Taco and Burrito Express: Eat-in Match Review

#15a. Taco & Burrito Express #3
1547 N. Ashland
Torta de Milanesa
$4.29 (no extras)

Taco & Burrito Express doesn't get much love. There are rarely more than a handful of customers inside. It doesn't even have a listing on Metromix, and it has just one review on Yelp -- mine. My theory is that this has to do with its extremely generic name. Wicker Park is notorious for its dismissal of anything corporate, and "Taco & Burrito Express Inc. #3" sounds like one of those trixie- and-bro- approved taco huts that belongs in Lincoln Park. In fact, there is a "Taco & Burrito Expres" [sic] in Lincoln Park, although given its misspelling of the word "express", it is not clear whether it is part of the same chain or a separate entity trying to avoid a trademark infringement lawsuit.

Nevertheless, I have some affection for this humble looking taco shop on Ashland Avenue. It stays open late, and makes for much better drunk food than Flash Taco. Okay, so it isn't La Pasadita, but the chaotic atmosphere of La Pasadita is sometimes the last thing to need when your stomach has already begun to growl and your head has already begun to throb. For getting in, getting out, and getting full, TBE #3 is a reliable option.

The Food: The Burrito Bracket, of course, isn't really designed to reward safe-but-not-sorry Mexican food. Rather, it's designed to identify uncannily good Mexican food, particuarly from those obscure little taquerias that you might never have discovered on your trips through the neighborhood. As such, although I endorse Taco and Burrito Express #3, I didn't necessarily expect it to outperform its low seed in this format. So how did it fare under critical (and sober) review?


Well, pretty much how I was expecting. This torta graded out at a B-minus or C-plus in almost every respect. The bread was fresh, but could have been crisper, and had become slightly soggy by the end. The breaded steak was adequate and consistently textured, but somewhat underseasoned (TBE's carne asada torta, on the other hand, has tended toward the salty side when I've tried it in the past). The condiments were fresh and well-proportioned, and the beans were tasty, but the salsa lacked a certain zest. Now, there are certain items at TBE that are quite good, particularly anything involving their chorizo, which seems to be a house specialty. But there wasn't much to lift this torta above replacement-level status.

The Experience: If you've gone to Taco & Burrito Express late at night, you've probably encountered an older, motherly-looking woman, whom I overheard being referred to today as La Vieja ("the older one"). La Vieja pretty much kicks ass, making sure that the kitchen is working hard, and that her customers go away feeling welcome and full. La Vieja was not there this afternoon -- instead it looked like her daughter was -- but you could still detect some of her influence; TBE is clean and well-lit and pleasantly if a little quaintly decorated. There is no table service (meaning no free chips-and-salsa), but it's a comfortable place to sit down. The food can take slightly longer than average to prepare, but overall the service is very friendly and a definite plus for this establishment. Whether those bonus points are enough to carry it past the mysterious Taqueria Traspazada, its opponent in this week's eat-in match, we will have to see.

Dona Naty's Taco [#12] defeats Taqueria Super Burrito [#5]

In what ultimately was a fairly decisive verdict, 12th-seeded Dona Naty's Taco [review] has defeated #5 seed Taqueria Super Burrito [review] to advance to the second round of the competition. Taqueria Super Burrito turned out a very average product, meaning that the round was pretty much Dona Naty's for the taking if it could match the standard that it established in its eat-in match with its tacos al Pastor. And with its wonderfully seasoned chicken, it had little problem doing that. Although Dona Naty's came in with the lower seed, I'm not even certain that this result can be termed an upset.


The bad news for Dona Naty's is that it faces a very difficult match-up next time around. My friend had a mixed opinion of the steak torta that he ordered today, which is the item du jour in its Round 2 match-up against the formidable De Pasada. Dona Naty's has surprised us before, but it's not going to advance to the Final Four without an outstanding effort.

Next week we move over from the Ashland Regional to the Chicago Regional, starting with an eat-in match between Taco & Burrito Express and Taqueria Traspazada for possession of the #15 seed.

