Texas Meat Purveyors Harlingen TX

The Rio Grande Valley

Taco consciousness in Rio Grande Valley is nearly corresponding to San Antonio’s. So rife with taco fans may be the area that one hopeful heart attempted to promote his spit-roasted gyros as Gyro’s Greek Tacos (performedn’t work—he’s out of business). On weekends, from roadside really stands to metropolitan Mexican places, everybody breaks out of the barbacoa—pit-cooked cow’s head—with tacos of brains and tongue to go along. So enmeshed are tacos when you look at the material of Valley life that a Brownsville drive-through labeled as Jerry’s advertises “Videos, Taquitos and Pizza” along with vehicle washes and alcohol. They’re addicting taquitos also: savory, spit-cooked pork, marinated with a surprise hit of pineapple and tucked into little corn tortillas with onion, cilantro, and salsa. At 49 dollars each, Jerry’s taquitos are inspired junk food (1235 Central, 542-1521).

The Valley is a bubbling crucible for change in Tx taco culture. At a franchise-looking spot such Taquito Hut in Weslaco, you’ll see traditional things like the plainest, tenderest tongue alongside mondernisms like hand-rolled flour tortillas and hybrids like tacos of beef brisket bathed in Tx barbecue sauce (211 W. Highway 83, 969-3539). At Armando’s Taco Hutt in Pharr (which minus the slightest justification expenses it self because the “Taco Capital regarding the Valley”), you’ll encounter a latter-day quesadilla that holds an eerie similarity towards the grilled-cheese sandwiches of one's childhood, just traditional tangerine mozzarella cheese inside a griddle-cooked flour tortilla the size of an LP (106 N. Cage, 781-1091). Weirdest of all to an outsider could be the peanut-butter-and-jelly taco on a flour tortilla offered at El Pato Mexican Food to Go, the Valley’s homegrown mini-chain with areas in six towns. El Pato reminds me personally of San Antonio’s Taco Cabana: it's an institution that consumes a similar part in local life (if El Pato stopped making its potato-and-egg break fast tacos, the whole Valley would work to a halt), and like Taco Cabana’s, its food is adequate without speaking the mysterious, gratifying language of home cooking. After grazing among the flour-tortilla “patos” at the Harlingen and McAllen limbs, the Chihuahua-cheese-with-chorizo combo ended up being the only person that roused my enthusiasm.

Right down the street from the Harlingen El Pato is an upscale spot in which residence cooking is spoken, nonetheless. With its pieces of grilled unusual beef, the taco al carbón at Mamacita’s Mexican Cuisine would do Tx al carbón goddess Ninfa Laurenzo happy. Tillie Alvarez, the property owner, tends to make creditable tacos de carne guisada and mean Mexican break pudding (capirotada) also (521 S. 77 Sunshine Strip, 421-2561).