Over at Las Gemelas, the multinational culinary team has put its own spin on Toluca green chorizo with crumbled pork spiked with, among other ingredients, pickled jalapeños and tomatillos, which amp up the acidity of the sausage. But in Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico, they make a chorizo verde whose hue can be traced to its delicious mess of herbs and greens.

When folks think of Mexican chorizo, I suspect they think of the pork sausage that drips brick-red grease, staining everything within a three-foot radius. “It’s easy with me and Tom because we are able to just communicate and create and build from that place of non-judgment.” “Before you do anything super-special, you got to be prepared to look foolish,” Albisu tells me. Each location has its own custom list of tacos nuestros. They’ve developed eccentric and fantastical combinations, tacos that riff on Chick-fil-A, patty melts and trendy international dishes. If you’re familiar with the Taco Bamba model, Albisu and culinary director Tom Hall workshop all items that make the cut for the “tacos nuestros” section of the menu. A take on Canadian poutine, the taco would seem a nod to vegetarians, but in fact, as Albisu says, “We take the jus from the barbacoa and we ruin that.” The kitchen also adds spicy mayo, bacon bits, cotija cheese and pickled red onions for one of the most surprising, and surprisingly satisfying, tacos around. When you’re throwing french fries into a corn tortilla, says Taco Bamba founder Victor Albisu, “all sense has gone out the window,” which is part of the reason I love this unorthodox, carb-on-carb taco that the chef has dubbed La Poutina. The only thing that stopped me from sampling more was, well, a deadline. No, I sampled dozens and dozens of tacos for this list. With so many good-to-great tacos in the region, I saw no reason to limit my picks to a handful of taquerias, though that would have been easy to do and easy to justify. What’s more, I wanted to spread the love. This list may have a bias for tacos wrapped in homemade tortillas, but it has other agendas, too: I wanted to showcase a wide variety of tacos, including ones that may be only loosely connected to Mexican street food. Like, we could absolutely just, you know, Sysco it up and get our thousand tortillas in a giant box. So for us, it’s the same with the tortilla.

“In order to have a really good pasta, your pasta is super important. “In order to have a really good sandwich, the bread is really important,” Irabién says. Like space to store those pallets of Mexican corn before you process them into masa. He’d also prefer to make masa in house, but he understands that kitchens such as the one at ¡Muchas Gracias! have limitations. But, by and large, Irabién prefers tortillas hot off the comal. taquerias, has moved into the bagged tortilla business. He points out that Masienda, the company that sells heirloom corn to a number of D.C. I wouldn’t call Irabién dogmatic on the subject. They import corn grown in Oaxaca (or other Mexican locales), nixtamalize and grind the kernels in house, then press the resulting masa into tortillas, whether white, blue or yellow, a wide spectrum of colors, textures and flavors.īagged versus homemade tortillas: Christian Irabién, executive chef at ¡Muchas Gracias! in Chevy Chase, calls it “the conversation of the year,” given the many kitchens that now make their own, including DC Corazon, Taqueria Xochi, Republic Cantina, Taqueria Picoso, Taqueria al Lado, Cielo Rojo and on and on. Some kitchens even go beyond making tortillas from masa harina, a corn flour widely available from restaurant wholesalers and suppliers. More than half the tacos on this list come swaddled in homemade tortillas. The expectation of cheap tacos, it seemed, had doomed us to commercial-grade wrappers. taco culture, they’d argue, made it tough to hire an employee dedicated to nothing but tortillas. Whenever I’d press about outsourcing what’s arguably the single most important element of a taco, owners would cry poverty or, conversely, crow about the quality of their particular third-party tortillas.

area were content to stuff their fillings into tortillas pulled from a bag.

It’s history.įor more years than I care to recall, taquerias in the D.C. To many, a good tortilla, its earthy aroma perfuming every bite, needs nothing more than a pat of salted butter or a swipe of honey. When pulled fresh and slightly puffy from a griddle, the tortilla is a workaday object, an ordinary beauty forged from little more than corn, water and salt.

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