Dona Naty's Taco: Round 1 Review

#12. Dona Naty's Taco
1813 W. Chicago
Chicken Burrito Suizo
$4.50 (no extras)

Defeated #12b Carniceria Leon in Eat-in Match [verdict]

I've been in a state of mind lately that I call the blasés: a sort of self-reinforcing combination of business and laziness that makes me easily distractable and short on productive time. As a result, it has taken until today to make my return visit to Dona Naty's Taco. Waiting until Saturday however has one distinct advantage, which is that I was able to enlist the services of guest eater and photographer Robert Gauldin, who is responsible for the money shots that you see in today's article.

The Food: The idea of Burrito Bracket is to match the items I eat at each restaurant as closely as possible within any given week. Since I ordered a super burrito at the aptly-named Taqueria Super Burrito earlier this week, which came complete with guac and sour cream, I naturally wanted to do the same at Dona Naty's. But in spite of having a fairly broad menu, Dona Naty's does not really have a "super burrito", nor any way to order guacamole and sour cream on the side. Thus, I went with a burrito suizo instead, suizo meaning "swiss" because of the cheese (and green salsa) that sits atop the burrito.

The burrito suizo is not the prettiest thing in the world -- the layer of semi-congealed cheese sitting atop the burrito shouts out "you're going to need a knife and fork, buster". Fortunately, it's what's inside that counts. It's clear that Dona Naty's takes enormous care in the way that it prepares its meats. The chicken was ground up quite finely -- almost moving in the direction of a puree -- and as a result it allowed the exceptional seasoning of the meat to shine through, with its host of spicy and savory flavors. In addition, all of the ingredients (the chicken, plus finely-sliced onions, tomato and lettuce, and a light complement of beans) were blended together into one continuous whole, rather than producing the "layered" effect that you might experience with some other burritos, where one bite is all lettuce and the next is all meat.

There are two real compliments that I can pay to this burrito. Firstly, it was the first dish I've come across that didn't really benefit from salsa -- the subtle combination of flavors were better left to their own devices. And secondly, it proved that a chicken burrito need not be boring. That's not to say that this was a completely flawless experience -- the tortilla was a little doughy, and I came across one chicken bone. But meat that is seasoned and flavored this well does not come about on accident.

The Experience: The service was much friendlier than I'd experienced on my previous visit -- our young waitress made us feel very welcome, even if there was some confusion at the end where we asked for the check and wound up with the toothpick dispenser. The one catch about Dona Naty's is that it can take a fairly long time between the time that you place your order and receive your food. The guys in the kitchen always seem to be working pretty hard, so I trust that this is because Dona Naty's just isn't taking a lot of shortcuts in the preparation of its food. Plus, our waitress gave us a refill on our chips, so it was all good.

Taqueria Super Burrito: Round 1 Review

#5. Taqueria Super Burrito
1502 N. Western
Super Chicken Burrito
$5.00 (includes avocado and sour cream)

There were seven or eight of our 19 entrants in the Burrito Bracket that I'd never eaten at prior to the start of the competition, but Taqueria Super Burrito is the only one that I have no recollection of even seeing from the outside. There's a pretty good reason for that, which is that it's located on a rather desolate stretch of Western Avenue. Go a bit north, and you'll intersect Milwaukee Ave and all the good stuff that surrounds it, like Arturo's Tacos and the Map Room. Go a bit south, and you'll run into the Empty Bottle and the huge Puerto Rican flag thingy. But in between, there are a lot of auto body shops and abandoned lots and broken fire hydrants, and that is where Taqueria Super Burrito is located.

You'd naturally expect the western fringe of Wicker Park, which borders on largely Hispanic Humboldt Park, to be fairly burrito-rich, but that isn't really the case. For one thing, Humboldt Park is in substantial part Puerto Rican rather than Mexican. For another, Western Ave. is not only the frontier of Wicker Park, but also the de facto boundary of the sort of contiguous white yuppie blob that continues more or less unabated to the lake shore. There might well be some great taquerias as you get deeper into Humboldt Park, but they aren't the sort of places that get reviewed on Yelp or Metromix. So, Taqueria Super Burrito is the closest accessible option for quite a number of blocks.

