fancy people call them crêpes. I call them pancake tacos. Either way, the French just found a bunch of pretentious things like pears and berries and goat cheese, rolled it in a pancake, and called it something other than a taco so they could take credit for inventing a taco.
Just because you wear turtleneck sweaters, tortoise shell glasses and cologne I can’t pronounce, does not mean you invented the taco.
That being said, pancake tacos are really delicious. If you’re in Houston, stop by Melange Creperie on Westheimer and Taft (in Mango’s parking lot), and a nice fella named Buffalo Sean will throw one or two together for you. No, he will not be wearing a turtleneck.
I came across this unusual taco truck in a rural area north of the Houston metro. It was impossible to get to, in this odd corner where Huffmeister and Hempstead Highway converge. The unpaved driveway was situated in a manner where you couldn’t get to it without breaking a couple of traffic laws.
It was a beautiful sunny and cool Texas winter day. A huge hand painted sign read, “TACOS OPEN”. Along with the taco truck, this lot contained an abandoned snow cone stand and a beautiful blue vintage Mustang with a torn, battered tarp obscuring it just enough so that I could clearly see blue, chrome, and awesome.
A long-legged black chicken doted around, searching for gizzard grit amongst a pile of bottle caps. My dining companion, who we will call Penelope Cruz, entertained the thought of ordering a chicken taco just to see what would happen. I explained to her that it was probably a fighting breed rather than a poultry bird. She was impressed by my vast knowledge of avian genetics.
Penelope Cruz then tried to befriend the hen, and if you don’t know chickens, trying to play with a chicken is kind of like playing that pop-up Orbitz game where you try to hit home runs over and over again. Or watching Ghost Hunters.
I ordered fajita and pastor (pork) tacos and a bottle of Joya; a grapefruit-flavored drink similar to Fresca but only distributed in Mexico. You can kill four men with this thick glass bottle before it breaks.
Four.
I once learned a valuable lesson about these non-twist bottle caps. Back when I was exploring Tijuana looking for a place to live, I came across this seedy bar called Carmen’s where there were people sleeping on the tables. I bought a raffle ticket for a buck or two, and won a bottle of El Presidente brandy, accompanied by a large glass bottle of Coke. I put the edge of the bottle on the bar and tried to ‘slap off’ the bottle cap with no luck.
A guy that looked exactly like Danny Trejo snatched the Coke bottle from my hand. I thought he was going to swing it at me, but instead he snapped off the bottle cap with his teeth and handed it back to me in one fluid motion.
It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in real life.
A bottle of brandy and a few beers later, I thought I’d give it a try. Why not? Uncle Sam was paying for my dental work anyway. I bought a Pacifico, gripped the edge of the bottle cap by my teeth and…
CRACK!
I broke the entire neck of the bottle off , cutting my face pretty good in the process. I spent the rest of the night holding a wad of napkins against my face and dripping blood and beer on the floor, reveling in the fact that I now looked like a local in this shady Tijuana cantina.
I have since mastered the art of opening bottles with my teeth, but I prefer to use a bottle opener.
Anyway, back to the taco truck. A screened-off dining area was handcrafted around the south side of the trailer, and the interior was outright quirky. Framed religious prints, a combination of plastic and live plants, and an awkwardly situated Foosball table were the key design elements here.
Wooden seagulls were strung up across the ceiling, each with a fancifully-folded dollar bill in its beak. It was all pink, yellow, and girly looking, like a blender full of Barbies.
The gal in the trailer dinged a bell to let me know the tacos were ready. The sliced limes were larger than key limes, but smaller than your average lime found in your local market. Both the pastor and the fajita were dry and bland, to the point that saturating them with lime juice provided only slight improvement. The red salsa was a dark maroon, and had an unwelcome sweetness that had to be countered with the application of table salt. The salsa verde was bland and uninspired. Yes, I am using the term “uninspired” when discussing taco truck salsa. So what.
Ruby’s Taqueria has an extensive menu, and before dogging it too much I’d like to stress the fact that a lame taco truck taco is still five times better than any Taco Bell menu item. If you’re in the area, I implore you to stop in just to take a closer look at the dining area. It’s something special, and I wish I hadn’t fought sundown to grab the few photos I did. Ruby’s is open 24/7.
Now if you’ll excuse me, someone’s got to teach Penelope Cruz how to hotwire a Mustang.
The Houston Chowhounds, a 700+ group of chefs, food industry folks, food bloggers and food adventurers, are presenting their third annual Taco Truck Crawl. It’s kind of like an amusement park for grownups, except there are no rollercoasters and fewer knife fights. And I’m running the show.
For those who know, the last Taco Truck Crawl was a load of fun for everyone who attended … except for that one guy that got a head injury from a pack of Chicles launched from a slingshot. There were around 100 in attendance last time (not that anyone actually took the time to count heads), and I’m guessing there will be a few more this time. We will be visiting a lot of taco trucks and/or restaurants in the Houston area and beyond.
29-95.com will be sponsoring the event with a party bus, with a general rule prohibiting the consumption of alcoholic beverages that we will collectively ignore like we did last time. If you’d prefer to caravan or car pool instead, feel free. I’ll be on the party bus if I’m not carpooling with Chamillionaire.
The illustrious event will be held on Saturday, April 10. This will not be on a Sunday, which it was last time because a certain really famous unnamed pastry chef named Plinio had to work on Saturday and asked us to do it on Sunday, and then he did not show up for the Taco Truck Crawl anyway. (Thanks, Plinio, for ruining my life.)
The list of taco trucks we will visit is shrouded in mystery and will only be divulged by a secret handshake or by discreetly slipping a ten in my pocket. I can tell you that on this list is Karanchos in Channelview, which I am probably a bit too excited about.
Be sure to bring lawnchairs, ice chests, beer, drinks, cash and sombreros.
We also will have some kind of afterparty. I don’t know where yet. Probably somewhere with lasers or a donkey.
Again, this is a free event, but we’d like to get you to RSVP here so we can get a good idea how many are coming along. Not a member of Chowhounds? Shoot me an email and I’ll save you a spot on the bus.
Note: Comments are disabled on this post, but please feel free to comment here.
pressure-skyrocketing game of Hi-Ho-Cherry-O Confetti, where pea-sized cherries from the popular board game become projectiles, choking hazards, and eventually painful foot-lodgings. O childhood gaiety.
