TACO THE TOWN
When you first walk into the brand new Street Taco and Beer Co. off Congress Street north of Church, you can’t ignore the similarity between the new locally owned joint and the national chain Chipotle. Even the menu is kind of similar—offering single street tacos with flour or corn tortillas for $2 to $3 and burritos for about $7 with al pastor, carne asada, pollo asado, carnitas, and veggie options. The restaurant also serves nachos, quesadillas, hot dogs, and $1 to $2 sides like beans, rice, elote, and calabacitas.
While the menu and restaurant are set up unmistakably similar to Chipotle, seeing meat and corn roasting on a spit in the back was the first sign that owners Dago Martinez and Amjaad Jhan were doing it better than their predecessor.
Once you take a bite, you’ll notice well-marinated, flavorful, and tender proteins, grilled tortillas, and handmade sides. While the al pastor used spices to accentuate the meat, the carne asada showed simplicity and technique that let the meat sing on its own. Even the calabacitas were full of flavor in that salty, comforting way that they should be.
Despite being made on an assembly line, the food still has the soul and spice that Mexican cooking should have—especially after adding a few healthy dollops of the aptly labeled hot salsa.
To cool off, the restaurant offers aguas frescas like horchata, jamaica, and piña with chunks of fresh pineapple. Street Taco also has a bar with local beer, draft beer, wine, and an array of tequila.
LIQUOR IS QUICKER
The local distilling world is about to get a bit bigger this spring when Independent Distillery fires up their fermenter and mash tun and still and starts cranking out locally made liquor downtown. Located off Arizona Avenue next to the future Johnny Gibson Downtown Market, the distillery plans to open about the same time this spring as the market, which will share a large outdoor patio with the bar and distillery.
Founder Don Northrup says they will start by distilling vodka and a couple of styles of gin (with secret botanical composition) and then move on to aged spirits like bourbon and rum. Northrup says they also plan to make bitters.
The distillery team, which includes his wife Toby Hall and their friend Trevor Streng, is happy to have the opportunity to open downtown, which, until very recently when the state approved the issuance of a Series 18 craft distillers license, wasn’t even possible.
“The development that’s going on in this area in the next year is going to be nuts,” Hall says. “We’re just happy to be a part of it.”
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2015.
Heather Hoch must have visited a different Street Taco and Beer from the one I went to on opening day. Could be because the one I went to is actually ON Congress and is not north of Church. It’s difficult to be north of Church, since it runs north and south, but why let facts get in the way of a good fairy tale.
And a fairy tale she tells. I had what are normally my favorite, the carne asada tacos, and they were seriously wanting. Not horrible, but not good either. The dollop of meat, rather than being hot off a grill, was apparently prepared way ahead of time and dished up out of a pan on a not so warm warming table. Hence my tacos were a falling apart, soupy mess of lukewarm meat.
My fiance, had one carnitas taco and one fish taco. The piece of fish was tiny and featured more breading than fish. The carnitas, like everything else, was cold and incrusted in congealed grease. She couldn’t eat it.
The chips are self-serve and in a word, horrible. The worst corn chips you got out of a bag at the supermarket are better than these. It’s as if they were cooked a week ago, perhaps someplace else, and put under a light bulb since then. Rather than being the color of say—a corn chip—they were a medium brown. The taste and texture was consistent with the foregoing.
There is a plethora of salsas available. We availed ourselves of two, a pico de gallo and a smooth green labeled, “hot”. It was only moderately so. The pico de gallo was lacking any heat whatsoever. What is was not lacking was salt. It and the green salsa were way too salty; perhaps an attempt to engender an increased thirst for beer.
We suspect that beer sales are the rational for this place. If so, they’re going to have to lower their prices. I guess they have a good selection, although I stopped looking when I saw my favorite, Dragoon IPA. But as much as I love it, $5.50 is too much to have me partaking of it at Street Taco, even if they solve their shaky service (I gave them a pass on this, attributing it to opening day jitters) and improve the food.