The Food: This is our first foray into chicken thus far in the bracket, which is at least somewhat intentional. Chicken is generally a low-risk, low-reward option for a burrito filling; it's going to be nice and edible, but it doesn't give the taqueria the chance to strut its stuff as much as something like carne asada or al Pastor. And that seems to be a pretty good description of Taqueria Super Burrito too: low risk, but perhaps not much more than medium reward. This was a very solid, serviceable burrito. All of the ingredients were quite fresh (though the avocado wasn't wonderfully so) and kept in pretty good balance to one another. The chicken was decent, and seemed to contain at least a fair proportion of white meat. The burrito wasn't bland -- it was a good burrito, really -- but probably not anything to go out of your way for.

There were, however, two areas in which Taqueria Super Burrito gets some bonus points. The first is the very spicy red salsa and the fresh chips that come with your dine-in order; although not quite as good as De Pasada's salsa verde, this was maybe the best red salsa that we've encountered so far. The second is that this food is cheap. The super burrito, aptly billed on the menu as "a meal unto itself", comes complete with sour cream, avocado, tomato and lettuce for $5, something which could easily run you $7 or more if you ordered everything a la carte.


The Experience: TSB's edifice is small and a little run-down, but they do their best to spruce it up with a large number of tropical-looking plants lots of free reading material in both English and Spanish; I chose People to catch up on all the latest Brangelina gossip. The service was quick, and neither especially friendly nor especially unfriendly. Like Carniceria Leon, they have bottled Mexican coke, although I suffered through a moment of embarrassment when I couldn't quite figure out how to open my bottle on the bottle opener attached to the cooler, and my glasses wound up falling off in the process. Overall, a solid experience in line with my expectations, but as some readers have observed, Dona Naty's Taco, which looks like it could be the Appalachain State of the Burrito Bracket, retains a pretty good shot at pulling an upset.

Pasada and Pasadita: All in the Familia?

Reader Brian G. writes:

"I could be wrong, but I've heard that De Pasada and La Pasadita are owned by the same people. Not that this should change anything in the burrito bracket per se, but if you can confirm it, it might give you a useful baseline from which to evaluate the two."

It's an interesting theory, and one that would seem to have some merits on its surface. Pasada and Pasadita are right next to one another, and they share a reputation for sourcing comparatively high-quality meat.

More intriguing, perhaps, is the similarity in their names: pasadita is the diminutive of pasada. What does de pasada mean, by the way? It's not an easy phrase for a gringo like me to translate, but the most likely candidates seem to be "of the past" or "in passing" (as in "he mentioned to me in passing that he was looking for a new job"). It also seems to have a somewhat idiomatic, perhaps even existential meeting: "es agua pasada", for example, is the Spanish equivalent of "water under the bridge". In this context, I read de pasada as basically meaning "the little things of the past" or "from the tradition", with pasadita meaning pretty much the same thing ("the little tradition").

But in fact, there is even more of a potential smoking gun. Both La Pasadita's website (which contains some fascinating diatribes against yuppified Mexican food) and De Pasada's website say that they are owned by a family named Espinoza. Have we proven the case beyond any shadow of a doubt?

I don't think so. For one thing, the restaurants opened in the wrong order. If there were a restaurant called De Pasada, it would be fairly logical for the owners to name the spin-off La Pasadita ("the little Pasada"), particularly if it were more of a downscale, take-out joint. However, La Pasadita opened up in 1976, while De Pasada opened in 1981. There are all sorts of Mexican restaurants that are named after derivatives of "tradition" (this one, for instance), and it's possible that the similar names are just a coincidence.

Similarly, it's possible that the common surnames are just a coincidence. There is generally a great deal of commonality in Mexican last names; 8.5% of Mexicans are named Martínez, for example, while 8.1% are named Rodríguez. Espinoza isn't "Smith" or "Martínez" or "Andersen", but it isn't "Funkhouser" either: there are 191 entries for "Espinoza" in the Chicago white pages, and another 99 for "Espinosa".

Moreover, if the restaurants are owned by the same family, why is there no mention of such on their respective webpages? La Pasadita's website lists the locations of all three La Pasaditas as well as four other "business affiliates", but none of them are De Pasada. De Pasada's website says that the family Espinoza came to Chicago in 1981, at which point La Pasadita was already open. In addition, the respective Espinoza families appear to have hailed from different regions of Mexico. The De Pasada Espinozas come from Nuevo Laredo, a border town near (you guessed it) Laredo, Texas, while the Pasadita Espinozas are from San Luis Potosi in central Mexico.

