December 21, 2008

Taco Review #3 - The "Alpo" Taco



A taco stand inside of a Mexican Supermarket? Si Senior - estoy bajo! A supermarket that has a taco stand AND a carneceria? Palabra! This is the El Paisano Supermarket in Espanola, NM - English not spoken.
OK - so I've had tacos here before and they were actually pretty decent. But dude, what happened? - the tacos they are serving up now, totally suck. I mean that shit is like dog food. The lack of cars in the parking lot should have been a clue.



OK, so I show up thinking: "this is gonna be the Taco Review to end all Taco Reviews", I mean I gotta order in Spanish, and the nice ladies even walk back to the beat market and hand-select the meat for my carne asada. No Holmes, it don't get better than that!
The first sign of scariness is they are frying my hand-selected peice of meat in lard oil. OK, thats cool, but I usually like my "asada" grilled and not fried, so whatever. Second bad sign, the place is empty except for two trolls that stumbled in after I ordered - both ordered menudo (they KNEW something). Third bad sign, it took FOREVER to get my food - I mean what the hell are they doing to it - I'm the only one there that ordered real food that does not have to be ladelled into a bowl?
So I FINALLY get the goods and lather it up with whatever salsa concoction that is sitting there on the sticky, un-bussed table from the previous troll. I add some cilanto and chomp.......what the....? Ya, it's frickin' dog food. It was truely nasty. Chewy meat that was fried and ground and pulverized to a point of unrecognition. After chewing on just one taco, my jaw muscles were already bonking - I'm serious, they were BEAT and I had to rest. Choking down the first taco I looked at the remaining horror that remained on my plate and noticed that they had cooled to a point that the grease had started to solidfy into a nice orangish-brown color, coating every frightening morsel. I ate one more and that was it - 2 down and 2 more for the trash.
The Review:
Meat: 1.0/5.0
Veggies: 3.0/5.0 (cilantro only - I was scared to ask for anything else)
Value: 2.0/5.0 (4 bucks for 4 tacos would be a good deal - if they were real tacos)
Condenments: NA
Overall 1.3/5.0 (and that's pretty generous)
Taco Alert: Don't eat there - even if it's 2:30 am, and you're really high and have the munchies - don't do it.