Taco truck culture is a way of life in Houston. For years, the general public and critics alike have taken great joy in discovering cultural foods that weren’t produced en masse, have never been reconstituted or processed in a factory, and aren’t squirted out of a tube.
The food in these real trucks are created by unsung chefs that come from countries you may be afraid of. These men and women have never been entertained by reality television shows about rich celebrities and their problems. Their teenage daughters have never asked them for fake boobs. They do not use organic soaps purchased from Whole Foods, Bed, Bath & Beyond, or a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
You see, true taqueros won’t be headlining in culinary magazines or appearing in New York Times photo slide shows. They succeed and fail based on our preferences, trials and recommendations. They don’t base their data from internet ads, consultants or think-tanks. They do not subscribe to foodie culture, and I’m certain that a rare few are aware of this or any other Houston food blog that promotes or denigrates them.
To make things more difficult for the proprietors of these authentic food trucks, big city officials constantly try to shut them down due to the restaurant lobby. Why would you pay $12.29 for one fajita taco at El Tiempo when you can get one for $1.75 at the Tierra Caliente truck (the first blog post on G&T) which is in the next door parking lot? You won’t, because Tierra Caliente was slammed by Houston’s inept Health Department and was forced to move to Washington Street (Tierra Caliente is now on West Alabama, in front of the West Alabama Ice House). For a better idea of mainstream Houston media’s take on taco trucks, take a look at J.C.Reid’s expose on the subject, and be sure to watch the video.
Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Brands , the largest restaurant company in the world. In addition to their recent market strategies such as getting 50 Cent to sue them, the “Drive-Thru Diet” campaign, starting a petition to have the Federal Reserve print more $2 bills, and most recently, their effort to replicate authentic taco trucks, Taco Bell has purchased a massive taco truck, which they are taking around the United States. Now they’d like to come to Houston.
This Taco Bell truck expects to drive into popular venues and give away free food items, such as the Volcano Taco which looks a lot like the box of CVS Crayolas that your date’s kid decided to leave in the pocket behind the passenger seat of your ’69 Caprice Classic for two weeks.
The Taco Bell Truck staff will be handpicked by some marketing prick in NYC that uses an emery board in staff meetings, pops his collar at night, and would never consider disassembling a washing machine to see what was wrong with it.
This week I’ve been working with Taconmadre, arguably the greatest taco truck business inside the 610 loop. When the Taco Bell truck attempts to set up shop here, Taconmadre’s magnificent green bus is going to park nearby. While Taco Bell hands out free tacos and gets their media coverage, the Big Green Bus will be right there, selling the real thing. Taco Bell might bring a crowd with their free tacos and tested marketing, but I’m hoping their patrons will see what’s going on next door and get a bite of a real taco.
Hopefully we can get the Taco Bell mega-truck to agree to a taste contest, but that wouldn’t make much sense on their end.
Taco Bell, I hope your folks have a great time in Dallas, but please don’t bother stopping in Houston.
UPDATE: A few hours after publishing this post, I received the following message from @TacoBellTruck on Twitter:
If you’ve come across previous G&T blog posts, you’re probably familiar of my acrimony towards Taco Bell. This rage is endless and everlasting, and keeps me alive.
“Think Outside the Bun”. Really? It sounds like something The Onion’s Jean Teasdale came up with. The kind of lady that knits Christmas ornaments and records soap operas with VHS tapes. A person that intentionally writes in Denelian.
Why do I despise Taco Bell so much? Hum.
1. I worked at a Taco Bell at the age of sixteen, and I saw dry, non-constituted bean powder for the first time.
2. Lettuce, tomatoes and a dollop of sour cream is not the definition of “Supreme” in my book.
3. Mild Sauce, Hot Sauce, and Fire Sauce are actually the same thing.
4. The male actors in their commercials, which represent their target demographic of 18-25, all wear knit stocking caps. Probably catering to potheads with munchies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that as a marketing standpoint, it works. But potheads wore stocking caps in that Dazed and Confused movie, which came out in 93, and was set in the 70’s. Potheads now wear Fidel Castro hats.