It's tempting to speculate that there is still some relation. Perhaps the Espinozas are part of the same extended family, for instance. I guess you can conceive of the San Luis Potosi Espinozas calling their cousins in Nuevo Laredo and saying "Hey hombre, business is good here, bro! Why don't you come and open another restaurant right next door to me?". But really this doesn't make any sense. In fact, when De Pasada opened in 1981, the La Pasadita Espinozas were busy with their own plans: that was exactly when they expanded into their second location at 1140 N. Ashland. Can you imagine any worse business plan than trying to open two locations right down the block from one another at the same time (or trying to compete with a restaurant that your cousin was opening)? Not even Starbucks would try that.

It wouldn't completely shock me if there were some relationship between the two restaurants. But the Occam's Razor position is that there isn't.

Where'd the Bracket Go?

The bracket graphic has been given a makeover and reincarnated as a Google Spreadsheet, complete with hyperlinks. It's also been moved from the sidebar to the bottom of the page, where it has substantially more room to breathe. Everything looks very good in Firefox and relatively good in Internet Explorer -- but if the bracket is not rendering right in your browser, please just send me a note.

As before, you can also check the current status of the bracket by clicking on the navbar link at the top of the page.

Dona Naty's Taco [#12a] defeats Carniceria Leon [#12b]

We're still waiting on our first really close decision. I got a little sarcastic in my write-up on Dona Naty's Taco [review], but these were some very, very good tacos, right up there with the carne asada burrito at La Pasadita in terms of the best individual dish that we've had so far. Carniceria Leon [review] by contrast was just average.

This was an "eat-in" match, so all that happens now is that Dona Naty's gains sole occupation of the #12 seed and advances into the first round proper, where it will match up against Taqueria Super Burrito next week.

Current Vegas odds to win the entire bracket are as follows. I'm happy to take any action that you want to give me!

La Pasadita ............... 3-1
De Pasada ................. 4-1
Tecalitlan ................ 5-1
El Taco Veloz ............. 6-1
Irazu .................... 10-1
Taqueria Super Burrito ... 20-1
Dona Naty's Taco ......... 25-1
Arturo's Tacos ........... 30-1
Lobos al Fresco Tacos .... 40-1
Chipotle ................. 40-1
Carniceria Guanajuato .... 40-1
Picante Taqueria ......... 60-1
Carniceria Laura ........ 100-1
Taco & Burrito Express .. 100-1
Taqueria Traspazada ..... 100-1

Edit: Tecalitlan odds adjusted downward as bettors take note of its tough potential second round matchup against Irazu/Lobos.

Carniceria Leon: Eat-in Match Review

#12b. Carniceria y Taqueria Leon
1402 N. Ashland
Tacos al Pastor
3 @ $2.00 each = $6.00 (no extras)

This review is getting out a little later than expected. On Tuesday I had to wait for the Comcast guy to come and fuck my cable up even worse than it was already fucked up, and on Wednesday I had to prepare for a fantasy football draft. Cable television and football are not as important as burritos, but sometimes you have to take time out for the little things.

To be honest, however, I had a few apprehensions about visiting Carniceria Leon. It isn't the most inviting place from the outside, with bars on the windows and signage obscuring the view inside. Carniceria Leon is principally a small supermarket, and there is perhaps some puritanical streak in most Americans that makes them reluctant to consume food on the premises of somewhere where they can also buy the raw ingredients. The deli is one exception to this rule, and a couple of generations ago we had the soda fountain at Woolworth's, but in general this phenomenon is much more common in other cultures.

The Food: None of my apprehensions related to the food. On the contrary, I was expecting some delicious pork, and I thought that the choice of al Pastor probably favored Carniceria Leon from the outset. The first thing you notice when you walk to the back of the market where the lunch counter is located is in fact the al Pastor spit.

