Tour de Tacos

Rosita's Al Pastor, Taqueria Chapala, Porfirio's, Joe's Bakery, Alayna's Taqueria, Taqueria Valle de Bravo, Luvianos, El Tacorrido, Piedra Grande, Piedras Negras

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT CRITIC
Thursday, April 09, 2009

Armando Rayo has a gift. He can spot a taco trailer from blocks away, before even the barest hint of it is visible to the untrained eye. On a recent midnight drive along far North Lamar Boulevard, Rayo's Trailer-Vision (the name we picked for his superpower) identified three trucks, a Mexican meat market and a corrugated metal taco shed, all within blocks of one another. Rayo and I were in the nighttime portion of a 10-stop taco tour, and we'd already hit three places in this one night. We were stuffed, running out of things to talk about and getting dozy from the soporific effects of grilled meat, refried beans and too many tortillas. But when we got out of the car at El Tacorrido, none of that mattered. It was taco time.

Rayo is the ambassadorial arm of the online Austin taco appreciation society called Taco Journalism. If your shop sells anything wrapped in a tortilla, chances are good that one of tacojournalism.com's four principal bloggers has reviewed your work, included you on a taco safari or mentioned you in a Twitter post.

The site was founded three years ago by South by Southwest Inc. colleagues Jarod Neece (film festival programmer) and Justin Bankston (Web developer). Neece lives a block away from one of the Taquerias Arandas outlets and says that "taco" was one of the first words uttered by his 2-year-old child. Bankston grew up eating tacos in the Rio Grande Valley, speaks "fluent restaurant Spanish" and posts reviews under the name "Cornbiter Deluxe." They're joined by Gordon "The Commish" Murphy, whose posts include the self-deprecating "Places to Eat When You Are White and Have Questionable Taste," and Rayo, operating as "El Mundo de Mando" or "Mando's World," the world in which I spent more than 10 hours talking about, eating and breathing the airborne essence of more than 40 tacos.

Taco Journalism isn't the only online taco presence in Austin. In 2007, the site tied with Taco Town (www.tacotown.org) in one of the Austin Chronicle's Best of Austin made-to-order critics' categories: "Best Way to Find a Decent Taco." Taco Town is a righteous site, rambling from taco-trailer reports to SXSW band picks to recipes designed to improve your hook-up prospects. But what Taco Town doesn't have is Armando Rayo, a born organizer whose day job is community outreach for United Way. Just a few weeks into my new job as the American-Statesman's restaurant critic, I got an e-mail from Rayo. "Congratulations!" it said. "Let's go eat some tacos!"

`Mando's World' Taco Tour: Morning glories

• Rosita's Al Pastor, 1911 E. Riverside Drive

• Taqueria Chapala, 2101 E. Cesar Chavez St.

• Porfirio's Tacos, 1512-B Holly St.

• Joe's Bakery, 2305 E. Seventh St.

• Alayna's Taqueria, 2611 Manor Road

For our morning taco tour, I asked Rayo to pick five of his favorite places, grouped so that we could be finished sometime after lunch. I plugged them into Google Maps and laid out an efficient trek through East Austin, starting with Rosita's Al Pastor on Riverside Drive. It was an appropriate place to start. Al pastor - chile-seasoned chunks of pork roasted "shepherds' style" on a rotisserie, sometimes with pineapple - takes different forms at almost every taqueria, but I've tried enough of the variations to know that this is one of my favorite styles. The Taco Journalism guys are less equivocal. The founders both say Rosita's al pastor is their favorite taco place in all of Austin. Bankston says he gave it "a million stars." The trailer is open early in the morning, and I've seen the parking lot around the trailer mobbed even after the bars have closed at 2 a.m.

Rayo and I ordered al pastor and barbacoa tacos for around $2 apiece, all on fresh flour tortillas. The barbacoa tacos were spread with refried beans, which Rayo said is as ubiquitous as mayonnaise in Mexico, and the beans helped soften the gamey flavor of the meat, which traditionally is slow-roasted beef that might or might not be from the head of the cow, depending on who's doing the cooking. Even with onions and cilantro and a squeeze of fresh lime, I couldn't buy into the flavor the same way I embraced the red, crunchy pork of the al pastor, which we finished off with creamy green salsa that was citrusy and hot. Before we left, we paid a toll of sorts, each giving a dollar to a rough-looking man who angled in on us from the sidewalk. Amiable as he was, we knew he wasn't going away until we gave him something, and it was the first of many extracurricular spending opportunities.