5. When I was growing up, there was a jukebox in the Taco Bell on Center Street in Deer Park, TX. I told some friends I’d play a few songs on it, and by some technical glitch, the jukebox played “I Touch Myself” by The Divinyls instead of “Mic Checka” by Das Efx, effectively canceling out my street cred and henceforth the rest of my teenage life until I bought a pistol and sold drugs.
This is the part where I should probably delve into the history of Taco Bell, explaining how an ex-Marine came up with this brilliant concept to make Mexican food more approachable to other white folks that were afraid of visiting Mexican taquerias. But you already know the story. We know what Taco Bell is. We understand that it is far from Mexican cuisine. And some will perpetually choose Taco Bell over a nearby taqueria, because they mistakenly believe that a corporate conglomerate is more concerned with food safety than a family-run truck, or maybe because they don’t want to get out of their car to order food for fear of getting robbed by a Mexican.
So it did come as great surprise to me that Taco Bell is now offering “Cantina Tacos”- their version of the Real Deal Holyfield. Taco truck tacos- complete with corn tortillas, chopped cilantro and onion, with a slice of lime. A real lime that was grown on a tree.
When I heard the news, it was as if I had initiated a chess match with Deep Blue, and after three moves, it was like, “You know, let’s just watch Power Rangers instead”.
You don’t expect Taco Bell to make a move like this. They are expected to come up with idiotic things, such as getting 50 Cent to sue them, or a “Drive-Thru Diet” campaign. I mean, seriously. Taco Bell is a company that gets Shaquille O’Neal to endorse their food. Their most recent ad campaign involves starting a petition to have the Federal Reserve print more $2 bills. Ad execs get paid for this.
As a self-proclaimed tacologist, it was my solemn duty to give these tacos the Pepsi Challenge. I stopped at the recently remodeled Taco Bell on Shepherd and Vermont and ordered all three Cantina tacos. My voice dripped with sarcasm as I ordered word-for-word:
“I’ll have the Premium Fire-Grilled Chicken, Premium Cut Carne Asada Steak and the Carnitas Shredded Pork Cantina Tacos with Fire Sauce and a super turbo sized Mountain Dew, bro”.
The nice young lady behind the counter obliged, and I brought the stuff home so nobody would see me there. I looked in the bag and saw three tacos wrapped in real aluminum foil. I grinned and shook my finger at the tacos.
“I see what you did there”.
Again, it is odd that Taco Bell made this decision, but at the same time, it is believable. Taco truck tacos are inexpensive, and so are their ingredients for the most part. Cilantro and onions are some of the cheapest produce you can find, and corn tortillas are less expensive than their flour counterparts. With the exception of avocado slices (which you generally see out West or near coastal towns), you can put a decent taco together for nickels with the bulk buying power that Yum! Brands has. The aluminum foil is probably the most expensive element. They have everything to gain from this decision, and nothing to lose.
I tried the chicken taco first, even though chicken tacos are a little odd for me to order. Reason is, if I want chicken tacos I’ll just buy a whole chicken from Pollos Asados el Regio and eat it with tortillas. I couldn’t tell if this was white or dark meat- it was kind of in between, like the inside of a McNugget. It had a nice color to it, with those charred stripes that make it look like it was once cooked on a grill or painted by some kind of grill-striping machine. Some chunky salsa verde would have gone nicely with it, but I doubt if Taco Bell knows what tomatillos are.
The beef taco wasn’t bad either. They were a bit stingy on the beef, and again, eating any kind of taco with Taco Bell’s Fire, Hot or Mild sauce is about as pointless as enrolling Justin Bieber in the Boy Scouts.
However…
I bit into the smokey, juicy and tender pulled pork taco as Johnny Cash played “When the Man Comes Around” in the background, hanging my head in shame as I chewed and swallowed my onions, cilantro and pride. I genuinely enjoyed this taco, as the images of the hundreds of hard working taqueros, shaking their heads in disapproval, flashed through my mind in order of their appearance in my traitorous life. I was disturbed by this, but then my mind halted with an epiphany.
You’re probably in Texas, so you’ve seen chili cook-offs and barbeque showdowns everywhere.
That’s right, Mr. Spell Checker. Barbeque with a Q in it.