This is truly fast food; my taco was prepared almost literally within seconds of my order, accompanied by the usual onions and cilantro. Unfortunately, the results were a little disappointing. The pork was relatively dry, and -- I don't know how to explain this -- very porky tasting, to the point of being slightly gamey. Although the accompanying salsa, a sort of verde-rojo hybrid, was good, the meat was not spiced very aggressively (especially by al Pastor standards), leaving the pork itself to do most of the work. From reading some other accounts, it seems that the quality at Carniceria Leon can differ significantly based on the time of day, and I think I might have caught it at an awkward time (about 4:30 in the afternoon) where the meat wasn't at its freshest.

Two other details. The tacos are also $2 each, which seems to be slightly on the expensive side, but they give you an awfully generous portion of meat; two tacos here are equivalent to three at most other places. Also, Carniceria Leon has bottled, Mexican coke. In the cola bracket, Mexican coke > RC > American coke > Pepsi.

The Experience: If the food was not as good as I was expecting, the experience was perfectly pleasant. The eating area was fairly small, but there were quite a few customers for this time of day, including a couple of families, and you could see the owner walking around the store checking in on everything. The counter guy knew plenty enough English for me to get my order across, and I had no sense of feeling unwelcome.

Carniceria Leon is right down the block from me, and I'll probably give it another chance in a month or two and report on those findings here. For the time being, however, it's about to get eliminated from the bracket.

Dona Naty's Taco: Eat-in Match Review

#12a. Dona Naty's Taco
1813 W. Chicago
Tacos al Pastor
3 @ $1.49 each = $4.47 (no extras)

Located on a well traveled but unremarkable stretch of Chicago Avenue on which the primary landmarks are burrito joints, Dona Naty’s Taco is in danger of blending into the landscape, the sort of place you’d stumble by on your way back home from Tuman’s Alcohol Abuse Center. El Taco Veloz, our #2 seed, is just down the block from Dona Naty’s, and Tecalitlan, our #3 seed, is just across the street. There is also a pizza restaurant named Naty’s a couple of storefronts down, which presumably has the same ownership.

I have to say it: I understand that Naty is a fairly common shortening of Natalia, and I’m not saying that every little taqueria needs to engage a corporate branding consultant, which would probably come up with some Spanglesh-pharmaceutical portmanteau like Talfresca!. But as far as gringo-friendly marketing goes, Naty’s isn’t much better than Taqueria la Cucaracha or (if you want to expand the horizons a bit) Booger’s Chicken Hut. As we learned last week, however, appearances (and names) can be deceiving in burritoville, and Dona Naty’s al Pastor left a lasting impression.

Food: Yep, that's right. Tacos al Pastor are my brand new toy, and I'm sticking with them for another week. Dona Naty's al Pastor set-up is standard: pork, onions, cilantro, a lime wedge, and double tortillas, which makes for some fairly attractive tacos:

Three things distinguished this al Pastor, and all of them are basically positives:

• First, the cut of the meat. Mr. Taco's Restaurant had some real problems in this department, as their slices were all over the board in terms of size and texture. De Pasada was an improvement, with nice, uniform chunks of meat, but they were basically Chipotle-style cubes rather than slices. Dona Naty's finally got it right, with thin, consistent slices of pork. This is particularly important in the case of al Pastor, because it increases the surface area and allows more of the spice mixture to bind to the pork. So while Dona Naty's spice recipe was nothing incredibly special, and while its salsas were less potent than those at De Pasada, their al Pastor got a lot of bang for its buck.
• Second, the character of the meat. Namely, there was a fair bit of lean fat on Dona Naty's pork. This is actually a good thing as far as I am concerned: it produces more variety in texture, and if nothing else, leaves no doubt that the meat is literally fresh off the bone, rather than having been over-processed. In fact, when coupled with a spice blend that had some hints of sweetness, it left a little bit of the impression of eating baby back ribs. However there were one or two chunks of meat that were just fat, and therefore inedible, and it made the tacos go down fairly "heavy".
• Finally, the onions: they were grilled! This is another huge plus for me; one major reason that I prefer Comiskey Park to Wrigley Field is because of the grilled onions on their polishes. The caramelization also provides another source of natural sweetness, again contributing to the "barbeque" flavor of the dish.

So, these were some very good tacos to my palate, although not something that you'd want to have on a diet. One other thing – Dona Naty’s has RC Cola instead of Coke products, which is sort of the equivalent of getting an e-mail from a long-lost friend. I promptly purchased a 12-pack on my way home.