At Taqueria Chapala, a few miles north on Cesar Chavez Street, our money went to a "musico," a man with a guitar and a belt-mounted amplifier who wandered among the tables in the dining room, singing sorrowful Mexican folk songs. Rayo saw my eyes swim in my head at the spectacle, and he Twittered that the Statesman guy "can't believe he's still in Austin." With Chapala's shocking yellow paint job and white bars across the doors and windows, along with the musico and the total absence of spoken English that morning, it wasn't exactly Chuy's, but it wasn't my first rodeo, as they say, and I made a mental note to work on my restaurant Spanish. Rayo ordered more barbacoa, this time "tacos dorados" style, with tortillas folded around the meat then fried crisp. We drank bad diner coffee and talked about Taco Journalism.

"This is the way we share community, whether it's passion for food or passion for culture," he said. "Mexican food is one of those foods that's simple to make. But if you make it right, it can give back to you." What a bunch of moony-eyed happy-talk, I remember thinking. But Rayo walks the walk. When he married Ixchel Granada de Rayo in August, their reception at Fiesta Gardens included taco carts catered by Mi Madre's restaurant, and Rayo sees a taco-catering service in his future, El Mundo de Mando Taco Factory.

At Chapala, the plates arrived, piled with aromatic fried tacos, grilled onions, chopped onions and cilantro and a grilled jalapeño pepper. Ever had one of those fried tacos at Jack in the Box? Two of the best little grease-bombs on Earth for 99 cents? Like that, only better. We ate most of two plates, the food so good that we didn't care about the morning's next three stops. We'd regret that.

I learned about the "salsa shot" at Porfirio's Tacos on Holly Street. No doubt inspired by the cough syrup-dose plastic cups of green sauce dropped into our bag of tacos at the neighborhood shop with counter service, the salsa shot is Rayo's quick-throw test of a taco shop's mettle. "Cheers," he said, and down the hatch it went. Salsa worship is a serious part of online taco talk, and reviewers might spend half of a short review obsessing over a simple blend of jalapeño, onion, lime and cilantro. Porfirio's salsa verde passed. Even so, I was more impressed by the simple beauty of my egg-and-bean taco for $1.35. We drank more bad coffee.

The streak of bad coffee came to an end at Joe's Bakery on East Seventh Street, where it came hot, fresh and instantly from a waitress whose picture I saw in XL a few years back, when we saluted servers who'd been at their posts since forever. And she knew her stuff, sliding a tall glass of ice water in front of me after I ordered a taco with chicharrones ($1.59), the spicy stewed hog fat that you most often see fried as a bar snack. "You're gonna need it," she said with a sly smile. She was right, if not for the spice, then for the fact that the chicharrones tasted and felt exactly like wet pork rinds. There's a reason those things are bar snacks. A few beers, and you'll eat anything that's salty and crunchy, right? The simple pleasure of carne guisada in mild gravy was more my speed that morning.

More music at Joe's, this time from a beautiful woman keeping time with rhythm sticks, singing something with an exotic, possibly Mayan sway. The noise of the packed diner hardly abated for her strolling serenade, but I was transfixed. Rayo ordered a Mexican-style breakfast taco with a fresh flour tortilla, eggs, jalapeño and tomato for $2.49, with a side of bacon in unnaturally long and crispy strips, with the look and decadent taste of something that might have spent some time in the deep fryer. Looking around, I saw my daughter's second-grade teacher, far from home but clearly right at home at Joe's.

By now, Rayo and I were fed men walking. But we had one more stop on the morning tour, at Alayna's Taqueria, a walk-up window next door to a laundromat on Manor Road. He peeked in to say hi to owner Genoveva Silva, who was tending to a big order of chicken fajitas on her flat-top grill. Here, the $2 taco was packed with at least a third of a pound of dark-meat chicken, and the cheese, tomatoes and onions came in a separate piece of foil for freshness. We packed the rest of our order - ground-beef picadillo and carne guisada tacos - into paper sacks to save for later. Much later.

The `Mando's World' Taco Tour: Sundowner's edition

• Taqueria Valle de Bravo, 7110-C Cameron Road

• Luvianos, 7213 Cameron Road

• El Tacorrido, 9320 N. Lamar Blvd.

• Piedra Grande, 8610 N. Lamar Blvd.

