On National Taco Day, I like to remember the best possible way to eat them — from a truck, in LA, at a gas station

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October 4, 2018 8:21 PM

I love tacos, but I'm also a horrible taco snob. I only like mine served off a truck in a gas station parking lot in Los Angeles. And I don't like to spend more than $10.

I love tacos, but I'm also a horrible taco snob. I only like mine served off a truck in a parking lot in Los Angeles. I want them to be small, tasty, and very, very cheap.

Thursday, October 4 is National Taco Day, which means that this humble food will be feted far and wide. But I don't care. I only like to eat them one way, in one place.

I spent the better part of a decade eating off taco trucks in LA, and in 2007, I found MY truck: Tacos La Estrella, always parked at a gas station on Colorado Boulevard in LA's Eagle Rock neighborhood, northeast of Downtown.

Then I moved back to New York.

"You will never have good tacos again," people warned me, ominously.

Yes, when I lived in NYC a decade earlier, it was a Mexican-food wasteland. But surely, with the whole food-truck revolution, that had changed?

Nope. Every purported "taco" truck I tried was a massive fail. Tacos too big. Tacos too busy (Lettuce? Shredded cheese? Sloshings of guacamole?). Tacos uncheap. A great taco is less than $2. Period. It's usually significantly less.

Every purveyor I tried — and I got away from the trucks after a while — botched the job. New York taco-makers seemed to think that a simple little piece of street food, made from unwanted cuts of meat and rendered delicious through ingenuity and an obsession with freshness, had to be improved. More meat. Fancier preparations. Ungodly sauces.

Great tacos are an art form, every bit as exacting in the details as great sushi, but at a much, much lower price. They are street art. And this art was long ago perfected in Southern California. It should be copied, not modified.

Thankfully, after a year and a half of suffering, I got back to California for the Los Angeles Auto Show a few years back. I went straight to the parking lot, fingers crossed that my beloved truck would be there.

I'm still reeling from how wonderful it all was.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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