MEXICAN FOOD

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFfQCrjDbPl/

that's my kinda ASMR

Great: East Beach Tacos in Santa Barbara, CA
Very Good: Tacos El Patron in SF (almost as good but I am partial to a balanced rather than an overstuffed taco, and these were overstuffed)

Question: is there some kind of current thing where Mexican food is played out for bougie white people in California, sort of like Chinese food seemed a little played out in NYC at one point? Several people I asked for recs on my trip told me "I don't know, I don't really eat much Mexican food," whereas for me Mexican food was priority #1 going to California

I recently moved to Savannah from Houston and the mexican food situation is dire.

If you didn’t have tacos at Lilly’s, then you did not have the best tacos in Santa Barbara. East Beach tacos are bougie tacos and if that’s your thing then Corazon Cocina is the best bet.

I am in CA and eat Mexican all the time, as does everyone else I know!

Well dang. I would have tried every taco place in every town we stopped in if I could have, but my family had other ideas. I love both bougie and non-bougie tacos.

Me too!

How is Mony's? I actually tried to go there too but didn't realize it was closed for dinner. My older one shares my love of tacos, while my younger one does not generally like Mexican food.

In LA I tried Hugo's but was not impressed at all (it actually wasn't my choice - my as it turns out non-taco-eating brother picked some up).

it’s not played out, it’s just omnipresent. mexican food is not like “event” food for me, it’s just what i get whenever i’m too lazy to cook or go to an actual restaurant. there’s gotta be 100 hole in the wall taco shops (tiny places with 4-6 booths open all hours) within a 10 mile radius of me, i just pick one and go. the cheaper and grittier the better. in fact if it’s an occasion to go out i purposely won’t get mex food, because i know within a week it’ll be past 11 pm and i won’t have eaten dinner and only taco shops will be open, so i’ll be eating mex food soon enuff

the exception is if it’s margarita happy hour time, which at my advanced age is a blessedly rare event. but then you’re picking the spot for the drinks / ambience, not the food

the cheaper and grittier the better.

There were so many layers to the Mexican food experience when I lived in San Diego. Cheap and gritty like anything ending in -bertos, eaten at 2:30 am while staying alert for the signs of a fight breaking out. Upscale places with fancy seafood and moles, like El Agave. More middle-of-the-road sit-down restaurants with traditional staples. Surf-centric taco shops in the beach towns...

you may be pleased to learn that thanks to 30 years of steady population growth and resulting increase in density, these two zones of the venn diagram

“cheap and gritty like anything ending in -bertos, eaten at 2:30 am while staying alert for the signs of a fight breaking out … surf-centric taco shops in the beach towns...”

overlap much more neatly than they used to

I bet they fuckin' do!

newer place near my workplace has excellent birria tacos and idk why I'm not on my way there right now

My daughter was super into the birria, it was her first one. It made me happy.

Good birria with consume is so excellent