Some good folks in Arizona are putting together the first annual Arizona Taco Festival, and challenging chefs and other culinary badasses across the nation to compete in one or all of four taco categories- beef, pork, chicken, and fish.
Why didn’t I think of this?
The event will eventually be a multi-city competition. The first event will be thrown in Scottsdale on Saturday, October 9, 2010. The grand prize is $7500.00.
The competition will also include a Sidecart Category that awards prizes for Best Salsa, Best Guacamole, Best Anything Goes Taco, Best Tamales, and Best Booth. Proceeds will go to Waste Not, a Phoenix charity that distributes perishable food to the homeless.
You can find the team entry form, sponsorship opportunities, and other pertinent info at their website. To keep up with new event info, follow @AZTacoFestival.
I’ll be one of the judges in this showdown. Let’s get some Texans out there to show them how it’s done.
Ted Nugent, also known as “The Nuge”, “Motor City Madman”, and “Terrible Ted”, visited Pasadena, TX yesterday to raise money for the Bay Area Builders Association, a charity that provides housing for the families of injured or fallen military members.
He is widely known for his guitar skills, his passionate and well-versed political commentary, and his love for bow hunting and wildlife preservation. The hipster staff at 29-95 asked me to check it out, probably because they were doing other things on a Sunday night like roller skating at American Apparel while shopping for a unitard. “Stranglehold” is a guitar masterpiece, and I’ve always wanted to hear it performed live, even if it was in Pasadena. Read the rest…
Predator came out in 1987. It’s a movie about a team of rugged commandos in the jungle who run into a formidable alien creature, and it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Sonny Langham, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black. This was an important casting decision, you see. The casting director was looking for a few obvious key characteristics when he chose these guys, since they would be portraying an elite team of commandos that live in a jungle and hunt aliens. Read the rest…
If you’ve been keeping up with this blog for a while, you’ve probably read one or more of Jeff Timpanaro’s gut-busting guest posts. (To read some of these, just punch “Timpanaro” into the search bar on your upper right.) He also has his own blog that will crack you up to no end. He’s genuinely one of my favorite people. Unfortunately, he’s got this incredibly complicated disease and he needs a new kidney. Read the rest…
Earlier this week, there were reports coming from online publications that a 2 million dollar house in Kingwood belonging to Chamillionaire was foreclosed on. Who cares, right?
Chamillionaire did. In fact, he jumped right into the studio and recorded a venomous 6- minute rant about his circumstances. Read the rest…
This weekend I’m headed to the Free Press Summerfest, a 2-day music festival where they are expecting a turnout of about one billion people. Thought it would be a good opportunity to promote the site. It’s hard to get one t-shirt made, you know? I settled for a $14 haircut from Gina Hair Salon on North Main, which specializes in this kind of thing. The hard part for the barber was working around the various scars from broken bottles and pool cues. The hard part for me will be getting this off of my dome by Monday morning.
***FAIR WARNING: The hyperlinks in this article don’t contain nudity right off the bat, but some workplaces might frown on seeing the word “Playboy” in your URL history.
Playboy Mobile is a website geared toward mobile devices. What sets it apart from the online playboy.com is that the stories are about 140 to 200 words so they can be read easily on a mobile device.
You know, so you can read the articles.
Playboy Scout is a blog module within Playboy Mobile that covers some of their favorite things, and this website just happens to be one of them. They recently did a writeup on the GunsandTacos blog that I thought I’d share with you.
Next time you get caught flipping through your cell phone looking at airbrushed gals in their underwear, you can blame it on me, I guess.
Taco truck culture is a way of life in Houston. For years, the general public and critics alike have taken great joy in discovering cultural foods that weren’t produced en masse, have never been reconstituted or processed in a factory, and aren’t squirted out of a tube.
This week I’ve been working with Taconmadre, arguably the greatest taco truck business inside the 610 loop. When the Taco Bell truck attempts to set up shop here, Taconmadre’s magnificent green bus is going to park nearby. While Taco Bell hands out free tacos and gets their media coverage, the Big Green Bus will be right there, selling the real thing. Taco Bell might bring a crowd with their free tacos and tested marketing, but I’m hoping their patrons will see what’s going on next door and get a bite of a real taco.
