3002 South Port Ave, Corpus Christi, Texas • 361-885-7705

I drove down Port recently and spotted four taquerias I’d never been to. I pulled into parking lots and emailed myself names and gps locations for each. One of the rationalizations I’ve had for not blogging every week was that I’d picked all the low hanging fruit. Well, the crazy thing about fruit is it grows back. Sure enough, close to HQ there are a bunch of new (at least to me) places to get tacos.

Pulling from the top of the list, I pulled my Valkyrie into the lot of the Merequetengue, which is inside the Q.C. Meat Market, and narrowly avoided an ankle-biting from a local dog who took issue with my mode of transport. Walking into the place, one is overwhelmed by the smell of a meat market: disinfectant and blood. I was bit apprehensive, but I ordered from the lady behind the counter and sat down at one of the tables that didn’t have chairs stacked upside-down on top of them.

The tacos were made to order on fresh handmade tortillas, and brought to the table by a waitress whose English was about as good as my Spanish. She pulled some sugar and a salsa verde from another table and set it in front of me – there was a red salsa, but not for me apparently. My routine when trying a new place is this; try the carne guisada with a fork, try the chorizo & egg with a fork, try the salsa with a spoon, add salsa and salt to the tacos, evaluate. Every step in the routine was satisfying here. The carne g, as you might expect from a restaurant in a meat market, was really good; toothy but not tough, and well seasoned. The chorizo and egg had good separation, with really good spicy chorizo and made so fresh to order that it was hard to distinguish the heat from the chorizo and the heat from the hot eggs. Add to both of these an excellent green salsa – a bit creamy, a bit hot, and good handmade tortillas. Merequetengue exceeded my expectations.

Our Taco Award Winner for this week is:

Debi Mazar

When I first watched Goodfellas, there was one thing – above all others – that made me wish I were Henry Hill and that’s Sandy, his guma, with a few pounds of cocaine, a tight dress, and an insatiable appetite. Cocaine is an evil drug, but if it were the 70’s and Sandy was offering it to me, I might be persuaded. Debi is now in her late 40s, is married to a tuscan cook who is inexplicably skinnier than she is, and she looks better than she did when she was in her twenties. You can see them working out who wears the pants in the family on Extra Virgin on the Cooking Channel.

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 back of the ’93 Vogue Italia in which Debi appears to tacos@tacotopia.net.

I live in Corpus Christi, Texas, a town also known has Tacotopia. It is the optimal environment for tacos – close to Mexico, big enough to have real competition between the taco masters and small enough not to assume the pretenses you find in larger cities where they try to corrupt the identity of the taco by introducing elements from other cultures. I’m no xenophobe but I do feel that the breakfast taco has reached its apex, and a standard has been established that can never be bested. If you add Sriracha sauce and fried feta to your Carne G, you’ll have something delicious but it’s not a breakfast taco.

So a few months back when some ignorant journalist went off all half-cocked and said “When it comes to breakfast tacos Austin trumps all other American cities” I worked hard not to totally flip the fuck out. With quiet reflection, and a stiff drink or five, I assessed the situation objectively and reached the conclusion that this yahoo just didn’t know any better, and that the only real contender Corpus Christi has is San Antonio. I know in my heart that we have the best breakfast tacos in the world, but many would argue that title belongs to a little spot on Hildebrand in San Antonio called Taco Taco, a place that was named best tacos in America by Bon Appétit Magazine. Having not eaten there I couldn’t be sure they weren’t right, and it kept me up at night.

This weekend I came up to the home of the Alamo to find out. Just like most celebrities it was smaller than it looked in pictures, but there was a full parking lot and a line out the door. The ‘no photography’ sticker on the door had me worried this was going to be a text only review, when a lady came up and asked me if I worked for a magazine.

“No,” I said. “I’m a… blogger,” I continued, shamefacedly. After she checked my credentials she said “you’re a nice man, you can take pictures” and I felt like I’d just gone backstage. The booth was nice, the light was good, the wall of awards stared down at me. The woman who guarded the door turned out to be Helen Velesiotis, the owner, and she revealed that there was no animal fat used to prepare any of the food.

“Even the beans?”

“Even the beans.”

Strike one. While I respect the decision, and the strength of will it would take to make such a decision It can’t help but adversely affect the final product, and it did. The beans were good but suffered from lack of pork fat. They were probably as good as they could get without it but was a significant lard deficiency, a terminal condition for beans. The tortillas were excellent, both the flour and the corn. The flour were fresh and fluffy, but dense – and no dry flour on the surface. The corn were thick and heavy, but fresh – almost like a baked polenta. I got the chorizo & egg, and a carne guisada. The chorizo and egg was heavy on the egg and light on the chorizo – to the point where I could barely taste the latter. The carne g was very tasty, with firm rich big chunks of beef and a sauce that had been made better with a long slow cook. The salsa itself was really good, with a strong dried chili flavor but with fresh tomato, cilantro and onion, blended to a sauce that showed nothing but the seeds and the red.

Once I got most of the way through the two tacos, Helen emerged with more food, and then later with more again. First it was a tray of chilequiles, and they were the best thing I had to eat there – a perfect blend of crisp corn tortillas, egg, cheese, fresh jalapeños, tomatoes, onions and cilantro on the same excellent flour tortillas. Then was the Norteño, beans and white cheese on a charlie brown with beef fajita y avocado.

We left the place totally stuffed, and feeling like we had been treated like royalty by the kind greek lady with the excellent Texican restaurant. That makes it hard for me to say this: these aren’t the best tacos in America, there are a few taco shops in Corpus Christi that do a better job than Taco Taco, but Corpus Christi is on such a high level, and the two hours difference from CC to SA makes it harder to make tacos as good, simply by proximity to the Rio Grande. You’d be crazy not to eat here if you like tacos and you’re in San Antonio. And Helen, if you’re ever in Corpus Christi let us buy you breakfast.

The taco award will return next week.

“This indecision’s killing me” was sung by Mick Jones from the seminal punk band the Clash, in a lyric in a song that transcended the prevailing socio-political ethos of the movement in favor of something personal and timeless. This feeling washes over me as I sit here. I don’t know where to start, I have come up with 20 ideas to start this post and none of them wants to offend any other by stepping to the front of the pack. Just like the rest of my life, I’ve got so much to do I can’t decide where to start.

Our Taco Award Winner for this week is:

Ellen Barkin

Often cast as the ‘manic pixie dream girl‘ of American cinema folklore, Ellen Barkin has the talent and skill to wander outside of that gilded cage when she chooses, just as she did with her Marriage to billionairre Ron Perelman (no, not that Ron Perlman). More stunning than ever at 56, she has been an an overwhelming array of great movies, the first of which I saw being the Science documentary the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but also including Diner, Tender Mercies, Down by Law, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,

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 back of an autographed dvd of Mercy to tacos@tacotopia.net.