‘Tacos’
The world may be full of Mexican restaurants, but little taquerias are kinda confined to certain parts of the USA. Fortunately, while in San Jose we happened upon a place called Tacos al Pastor #2. The whereabouts of #1 are unknown, but the thought was that any taqueria deserving of a sequel was deserving of my stomach.
My first foray into Pittsburgh’s Mexican food scene brought me to Round Corner Cantina in Lawrenceville. I really had no idea what to expect, but I found a nice outdoor patio area and a good selection of tacos. I ordered myself some Yuengling and then took a look at the taco menu for a while before landing on their Puerco Tacos.
Santa Monica doesn’t exactly have a reputation for good food. And what reputation it does have usually tends to lean on the upscale. But reputation alone does not simply make a city, and Santa Monica actually has a surprising number of little gems hidden in its nooks and crannies. One of these, I had heard, was Tacos Por Favor.
Yet, aside from actually hearing of Tacos Por Favor, I hadn’t really been told what was good on their menu, so when I arrived and found a vast menu full of nearly every Mexican dish I had ever heard of, I was in trouble.
How many times have you sat around late at night eating either Taco Bell, Doritos or both and thought how amazing it would be to combine the two? I know I have. So when Taco Bell first started testing their new Doritos Locos in Fresno and Bakersfield last year, I was almost tempted to pay one of those cities a visit. Thankfully, I did not make the mistake of setting foot in one of those cities, and the testing was obviously a success, because at midnight this morning Taco Bell rolled out their Doritos Locos Tacos for the nation. If you’re unfamiliar with the Doritos Locos, they are essentially your regular or supreme tacos, but with a giant Nacho Cheese Dorito as the shell. Usually I can wait to try Taco Bell’s new products, but for this I had to be there right at midnight.
Who doesn’t love a good pun? Or even better, who doesn’t love an awesome compound word. Combining giant and enormous gave us ginormous. Combining lion and tiger gave us liger. And combining terrible and institution gave us Ohio State University (yes, I know that is technically three words, but I stand by it). Now joining the ever-growing list of compound words is a restaurant named MexiKosher in (surprisingly) Pico-Robertson. I love a good compound word as much as the next guy, but could this new Kosher Mexican restaurant make a happy unvegan? I intended to find out.
On a funky little corner in Culver City, there resides a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint called Tacomiendo. I originally read about them a long time ago because they served good food at cheap prices. Finally, after residing on my to-eat list for so long, I got around to taking a ride out to try them out. Not terribly hungry for this dinner hour, I skipped over the big ticket items like burritos and tortas. Instead, I went with their namesake, a taco.
On a Saturday night the girlfriend and I were sitting around feeling lazy. Neither of us had eaten dinner, and we weren’t terribly hungry, but we knew that we needed some sort of food in our systems. It had to be light, and as I looked over my list of restaurants I wanted to try, only one seemed to tickle our fancies. This was a remotely new (8 months or so) restaurant called Tinga, in Mid-City.
The interior of Tinga has a nice wooden atmosphere that is almost like a bar except that it is BYO. In the middle of the small seating area is a long communal table and the walls are lined with stools. The ordering takes place at the counter and although the full menu is on the side wall, they also have paper menus for those who don’t want to stare awkwardly over the shoulders of fellow patrons.
Over and over again, a friend of mine has told me that I just have to go to Sky’s Gourmet Tacos. Considering I live so close, it took me a long time to finally make it there, but when I did I was expecting something pretty special. Before fusion taco truck became the coolest thing in LA, Sky’s was already serving up their own kind of fusion. In their case, the fusion is Mexican “with a splash of soul.” Since I’m a big fan of soul food, Mexican food and general food creativity, I was sure I would love Sky’s.
Out in Hollywood, there is a little taco stand on a corner called Cactus Taqueria. Having heard a lot about this place, I felt that I needed to stop there to have a Mexican dinner before the Belle and Sebastian concert. I showed up and found the little stand in the corner of a parking lot on Vine. There were a few people waiting for their orders and another few groups eating out in the outdoor, yet covered seating area. It looked like a great place to find a good taco.
In my experience, most taco trucks aren’t worth blogging about. It’s not that I feel like I am too good for them or that they aren’t interesting, but in most cases I have found that they all taste pretty much the same. This is not true of Tacos El Gallito. I stopped by here one night with no plans to blog, but just hoping to get a decent taco. Instead, I had one of my most legendary LA nights and wound up befriending a couple of their Mexican patrons named Toast and Reuben. I also fell in love with the truck and vowed to return to give them a proper unvegan review.