Restaurant El Charro – Getting Lucky

4105 Agnes Street, Corpus Christi, Texas • 361-881-6076

I’m in the midst of a case of snakebite, not a real snake, but the bite of the snake of fate. This happens to me every 9-12 months. I lost a valuable employee (though my other guy has picked up the slack well), my truck broke down, my newly remodeled bathroom backed up full of raw sewage. So I fix the truck, drive it for one day and it breaks down again. I get a plumber, he brings in a second plumber, and now it looks like we’ll need to bring in a tunneling crew that is likely to cost an amount comparable to a new car. Equipment at work is breaking down after years of trouble-free service.

I can hardly complain though, looking at the situation with a wider angle. I’m walking, breathing, working for myself, and I’m married to a lovely and charming woman, I’ve got a stepson who can nearly out-play me on the bass. I live in the greatest state in the country, in the greatest country in the world, in a time when the human race possesses the technological capability to do things we’d have assumed were miracles in olden times. In my life I have had some bad luck, but I’ve had some very good luck too.  Some would call it by another name; blessing; favor; fate.  I don’t presume to understand the hand of any power higher than myself – I know enough to know that I don’t know what I don’t know. Another thing I know is that it could always be worse. It just doesn’t feel like it that much this morning.

So in spite of (or perhaps because of) late nights of work all week and a steady stream of bad news I carved out time this morning to have some tacos. Of course I slept through the alarm (bad luck for the Hat, who waited for half an hour for my late ass to show up) but I eventually made it to the spot, El Charro on Agnes. This is the first of a four part series showcasing a cluster of taco shops located at the delta of Agnes, Baldwin, and Airport/Old Robstown – an area I call Bald-Ag.  We’ll review the local taco shops, and at the end a winner will remain standing – to go up against the winner of the next cluster (Kostoryz), and the next (Staples/Leopard). El Charro was scrappy this morning, though, and the rest of the boys on the block better step up if they have any hope of taking the title in the ‘Bald Ag Taco Frag’

Here’s the tale of the tape: the tortillas were tip-top, and the tacos were big. The carne guisada (“beef & gravy” according to our server) was very good – flavorful and dense while still having some spring in the beef, and I don’t think any caught in my teeth. The chorizo & egg was not quite as good but still well able to defend itself from all but the best in the city. There was good definition between the egg and the chorizo, everything was fresh to order, and there was a hint of sweet and spice. With some of the good burnt orange pickled salsa it was an A, if just barely. The atmosphere was nice too, big and comfortably clean – but not too clean.  I’d been here before on a weekend and it was packed tighter than a hong kong subway, but today is was good.  There were some snaking lines para llevar, but they seemed to move quickly. The coffee was fair, and refilled frequently.

All in all this place put its all into this fight. We won’t know until the other challengers get their licks in, but El Charro has nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe all this misfortune has started to turn around, starting with a couple of simple tacos.

Good luck!

From the Hat

Man, it’s my Lucky Day.  Got a couple of Scrabble games going with friends and havin’ a pretty lucky run.  On the way to the university this morning, I was lucky the driver texting in the car in front of me hadn’t caused an accident on our run down Ocean Drive. I dreaded  having to pass his meandering vehicle, but lucky for me, once he finished his mobile missive and hit send, he sped up to 60 and I didn’t have to deal with him.  Not the luckiest day I’ve had, but pretty good so far. Better than an unlucky day hands down.  Somewhere back in the distant past, I broke my neck.  Now that’s an unlucky day. Or was it lucky that I didn’t end up dead or paralyzed? Luck is interesting that way, depending on how you look at the same event, it can be either lucky, or unlucky.

Now before I run down a rabbit hole (in 3D) with this, it should be noted that I don’t believe in luck any more than I believe in astrology or their love child, “My Lucky Stars”. I understand the belief, but it just not sensible. When something bad happens, especially when several somethings bad happen, it’s all due to Bad Luck.  But if instead it’s a string of good things, it’s my Good Luck that’s responsible. We are creatures that by nature need an explanation. If we don’t have one, we’ll make one up.  Viola! Luck.  But as explanations for what goes on in the world go, Luck is pretty lame. I mean, let’s say I go to Cousin Clint’s Poker Night for a bit of Texas Holdem’.  If I have an unlucky night and loose all my money, someone else must have had a lucky night to win it.  So not only can the same event be lucky and unlucky for the same person, it can work this way for different people. Oh my achin’ head!  So was it bad luck that I broke my neck?  Absolutely not. It was stupidity that was responsible. Was I lucky that things turned out so well? Absolutely not. Brilliant surgeons, the care of countless nurses and the love of my family were responsible. And all of these people would have been there doing their thing regardless of my luck.  On the other hand, I had the best mollejas taco I’ve ever had today. Lucky?  Hmmm.

I did have the best mollejas taco I’ve ever had today at Charro’s Restaurant this morning. Fried very crispy – they were the texture of a perfectly fried oyster. Crispy on the outside, and soft and juicy on the inside. They came on an excellent flour tortilla with fresh onions and cilantro. Pure joy!  I also ordered the barbacoa taco. It was good, but missing the taste of cow’s head expected in an excellent barbacoa. It was lean and there was an unusual, but pleasant spice to it. Familiar, but I’ll have to have more to put a name to it. The salsa was served warm and colored that way too – spicy and orange with just the right amount of heat. A very pleasant breakfast and I thank My Lucky Stars.

