4418 Prescott St, Corpus Christi, Texas 78416

I live in Corpus Christi, and I’ve lived here for 11 years. My mother grew up here. I’ve got grandparents on both sides from here. My papaw worked for the Post Office downtown, and made a 400 pound coffee table out of the marble wall of a stall in the men’s room there when they tore the place down. I’m not an outsider, but I’m not a local. I’m a bolillo, so I’m always going to stick out at the best taquerias.

So when I was driving down Golihar and saw Toñas, I pulled in to the decrepit Prescott Village shopping center and expected to do my normal thing. Get in and out with as little muss and fuss as possible. Sneak a photo of the tacos, and then get a parting shot of the front from my truck as I drive away. I really didn’t expect anyone inside to speak English. At most Corpus Christi taquerias the waitress asks what I want in Spanish, and I answer in english, and the correct tacos find their way through the language barrier to my table.

Today was different, though. The guy behind the counter saw my giant camera, and asked if I was from the city, about a maintenance fee. I said no – that I write a blog about breakfast tacos. He told the ladies in the kitchen that I was a writer, and one of them held up a tortilla for a photo. They let me come back in to the kitchen. It was nice to be regarded with amity, and not with suspicion. They were rolling out and cooking tortillas to order. They were as good as you’d find anywhere. There are few things in life as good as a tortilla that’s seconds off the placa.

The salsa was fair. The carne guisada was pretty tasty, though I suspect there might have been some food service beef gravy mix to help fill it out. The chorizo and egg was fresh, and on those tortillas, everything was better. Many of the patrons knew each other, old and young. If you notice the lady in red at the top had a bow on her shirt where people were pinning money for her birthday. The coffee was par for the course here in town. The setup in this place is a steam tray in plain view of the customers, behind glass. You order at the front, and then you see them prepare your food. If you order coffee, they give you a cup and you go to the coffee station to your left and serve yourself. From the front of the restaurant you can see Cunningham Middle School through the brushstrokes of the hand-painted signage on the plate glass window. Kids come in every 30 seconds or so, on their way to school, and leave in another minute with a taco in a bag, and run out to beat the bell, laboring under the weight of the backpack. Homer, the guy behind the counter confirmed what I expected: that this was the original location, the other being the Toñas on Agnes. The Signage was painted by the same hand. This one has been here for fourteen years, the other for seven.  There are probably kids buying tacos today whose parents were buying tacos here when it opened.

So the ingredients may be lowbrow, just like the neighborhood, but the atmosphere, the people, and the tacos were as enjoyable as I’ve had.

Our Taco Award Winner for this week is:

Esmé Bianco

Game of Thrones, though brutally violent and rapey, is a great show (and a great series of books). Critics are using a term coined to describe this use of sex to move the narrative forward in GOT. It’s sexposition – a pun and a portmanteau of sex and exposition. Women in Westeros are brutalized (as are the men) but have as much power in many cases as the men of the realm. Even the courtesan Ros, is valued. And as she should be, endowed with stunning beauty, grace, and natural gifts by the beautiful Esmé Bianco, a British burlesque performer and lingerie model. Esme belongs to an elite club of beautiful former girlfriends of Marilyn Manson that includes Dita von Teese, Evan Rachel Wood , Stoya, Jenna Jameson, and Rose McGowan. I have respect for HBO and the show’s runners for having the balls to cast people in the roles of prostitutes who actually know something about working in the adult entertainment industry. Esmé’s confidant and fellow prostitute on the show is Shae, played by Sibel Kekilli who appeared in more than a few ‘genre pieces’ in Germany in the early 2000s. Respect those who deserve it, and Esmé commands it.

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 a tavern wench’s bodice to tacos@tacotopia.net.

How will the Apple iPad affect the breakfast taco industry? That’s the question we asked patrons and employees of Taco Rico on Greenwood. Our responses consisted mostly of “what is an iPad?” and “is this going to be together or separate?” It would appear, at least at this taco shop, that there has been little preparation for the coming of the fabled fifth screen, and employees of taco rico are ill equipped to take advantage of the remaking of the taco landscape that will inevitably follow tomorrow’s product launch.

The chorizo & egg was less than inspiring, with very little chorizo and tasting a bit mealy but still edible. It was huge, though, and nearly crowded the other taco off the plate. The carne guisada was goldilocks, not too good, not too bad. The coffee had a touch of burn, but served its purpose – though only after it was self served from the coffee station. What this place lacks in straight up good food it makes up for in quirky atmosphere: The little old lady, the steam tray, etc… I’d swear there was a piece of sausage hanging from the ceiling behind the counter. And while Taco Rico is not the best taqueria I’ve been to, it’s worth a visit if you’re near the intersection of Horne and Greenwood, and you’re craving a taco, and you like funky little taco shops, and the taqueria you were planning on going to is closed.

Our free taco winner for this week is:

Photo Courtesy LisaBlackDesigns.com

Busty Biltwell

Corpus Christi’s own Busty Biltwell is a member of the After Dark Burlesque Review, a local group promoting arts and culture, and apparently a fan of Jean Claude Van Damme (who isn’t?). Ms. Biltwell’s ample talent has been presented most recently at the House of Rock, as well as shows in San Antonio and Austin. She brings classical grace and style to the oft maligned and under-appreciated art of moneymaker-shaking.  As is obvious from the tattoo on her thigh, she is a supporter of the Navy, and sailors everywhere. And while we don’t stock shirts that are made to accommodate her unique endowment, our jersey knit tees are stretchy. Thanks, Busty, for helping keep Corpus Christi beautiful and making infants hungry in your wake.

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 JCVD to tacos@tacotopia.net.

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

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

As 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.

Toñia’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.

The 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.”

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.

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