The Experience: This was a little off-putting. After the waitress saw me sit down and brought me my chips and salsa, she sort of retreated to the back of the restaurant and pointed me out to the counter guy, who came and took my order. It was like she'd discretely pressed the gringo alert button to notify the authorities of a shrimp chimichanga order in progress. I'm sure that her English wasn't much, and my Spanish isn't much, but all I had to do was communicate that I wanted three tacos and a can of cola: how hard could this have been? I also can't say much for the decor -- the tables and chairs appeared to have been purchased from a McDonald's outlet store. It wasn't charming, exactly.

Still, its couple of shortcomings aside -- nobody is going to a taqueria for the modernista furniture -- Dona Naty's makes a mean taco, and would have given De Pasada a run for its money last week. We visit its actual opponent tomorrow, the even more bare-bones Carniciera Leon.

Burrito Burr-ocracy

This upcoming week features the first of three "eat-in" matches, in this case between Dona Naty's Taco and Carniceria Leon for possession of the #12 seed. The reason for the "eat-in" matches (a takeoff on the "play-in" matches used in the NCAA basketball tournament) is explained in some detail on the WTF/FAQ page (you guys really seem to love these new navigation elements, by the way, based on the traffic patterns that I'm seeing). Basically, we need a way to get down from 19 taquerias to 16.

The format of the eat-in matches will otherwise resemble that which you've grown accustomed to: I'll eat the same item at each restaurant and declare a winner. The winner of the eat-in match will then advance into the first round proper, where it will face off against Taqueria Super Burrito next week.

De Pasada [#4] defeats Mr. Taco's Restaurant [#13]

No upsets so far. Mr. Taco's Restaurant [review] turned in a fairly solid performance, and is certainly not on my shit list like Flash Taco and Lazo's. But it was really no match for De Pasada [review]. This is all starting to point toward a very interesting Ashland Regional final between De Pasada and La Pasadita.

De Pasada: Round 1 Review

#4. De Pasada
1108 N. Ashland
Tacos al Pastor
3 @ $1.65 each = $4.95 (no extras)

You had me at tomatillo.

The quality of the salsa is not an absolutely foolproof measure of a taqueria's ultimate quality, but it's a pretty damned powerful leading indicator. In just one bite, you can tell whether the salsa is made from fresh ingredients or has been sitting in a vat for several hours, and whether the chef has a good tongue or is just running through the motions. De Pasada's salsa, which I first experienced about a month ago, is absolutely wonderful -- the roja, yes, but especially the verde. It is an aggressive blend with plenty of character and texture, and you can see from the residue of seeds and tomatillos that De Pasada does not skimp on flavor. It's very much worth the walk down Ashland to try De Pasada, the quieter, younger sister of La Pasadita that sits almost literally in its shadow; even its sign is partially concealed by an overgrowth of trees.

The Food: De Pasada does have tacos al Pastor after all! A quick search of an online menu indicated that the closest substitute was probably barbacoa, but al Pastor is right on the chalkboard, as presumably it has always been.

De Pasada's Pastor follows the same basic formula of Mr. Taco's, the pork accompanied by onion, cilantro, and a double tortilla (it did not feature a lime, as Mr. Taco's did). Each taco is wrapped in its own sheet of wax paper, which is not very photogenic (nor very green) but helps to keep the tacos nice and warm.

Since my central criticism of my last set of tacos was with the quality of its meat, the first thing I did was to gnaw on a chunk of the pork. The difference was recognizable immediately; this pork was nice and tender with subtle hints of smoke, and it was cut into attractive, even-sized pieces. You'd be happy to eat it on its own.

Really, though, that's not how you should be eating al Pastor. Rather, you should be folding the taco into a U-shape and taking a big, aggressive bite, because that way you'll get the spice of the pork to compliment the onions, cilantro, and salsa. My friend has a saying that the hallmark of a good meal is that every bite tastes a little different, and that was sort of the case here; some bites were more mild and others were more potent, depending on the onion-to-cilantro-to-salsa ratio. The spicing on the pork itself was good, though perhaps not quite as nuanced as Mr. Taco's, but taken as a coherent entity, these tacos were real winners.