• Piedras Negras Taqueria #2, Pleasant Valley Road and East Cesar Chavez Street

For our nighttime tour, Rayo and I improvised, knowing we'd go to North Austin but letting our appetites steer us. But on our first stop, all we could do was blather on about the salsas - brown, red and green - even after the tacos came. It's one thing to fetishize salsa, but if that's all you can say about a place, it's time to move on. Like this one taco place a reader e-mailed us about at the Statesman, one of those e-mails littered with capital letters and exclamation points about how this one little dive had the best salsas IN THE WORLD!! Habanero! Peanut! Tomatillo! Just the best dang coal in all of Newcastle. So obsessed was this e-mailer with puréed peppers and cilantro that I wondered if she saw the same rat that we did when we drove out to investigate the hyperinflated punctuation. The Big Picture, friends. Salsa's just the wave; it's not the water.

At Taqueria Valle de Bravo on Cameron Road, the free tortilla chips came with beans, not just a bowl of salsa. A Mexican telenovela blared away on the TV in the corner, and Rayo went right for the quesadillas fritas, an order of five fried tacos filled with chicken, tomatoes, onions, cabbage and sour cream, dusted with tangy white cheese for $6.99. This time, we paced ourselves, splitting the plate and a tamarind agua fresca that tasted like sweet, pulpy white grapes. Pressed for time and belly space, we also resisted the lure of the strategically placed fruit-pop paleteria next door.

"There's a dying breed of food out there called Tex-Mex," Rayo said halfway through our dinner at Luvianos Restaurant on Cameron Road. "The old-school Tex-Mex places, there's not that many of them anymore: Matt's, Cisco's, Nuevo León, Joe's." However you define Tex-Mex - I grew up thinking ground beef, brown chili gravy and Velveeta-style cheese was Mexican food - our tour had been probing farther south of the border with all the roasted, pulled and lightly spiced meats we tried. Luvianos is named for a town near Mexico City, and Rayo said their $1.75 barbacoa taco was the best of the night. I was mesmerized by the tall drink cooler, stocked with Corona, Negra Modelo, Jarritos sodas in their gumball-machine colors and Mexican Coke. One thing to say about my time in Mando's World: I was never far from a cold green bottle of Coca-Cola.

We had Trailer-Vision to thank for our next two stops on North Lamar Boulevard, first at El Tacorrido, a perfect corrugated metal cube planted in a strip-mall parking lot. The best part of El Tacorrido was a sticky plastic jug full of what I called "chile chutney," a fiery, chunky salsa rich with tomatoes (skin and all), onions, jalapeños and what might have been nopales (cactus). It added magic to the slow-cooked taste of the carne guisada taco with potatoes and bell peppers for $1.50. And pickled pink onions made the shredded pork carnitas taco (also $1.50) into something special. We ordered Mexican Cokes to ward off the midnight fatigue, surprised to see clutches of high-school-age kids, talking purposefully on cell phones, file in and out of the tiny patio space while we ate. So late on a school night. Was I feeling concern or just envy?

A little farther down the road, Rayo picked out the Piedra Grande trailer from among four taco trucks on the same block. His barometer: Always hit the truck with the most people out front, no matter how dodgy it looks. A man offered to sell me an "extra" Black and Decker drill from the front seat of his car as I walked bleary-eyed to the trailer. Rayo ordered for us in Spanish because by then I had given up pointing at hand-lettered menus and asking what things meant (by the way, order "sesos" and you get brains; I should have asked for some). What we got for $1.50 each was two of the best tacos of the night: charry pork carnitas that tasted like fall-off-the-bone barbecued ribs and rich, bright-red al pastor that Rayo said "consumes your mouth." Out of curiosity, I tried a mango licuado, a kind of smoothie that tasted like milk, sugar and froth, but not much else.

Smarter men (men with "sesos") would have stopped there. But I insisted on trying Piedras Negras, the East Side trailer where the Taco Journalism guys had gathered for a portrait a few days earlier, the three Anglo men in jackets and ties, Rayo in his bad-boy "El Mariachi" suit. "I have to say something about that place," I told Rayo. "It's in the picture, and people will ask about it." The "something" is that at 2 a.m., they were in no mood for us to order things they had run out of. Nor did they want us to ask how much anything cost, even though their peeling, redacted menu board looked like it had barely survived a nuclear war. What's the old saying? "If you have to ask, you can't afford for me to get out of this trailer and make you sorry you asked." Yes, ma'am. Rayo laughed, Twittering about how the taco lady was ready to pull my card. Never have I worked so hard for a $2 fajita taco. But you know what? It was pretty good. A memorable last stop on a 10-spot taco tour. We should have made T-shirts.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902