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.