Salud

Our free taco winner for this week is:

Jennifer Tilly

We mentioned Ms. Tilly in the Eddie’s Review, and noticed a strange thing soon afterwards: about half of our traffic comes from google searches for Jennifer Tilly (née Chan). Since then we’ve awarded free tacos to a number of very impressive women but none has inspired such interest as has Jennifer. A compelling argument in favor of blended marriages, she is part Chinese, and all American. Some might confuse her squeaky voice as an indication of a lack of intellect, but they’d be stupid to do so. Though briefly eclipsed by her sister Meg after a casual interest in acting turned into an Oscar nomination, Jennifer has stood the test of time taking on brave and challenging roles in movies like Bound, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, Fast Sofa, and Bride of Chucky. She nearly stopped acting altogether after taking up professional poker playing, winning at Ladies-Only No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em in the World Series of Poker.

Offer includes 2 tacos, an audience with the ‘tacoteurs,’ and a free tacotopia t-shirt. Please redeem this offer at Whetstone Graphics on a Friday morning of your choice. Offer subject to cancellation by order of the wives of the tacoteurs.  Enter to win by emailing your name on the dvd case of a copy of Bound to tacos@tacotopia.net.
Restaurant El Charro on Urbanspoon

Toñia’s #2 – Right Before Your Eyes

This is an beautiful example of the dying craft of hand painted signage

This is a beautiful example of the dying craft of hand painted signage

2561 Agnes St.
Corpus Christi, TX 78405
361-884-7596

ExteriorAs I pass through the familiar patterns and practiced routine of my day I am scarcely aware of an entirely different world that occupies the same space.  Move one block to the west, drive an hour earlier, focus on the roofline instead of the sidewalk, and you’ll see it.  The Hat and I agreed to meet at Toñia’s #2 this morning and I took the Morgan exit, one exit too late.  I cut back a block into the neighborhood, and kept my eyes keen for new taquerias.  There were many old boarded up businesses, at least one had been a taqueria at one point based on it’s signage but it was fenced in and chest deep in weeds, looking as if Andrew Wyeth had painted the barrio – lonely and haunted by emptiness.  I made it to the destination, and the parking lot was thick with workers in their trucks.  These guys have their own little world too.  They go to their own bars, have their own family events on weekends and hang out at their own section of the beach.  I thrive on repetition.  I find something works and I’ll work it that way until it doesn’t, and get better at it.  Time passes too quickly, though, when you’re doing the same thing over again, and it’s nice to see things you don’t, especially when they’re right in front of you.

tacosToñia’s might be one of these places, if you regularly drive down Agnes – though I get the impression many people who do might not be big readers of blogs. I make it out that way when I need some unusual piece of wood, or a weird fastener, or some angle iron and 16 gauge plate – meaning not that often. Not like people who live and work there, whose families lived and worked there, who have a rich history and stories to tell about every street in the neighborhood like I once did about the place I grew up… One of the places I grew up.

I’d been here before, back when I would put these things up as posts on facebook to mock the people I went to school with who’d moved to California and mistakenly thought they had good breakfast tacos. It was still there though the giant mulberry tree was bare this time, not like before when the sidewalk was dappled with thousands of impossibly deep purple stains. I didn’t see the pretty cross-eyed server this time, but the hairnets were still on all the employees as they dished out the business from their cafeteria steam tray. I served my own coffee and Kevin paid the lady, and we went back to his place to eat after finding the only place to sit – an outside patio in a steel cage – too wet to sit on with dew.

SkylineThe fare was fair, and even though the tortillas were the worst I can remember and chorizo & egg could have been called the egg that imagined it once knew chorizo, I ate both tacos (well they were tiny). The carne g was not bad really, and the coffee was decent. If you’d only ever had Whataburger’s excuse for a taco this might be the best you’d ever have, but we do live in Corpus Christi, AKA Tacotopia, the center of the tacoverse.

After we hastily consumed the lot I headed back to my shop, stopping along the way to take a picture of the fog rolling around downtown. A homeless guy shuffled into my shop at 8:30 asking for some vinyl stripes to put on his profoundly soiled jacket and I obliged him, for free, in a effort to cause him to exit as efficiently and expeditiously as possible. Tom Waits put it well in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Down By Law’ when he said, “It’s a sad and beautiful world, buzz off.”

