2110 Laredo Street, Corpus Christi, TX • 361-885-0117

When you see cops at the taqueria it’s gonna be really good (they’re eating there) or really bad (they’re pulling criminals out of the kitchen). San Luis’s parking lot was adorned this morning with a local cruiser, and the wig-wags were off so I put my wallet in my front pocket and walked inside. You may recall San Luis as one of our early reviews, and I have long considered it one of the best in Corpus Christi. So when this month’s Corpus Christi Books and Beverages book group meeting was winding down Wednesday night and I invited a few of the abundant and abundantly single intelligent and sexy ladies of literature to have some early morning tacos I suggested San Luis, figuring it would be a sure thing. Well, as my bookie says, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

We could hear the ringing of the phone as we sat down, and it rang nonstop, unanswered, for the duration. It was as if we were listening to a skipping record of the vuvuzela. My wife eventually walked over and took the receiver off the hook, only to have the ringing magically continue like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Not only that, but the tacos took about 40 minutes to come out. We had only sporadic coffee service throughout that time, but by the time the food came I was white knuckling.

Check out the color from the chorizo.

The tacos themselves were not bad. The chorizo and egg was about average, a little too light on the chorizo, a bit too mixed so the flavor of the egg extinguished the flavor of the chorizo, but still quite eatable. The carne guisada was also easy to eat, but just a smidgen tougher than it should be and lacking any real distinguishing spice or flavor. It wasn’t all mediochre though – the coffee was good, especially with fresh scalded milk in a little sweating stainless steel dispenser. The salsa also rocked, and the tortillas were, as they always are here, amazing. My wife’s chorizo, bean, and bacon taco on a fresh handmade corn tortilla was exquisite. But when Nico, who is a cheese blogger, got her carne g with cheese you can guess what wasn’t in her taco. Yep, and when we brought it to the attention of the server, she brought out a bowl of shredded American cheese. Sure, we are the greatest country in the world, but American cheese just sucks, for real.

There was some discussion of the staff being short-handed, but we all left feeling a bit disappointed, a bit late, and a bit full. I will be back, but with lower expectations.

Our Taco Award Winner for this week is:

Adrianne Curry

Model, playmate, fangirl, geek, freak, hardcore gamer, celebrity bride, jabba’s slavegirl, gym rat. All of these could be used to describe the multi-faceted but singularly sexy Adrianne Curry. In the outfit pictured right, who wouldn’t want to be Jabba the Hut, even knowing that he meets his end at her hands. Ms. Curry pulled herself up by her brastraps through a troubled childhood, a working class life and problems with drugs to become a world-class model, and a brainy techy geek at that. She’s an ambassador for cosplay, and hangs out (often literally) with fellow taco award winner Coco. She’s got one of the easiest-on-the-eyes twitter feeds around, and just happens to be married to Peter Brady. She does all of this while spending hours each day in the gym. The force is strong with this one.

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 January 2008 issue of Playboy to tacos@tacotopia.net.

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.

4066 South Port Avenue, Corpus Christi, Texas • (361) 808-7711

You may not know it, but Corpus Christi has a vibrant filmmaker’s community. There’s the Rockport Film Festival in the fall, and a number of local production companies like Los Tall Boys Media, whose short film ‘Black Market Tripas‘ combined the gritty feel of ‘Taxicab Confessions‘ with our city’s best feature – our cuisine. Each year we see people running around like ants whose anthill has been kicked over to put together movies in only 168 hours and compete in the CC7D Corpus Christi Seven Day Film Project, which is the brainchild of tacotopia taco eater extraodinairre Heidi Hovda and fellow tacotopia alumnus Joe Hilliard, who is also behind the Coastalthon film and music festival, 40 things to do in Corpus Christi, and who writes a column for the Caller Times.

This morning the Hat and I were interviewed by local filmmakers Matthew Scherer and Bryan Thetford for their upcoming documentary about Corpus Christi’s tacos. Yes, you heard right. A documentary about tacos in the breakfast taco capital of the world. Finally someone is getting it right – unlike the city council who outlawed pipes this week. The police said they needed to get rid of smokable incense (okay, I can get behind that), ‘and while you’re at it – shut down all the smoke shops.’ The city council said ‘sure, we’ll carry your water without thinking. Can we do anything else to alienate people under 40?’ Las Brisas is going to pump toxic waste into the local air, and I can’t have a cigar in a local cigar store. I don’t smoke, much less smoke anything illegal, but if I acted like the city council has I hope someone would force-feed me some hash brownies so I would lighten the fuck up.

And, I now step off the soap-box. Getting that upset is bad for my heart, which is already (thankfully) laboring from this mornings amazing chow which included coffee, refried beans, pico, carne guisada, fresh flour and corn tortillas, barbacoa with onions and cilantro, and two types of chicharrones; fried and guisado. I could go down the list and rate each item, but there’s no need. Sonny’s kicks ass across the board. We’ve never given them a proper review, though we’ve mentioned them in our Spamathon, and we featured them in our first (and only) menudo minute. In spite of this we eat here regularly, and they are among the best taquerias in Corpus Christi, which puts them among the best taquerias in the world. The real star of the menu is the chicharrones. If you like tacos you should eat here, and if you eat here don’t leave without trying the chicharrones. They come to the table still hot from the grease and they have a texture that is closer to carnitas than the puffed pork rinds you’d find at stripes.

So after a while we relinquished the prime table that had seen us eat too much good food, drink too much good coffee, and take up too much time while we waxed poetic about the symbolic significance of the breakfast taco in our post-modern industrial societal construct, meaning we said ‘we like tacos.’ With that we made our way across the red doormat and out into the relative anonymity of our workaday lives. And while our time in the limelight was limited, our selection of great Corpus Christi taquerias is limitless.

Big-ups to Sonny’s for their cooperation (letting an albeit small film crew set up), their food, and their excellent service. You Rock!

Our Taco Award Winner for this week is:

Nikki Cox

The Cruel Knife, and the Damage Done

With the body of an adult performer and a name to match, Nikki Cox is one of those types of minor celebrities I call wet briquettes. They are given many chances to become famous, none of which have ingnited their career. She was on Unhappily Ever After, where she met her one-time fiancee Bobcat Goldthwait who recently on WTF summed up the terminus of their relationship thus, “I wanted to have a small wedding, and she wanted to bang other dudes.” That other dude is former SNL performer and fellow briquette Jay Cox Mohr, who in an act of feminism (?) took his wife’s name. Nikki started out as a dancer, performing with Michael Jackson, before having to change directions, presumably due to her unusually ample chest, when she started a series of false starts in television including the eponymous Nikki, and more recently Las Vegas while becoming addicted to plastic surgery. While her stunning looks have suffered from the ravages of botox, she is still quite beautiful and occupies a special place in Tacotopia.

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 Sarjenka Episode of ST:TNG to tacos@tacotopia.net.