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Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, conventional wisdom has long held that New York City simply isn’t a taco town. Pablito’s Taqueria, in Sunset Park; Taqueria Al Pastor, in Bushwick; the Birria-Landia truck in Jackson Heights; Taqueria Sinaloense, in the Bronx, with its shrimp-packed tacos gobernador—these places aren’t secrets. Their businesses thrive; their customers are profoundly well served. Recently, however, something has shifted: a new wave of ambitious, modern taquerias have punctured the idea that the only tacos worth talking about are in the outer reaches of the outer boroughs.
A self-serve station at Santo Taco includes lime, salsa, radish, and chicharron.
Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a street-facing decoy for the glamorous restaurant hidden downstairs. La Esquina abajo remains open, but Santo Taco, unlike its predecessor, is very much its own raison d’être. A renovation has sleeked up the interior, but it’s primarily an outdoor restaurant. Ordering happens at a walk-up window, and the best place to sit is at the sidewalk tables, perhaps while sipping goldfinch-yellow agua fresca, a not-too-sweet blend of pineapple and cucumber. Even the line feels engaging—the queue moves quickly, allowing you to watch taco construction in action through the windows. The star of the kitchen is the steak trompo, a huge beehive of strip and sirloin steaks skewered on a vertical spit, glossy with fat. When a trompo taco is ordered, a cook brandishes a knife of ferocious sharpness, shaving a thin, broad piece large enough to overhang the corn tortilla it’s laid upon.
Ordering happens at a walk-up window, and the queue moves quickly, positioning you to watch taco construction in action through the windows.
The trompo is worth ordering for the visuals alone, even if the flavor of the meat, seasoned only with salt, nearly vanishes between the tortilla’s dusky masa sweetness and a tangy, pond-green salsa of avocado and tomatillos. I’d more heartily recommend the carnitas, a straightforwardly wonderful taco of pork ribs and belly slow-cooked until a collapsing mess, or my favorite, surprisingly—the mushroom taco. Too often a vegetarian afterthought, here it’s beautifully complex, with moody, silken petals of creminis and shiitakes. With apologies to vegetarians, I loved it topped with crushed chicharron from the self-serve salsa station, a crunchy contrast to the shrooms’ slippery softness.
Tacos include silky mushroom, steak trompo, and carnitas.
Santo Taco is owned by Santiago Perez, a Mexico City native. He’s a partner in the restaurant group of the famed chef Enrique Olvera, who’s not involved with Santo Taco, but who last year dropped another pin on the new-wave map. Esse Taco, in Williamsburg, draws on some of Olvera’s other restaurants: pineapple butter melting over the tacos al pastor, a corn-husk ice-cream sundae that calls back to Cosme’s iconic dessert. More for the map: Esse isn’t far from Greenpoint’s Taquería El Chato, where you can get a striking tripa taco (crispy, toothsome, lashed with salsas); a few blocks farther still is the sunny Taqueria Ramirez, where the tacos suadero are like velvet, and the carnitas so magnificent that they were spun off into their own restaurant, Carnitas Ramirez, in the East Village. Tacos 1986—known as one of L.A.’s best taquerias, which is saying something—expanded to the West Village last month, with Tijuana-style tacos (and Tijuana-style late-night operating hours); their aromatic corn tortillas are rolled out and cooked just moments before being loaded up with fillings like carne asada and pork adobada.
A renovation has sleeked up the interior.
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What most connects these taquerias, besides their newness, is a style of visual communication: through choices of décor and typography—and, importantly, their geographic positioning, in hip, youthful, often central neighborhoods—they signal coolness to a particular audience. I recently spoke with the taco scholar José Ralat, who placed this in a trend he calls Orinocofication, after Taqueria Orinoco, a slick Monterrey-born chain that’s swept Mexico with what Ralat described as a tourist-catnip approach of “design first, food second.” But the new batch of New York taquerias, while awfully pretty, are also all quite good on the food front; a few, like El Chato and the Ramirezes, are truly spectacular. A bizarre portion do happen to be fronts for speakeasies: pass through Tacos 1986 to reach a soon-to-open restaurant and bar; the Mexico City import Cariñito Tacos, in Greenwich Village, whose menu is inspired by Southeast Asian flavors, has a secret mezcaleria hidden in the back. But, as with Santo, the establishments themselves are terrific taquerias, plain and simple: ultra-casual, fast-moving spots to grab some food that you’ll devour in seconds, eating the taco the way a taco is meant to be eaten: hot and drippy and fast. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