Agnes Street is the back door to the world.  It’s not the prettiest street, in fact, it’s damned hard to use the words pretty, Agnes, and street in the same sentence.  Rimmed with junkyards and recycling facilities –  it’s a place where cars go to die and dead cars become iron carcasses, picked-over by hyenas looking for that no-longer-available taillight housing, or switch, or Dodge Ram Truck Dash.  If you work it, you can find a rusting hulk to represent each of the last 6 or 7 decades nestled comfortably among the thorns and snakes.  Once road-proud beauties now half-buried, raise their fists in silence as if trying to illicit a mournful cry from Charlton Heston at the loss of a world lost in time.
At least it’s a peaceful end.  I’m reminded of similar rusting hulks, nigh when the earth was young, in Oklahoma, Alaska, and North Carolina.  Targets they were, for the field artillery.  They didn’t go quietly.  The stood brazenly upright out in the open, giving a raspberry to any would-be forward observer willing to step up and try to give ‘em a black eye.  Taking high explosive, white phosphorous, (used for equipment and facilities only, their use is prohibited on troops.), and smoke rounds ranging from grunt-carried mortars to self-propelled howitzers.  It was the eighties, so quite often the target descriptions were, “platoon of Russian Special Forces in the open”, or “Soviet T72 tanks in defile”, or the occasional “school bus full of armed children and nuns.”  Humor was a different thing in the field.
At one post, Ft. Sill Oklahoma, on the training course where we learned to put hurt on these targets from artillery located dozens of miles away; it was a daily event when the “Gut Truck” showed up.  “Roach Coach”, “Poagie Wagon”, whatever you called it, you could get a sandwich, or taco (definitely not a good example of either) from this big white ford truck equipped with a mobile kitchen.  It was a paradise of donuts, chips, or any other kind of terrible-for-you junk food you could desire – located conveniently in the middle of a staged war zone.  But we were hungry, and there were tacos.
There were tacos this morning, too.  Tonia’s #2 had an action station for taco construction.  The taco lady hawked her wares from behind glass – an assortment of goodies to choose from.  I had a picadillo, and a chicharone, both on flour.  The chicharones were basically a soup of pig skin and onion, with a tomato base.  They were piggy, but too soft for my preference.  Not enough to put me off on them though.  But they were mighty; undiluted with eggs or other nonsense.  The picadillo was better.  It’s a peasant dish of spiced ground beef and potatoes.  Tonia’s offering was seasoned well with plenty of salt.  The salsa specialists out there will groan at the salsa offering.  And even a tortilla trainee would see that these were not that good.  Mine might have needed a bit more time on the comal.  The coffee was good, but not never-ending.   I liked the place and will probably be back.  I was derelict in my duty by not having noticing the sliced hotdog and barbeque sauce taco.  Damn.

From the Hat

Agnes Street is the back door to the world.  It’s not the prettiest street, in fact, it’s damned hard to use the words pretty, Agnes, and street in the same sentence.  Rimmed with junkyards and recycling facilities –  it’s a place where cars go to die and dead cars become iron carcasses, picked-over by hyenas looking for that no-longer-available taillight housing, or switch, or Dodge Ram Truck Dash.  If you work it, you can find a rusting hulk to represent each of the last 6 or 7 decades nestled comfortably among the thorns and snakes.  Once road-proud beauties now half-buried, raise their fists in silence as if trying to elicit a mournful cry from Charlton Heston for a world lost in time.

At least it’s a peaceful end.  I’m reminded of similar rusting hulks, nigh when the earth was young, in Oklahoma, Alaska, and North Carolina.  Targets they were, for the field artillery.  They didn’t go quietly.  They stood brazenly upright out in the open, giving a raspberry to any would-be forward observer willing to step up and try to give ‘em a black eye.  Taking high explosive, white phosphorous, (used for equipment and facilities only, its use is prohibited on troops.), and smoke rounds ranging from grunt-carried mortars to self-propelled howitzers.  It was the eighties, so quite often the target descriptions were, “platoon of Russian Special Forces in the open”, or “Soviet T72 tanks in defile”, or the occasional “school bus full of armed children and nuns.”  Humor was a different thing in the field.

At one post, Ft. Sill Oklahoma, on the training course where we learned to put hurt on these targets from artillery located dozens of miles away; it was a daily event when the “Gut Truck” showed up.  “Roach Coach”, “Poagie Wagon”, whatever you called it, you could get a sandwich, or taco (definitely not a good example of either) from this big white ford truck equipped with a mobile kitchen.  It was a paradise of donuts, chips, or any other kind of terrible-for-you junk food you could desire – located conveniently in the middle of a staged war zone.  But we were hungry, and there were tacos.armyphoto0001

There were tacos this morning, too.  Toñia’s #2 had an action station for taco construction.  The taco lady hawked her wares from behind glass – an assortment of goodies to choose from.  I had a picadillo, and a chicharrón, both on flour.  The chicharrónes were basically a soup of pig skin and onion, with a tomato base.  They were piggy, but too soft for my preference.  Not enough to put me off on them though.  But they were mighty; undiluted with eggs or other nonsense.  The picadillo was better.  It’s a peasant dish of spiced ground beef and potatoes.  Toñia’s offering was seasoned well with plenty of salt.  The salsa specialists out there will groan at the salsa offering.  And even a tortilla trainee would see that these tarps were not that good.  Mine might have needed a bit more time on the comal.  The coffee was good, but not never-ending.   I liked the place and will probably be back.  I was derelict in my duty by not having noticed the sliced hotdog and barbecue sauce taco.  Damn.

–Salud

20091105-Tonias2

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