I grew up in San Diego, and the “authentic” Mexican food there is a completely different animal than Tex-Mex, or Taco Bell style, or any native Mexican cuisine. It was mentioned upthread that Jack in the Box tacos are essentially a cheap version of Mexican hard shell tacos, and in San Diego that’s true - a beef taco at your typical San Diego taco shop is shredded beef in a folded tortilla which is then fried, drained, and stuffed with lettuce, cheese, and hot sauce.
San Diego-style burritos are also their own animal - the tortilla is lightly grilled, and while it’s about the same size as a San Francisco-style burrito with beans and rice and all, it’s composed almost entirely of the main ingredient, with a few garnishes - a “beef burrito” will consist only of shredded stewed beef with the onions and tomatoes that cooked with it, a carne asada burrito will be almost entirely steak with a bit of salsa and guacamole, a shrimp burrito will be shrimp with some cheese and rice, and so on.
Many taco shops in San Diego will serve cheeseburgers and French fries as well as a concession to the people who get dragged along with their friends and really aren’t in the mood for Mexican food. The fact that they had the fries on hand in the first place is what lead to San Diego’s greatest contribution to American Mexican food - carne asada fries, a giant platter of fries topped with chopped steak, cheese, guacamole, sour cream, and hot sauce. (The same combination of toppings, when wrapped in a tortilla with lettuce, becomes a California burrito.)
Okay, now that the gratuitous and oh-so-unpredictable is out of the way, I’m wondering if Taco Bell has changed any in the last six years to become any more “authentic”? (I don’t think I’ve been there since this thread was started.) Because, really, Taco Bell seems as successful as ever, as far as I can tell.
When Taco Bell serves Korean tacos, we can declare equity.
Well, they have taco shells made out of Doritos now, so that must count for something, right?
There was a brief time a few years ago where Taco Bell actually started carrying Mexican-style street tacos, with steak or chicken or carnitas along with onions and cilantro and hot sauce. They didn’t last very long, which was a shame because I thought they were pretty good and actually compared well to the taco truck near my house that does street tacos.
Tamales, incidentally, are the one common Mexican entree I have yet to see Taco Bell or any of its Mexican fast-food competitors try to attempt. Are they too difficult for a fast-food place to cook? I’ve seen some Mexican restaurants sell a tiny-sized version of tamales you’d think would be a natural for a Mexican fast-food place.
Is San Diego where I got the idea of what a burrito should be? I hate burritos with ‘filler’ like beans, and especially rice. I get funny looks when I order burritos without beans and/or rice.
Tito’s Tacos (Culver City) beef burritos are just huge flour tortillas filled with their chili colorado – the same stuff you get if you order a bowl of chili – and wrapped up.
Most Mexican taco shops and food trucks offer burgers – in L.A. Up here, not so much. In L.A. shops and trucks seemed to have a hundred things on their menus. Tito’s was the exception. They had tacos, beef burritos (described above), bean-and-cheese burritos, beef-and-bean burritos, tostadas, refried beans, rice, and tortilla chips.
Making tamales is a pretty involved and time-consuming process, and I imagine a typical fast food kitchen would have to add some additional facilities (like the steamer) to do it. However, I don’t know what’s to keep them from selling pre-made tamales.
If I said Taco Bell was the McDonald’s of Mexican food I’d be insulting McDonald’s. I’d rather go to McDonald’s. Seriously how can they possibly make food that tastes so bland?
You’ve clearly never eaten at Taco Time. My theory is that Taco Time’s menu was developed by someone whose closest experience to Mexican food was having seen a Speedy Gonzales cartoon in his youth, and considers ketchup and ranch dressing to be “spicy”.
And in areas like Puerto Vallarta “Mexican” food is often grilled fish, shrimp, and lobster. Not even spicy like we assume… more citrus flavors than heat.
Not only that, but if you go to a typical ------berto’s in San Diego (or a similar place in L.A.), and order a carne asada burrito, it probably will just have carne asada in it–that’s it–with maybe a few grilled onions, and perhaps some guacamole.
Defining the ingredients of a burrito or taco is like defining the ingredients of sandwich.
I haven’t been to Mexico, so I don’t know what authentic Mexican food is. However, I have eaten in a number of Mexican restaurants in the US, and as far as I am concerned there is no good Mexican food or bad Mexican food. There is just Mexican food. It is all the same to me.
Corn tortillas, flour tortillas. Rice, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, spiced meat. In a shell, wrapped, on the flat.
Have you been to a restaurant that specializes in regional cuisines? Mexican food is very different from one region to another. We just don’t get most of the variation in the US because there isn’t a huge market for it.
Mexico also has an extremely well developed fine dining scene, complete with innovative celebrity chefs. The food you’d get in a top Mexico City restaurants definitely wouldn’t be comparable to your local taqueria.
Yep. As I said above, a San Diego-style burrito is almost entirely the main ingredient with a little bit of garnish.
The Mexican food was one of the things I missed the most after I moved from San Diego to the northwest a decade ago, and words cannot express my joy when last year I discovered Memo’s, an honest-to-God San Diego-style taco shop chain right in my own back yard. The people running it must be San Diego expats as well, because every single menu item I’ve tried from them is note-for-note identical (as best as I can remember) to the stuff you’d get at any of the taco shops in San Diego that I ate at all the time in my youth.
All this talk of missing the Mexican food in San Diego is amusing to me.
I grew up in New Mexico then moved to San Diego almost 20 years ago. The Mexican food in Albuquerque tended to be smothered in green chile sauce of a sort that you are hard pressed to find more than 50 miles outside of the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico and a little bit into southern Colorado. I am sad that I can’t find Mexican food like I had growing up in San Diego.
My in laws in LA live a few miles from Tito’s tacos in Culver City. So every few months I will get a Tito’s meat burrito and a taco. They are good but not as good as any of a 100 restaurants in Albuquerque , a least to me.