The Experience: De Pasada has a cheerily-colored interior with perhaps six tables, which are spaced out comfortably rather than bunched together. The service was fast and friendly, and the waitress spoke very good English. The waitress had her 9-year-old son with her (she spoke English to him too), and it's evident that this place is family-run and takes a lot of pride in what it does; they're really deserving of your business.

It's Raining Carnicerias

Shit. I was afraid that would happen.

A helpful poster in the Mr. Taco's thread advised me that I ought to check out the al Pastor at Carniceria Leon, located at 1402 N. Ashland. I had no idea that this place existed, even though it's within a 90-second walk from my apartment. I'm sure that I'd passed it before, but perhaps I'd assumed that it was some kind of spin-off of Carniceria Guanajuato, the formidable Mexican supermarket just up the block.

So I went out in the rain and ... well, Carnicera Leon is there. It isn't much to look at, but it's there, and it serves carnitas and al Pastor but not chicken, which makes it kind of bad-ass. So we have little choice but to include it in our bracket, where it will move into an "eat-in" match with Dona Naty's Taco for possession of the #12 seed.

Mr. Taco's Restaurant: Round 1 Review

#13. Mr. Taco's Restaurant
810 N. Marshfield
Tacos al Pastor
3 @ $1.60 each = $4.80 (no extras)

(Note: De Pasada is closed on Tuesdays, so we'll break convention and review the underdog first.)

Variations on "Mr. Taco" have to be among the most common names of Mexican restaurants in the United States, the equivalent of a Chinese restaurant calling itself "Peking Express" or an Indian restaurant "Ghandi". There used to be a "Mr. Taco" where I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, a small chain which was sort of a ghettoized version of Taco Bell; its only customers were stoners and a few misguided vegans in search of bean burritos, and it closed several years ago. The Chicago version of "Mr. Taco" is noteworthy for the unique use of the possessive case in its name. It isn't "Mr. Tacos' Restaurant", which would seem to imply a restaurant owned by a dude who sold tacos, but rather "Mr. Taco's Restaurant", which would seem to imply a restaurant owned by a giant taco. Well, that's how I read it at least.


You probably wouldn't stumble across Mr. Taco's if you weren't meaning to; I first came upon it rather on accident when my friend was looking for a Currency Exchange to renew his parking stickers. Although just steps away from the busy Chicago/Ashland intersection, it's tucked out of view on residential Marshfield Ave., and its dreary storefront doesn't do much to pique one's curiosity. Nevertheless, it has some reasonably good food to offer.

The Food: Because of the careful preparation they require, tacos al Pastor are not particuarly easy to find on Chicago menus. (Mr. Taco's round 1 opponent, the relatively authentic De Pasada, does not in fact offer them, and so we will have to make the rather liberal substitution of tacos de barbacoa.) As such, this was one of my first experiences with al Pastor, but I think I'm a convert: it has more potential to wow the palate than other "mystery meat" variants like barbacoa and chorizo.


Mr. Taco's version of al Pastor is rich with flavor and visually attractive (not quite done justice to in the picture you see above). Accompanied by fresh onion, cilantro, a wedge of lime, and two deliciously soft tortillas, the sliced pork is a vibrant hue of orange, making for a dramatic accompaniment to the red tablecloth (and a dramatic contrast to pretty much everything else in the restaurant). The flavor itself might also be described as vibrant, especially when accompanied by the relatively potent squeeze-bottle salsa. There are several different flavors going on here, but the best analogy is probably to a good enchilada sauce, with hints of roasted spices and chilis.

The problem -- and it's a major one -- is that the spice is making up for meat of dubious quality. The pork had little taste and no moisture, and the slices lacked a consistent texture, but erred on the side of being too thick. I'm not even sure that Mr. Taco's has a spit, which could explain the problems. In fact, I was somewhat reminded of the apocryphal story of the spice trade being important in ancient times because spices could be used to cover up the taste of spoiled meat. I am not in any way suggesting that Mr. Taco's falls short of health code standards (far from it judging by the freshness of the onions and cilantro), but what they have is a good recipe being applied to poor product.

