for the love of tacos.

look! it's all over my bullets & everything!

as a thirty-seven year veteran of these united states, my history with the taco is a long & storied one...mostly storied though.

as an 80's child in nh born to a middle-class family feeding multiple kids, taco night was friggin TACO NIGHT. hard shells. ortega-seasoned beef. bowls of cheese & tomatos & lettuce and sauce squeezed from packets. in my elementary school years, as my mom, sis, bro & i traipsed through the aisles of a supermarket, we came across a smashed bottle of ortega taco sauce on the tiled floor. we siblings instantly turned this into an opportunity to create a song with the lyrics "ortega taco sauce. laying on the floor. hey!" it had a "mexican" dance & was sung in what passed for a mexican beat in my mind back then, which is to say that it was slightly russian...taco childhood memory retained.

then, as was the case with many of my oft-eaten childhood foods (see: pizza, porkchops, smelts), i went through a period where i didn't have anything at all to do with tacos. i have ZERO taco memories from ages 18-34, meaning that taco bell totally missed out on my time in that coveted demographic. suck it, yum! brands.

then something done flipped in my brain.

maybe it was my target-purchased taco juan's t-shirt. maybe it was a close friend's love of tacos. maybe it was the need to latch onto a nyc food fad & suck all the life out of it until it was sprawled, bloated & lifeless at the foot of the rockaway taco stand. it was likely a combo of the three & numerous other taco influences that led me to foment an obsession with meats & veggies & sauces all snuggle blanketed up inside a tortilla.

& as such, eat!drink!taco! is now a reality. it is the sexy sister site of eat!drink!snack! it is an excuse for eating an insane diet of tacos. it is the next step in my TOTALLY UNREALIZED GOAL of taking over the world.

here's what you have to look forward to:

• LA PHYSICALE - visits to restaurants serving tacos, although "visits" is a loose term, as i often order tacos & abscond with them back to my apartment before eating them.
• TRUCKIN' - visits to varied taco trucks, the mobile vendors who've been a major force behind the recent upswing in the nation's collective taco love.
• FAST & DIRTY - visits to chain peddlers of the taco in all their henry ford-assembled incarnations.
• TACXPERIMENTS - attempts at saucy taco recipes from a source who knows nothing about making proper recipes.
• TACO NEWS - the latest & greatest in news from tacoland...like cnn but good.

...& in the sorta-classic eat!drink!style!, from time to time there will be a heaping helping of random ramblings...as you're witnessing here.

so yeah...if you care, stay tuned later today for our first review. it'll be the first of many muy picante reviews & it's gonna be totally awesome.

welcome.