The Experience: Mr. Taco's has a decently sized but somewhat chaotic-looking open kitchen behind its front counter space, and there were four women busily working within it, peeling onions as they took turns taking orders and busing tables. This portion of the neighborhood is relatively rough-and-tumble, but the restaurant was busier than you might guess from the outside, with a series of Hispanic locals that tended to linger at their tables. We also had a couple of homeless people that came in asking for change, but they were quickly shooed away when it became clear they weren't planning to order anything. Al Pastor translates as "shepherd-style", and all of this tended to entrench the notion of home-prepared "peasant food".

With a few improvements in the quality of its meat, Mr. Taco's would qualify as something of a darkhorse, but based on this experience it remains the underdog to De Pasada, which we'll review on Thursday.

The Burrito Spectrum

The idea of taking some kind of protein and sticking it within some kind of carbohydrate wrapping is not new. On the contrary, it has to be one of the oldest and most universal innovations in culinary history. Virtually all culinary traditions employ some version of it, from the burrito to the panini, from the double cheeseburger to the Bánh mì, from the the doner kabob to moo shoo pork. It is not a productive use of one's time to worry about which of these "sandwiches" are authentic and which were imported from somewhere else, since the whole richness of culinary history lies in its tendency to borrow and fuse ideas from as many sources as possible. The "sandwich" (you'll see in a moment why I'm using those quotation marks) serves some basic functions: it's quick and easy to prepare, portable, and relatively nutritious. For a cuisine not to have some form of the "sandwich" is like a language not having a word for "mother".

I was thinking about this recently while snacking on a "Beachin' Buffalo Chicken" burrito from Burrito Beach (a necessary evil; I was stuck in the Union Station food court waiting for my train to depart to Wisconsin). This burrito consists of "spicy buffalo chicken, fat-free black beans, white rice, crisp romaine lettuce, diced tomatoes, and blue cheese dressing". In other words, it doesn't contain any of the ingredients that you'd find in a carne asada burrito ordered at La Pasadita, save of course for the tortilla itself.

So is it the tortilla that makes a burrito? Not really, because we have the problematic category of the "wrap", which can take any filling that can be diced into bite-sized chunks. For that matter, we also have the taco. At restaurants like La Pasadita, the default fillings in a taco and a burrito are exactly the same, and of course both make prominent use of the tortilla. It might be tempting to forge a distinction between the taco and burrito based on their size, whether they remain open or closed, and whether the tortilla is cooked or grilled along with the ingredients, but all of these are problematic, as there are many exceptions to the rules. At many times and places the terms have been used interchangeably, particularly early in the development of the burrito.

Indeed, it is folly to try and determine where the burrito ends and the wrap begins. Instead we have to acknowledge some kind of spectrum, like the one that I have outlined below.
The spectrum has some degree of directionality to it. For example, as you move rightward from taco to "traditional" (La Pasadita-style) burrito to Cal-Mex/San Francisco/Mission-style burrito the size of the tortilla increases, and the list of ingredients generally becomes larger and more diverse. But what is fascinating is that all of these concepts have been invented and re-invented many times over, and that the influence always works in at least two directions. Is the wrap an evolved sandwich or an devolved burrito? (Most people would say "devolved sandwich or evolved burrito", but you know where my biases lie). What do we do with something like the torta, which contains "burrito-like" ingredients but not a tortilla, and predates the modern burrito in its origin?

A Massachusetts judge ruled last November that a burrito is not a sandwich; the case arose because Panera Bread Company owned exclusive rights to sell "sandwiches" in a certain shopping mall, and claimed that Qdoba Mexican Grill had intruded into its territory. The linchpin of the judge's ruling was that a burrito consists of one tortilla and a sandwich two pieces of bread. I'm sure you can think of all the same problems with this definition that I can, although I have some sympathy for Qdoba's position, as they were the defendants in the case and the common usage definition of sandwich probably involves Wonder Bread and tuna fish. Nevertheless, we're left to pick and choose our conclusion:

• A burrito might or might not be a sandwich, but a sandwich is definitely not a burrito.
• As Rick Bayless has put it, the burrito is the original fusion cuisine.
• This whole post has been the equivalent of talking with food in one's mouth.