We had just come out of a punk show (couldn't tell you which one if you put me in front of a firing squad). We were sweaty and sticky and a film of cigarette smoke clung to us. We were also hungry. In front of us was a taco cart. A taquera slid mound after mound of grilled beef onto pairs of tiny tortillas then doled them out to customers. She was a maestro who worked the griddle with casual precision. Slide, shovel, flip, plate. The smell was heaven, all salt and smoke and meat. I couldn't resist. How could anyone? But I was confused.
As we queued up, I tried to wrap my brain around what I was seeing. Why were these tacos so small? Why were they made with soft, floppy tortillas instead of crunchy shells? Why didn't they have any toppings? Where was the orange cheese and shredded iceberg lettuce? What was this woman doing? Why was she making tacos wrong?
Yes, I was an idiot.
I say that with more affection than judgment. Aside from the ultra-snotty years of my late teens and early 20s (because we never know as much as we do when we're 23, right?), one of my fundamental beliefs is that before any of us can become someone who knows a lot about something, we are someone who doesn't know anything about it. There shouldn't be any shame in that. The shame lies in wearing your ignorance like a uniform, in brandishing it like a weapon.
The Tacos Arizas truck in Echo Park was a favorite nighttime dining destination for the author. Photo by Elina Shatkin/KCRW
Growing up, I'd always had a big appetite. Within my family, there's a semi-famous photo of me as a small child, taken at my favorite restaurant, our local outpost of the chain restaurant Coco's. To my 5-year-old palate, this place was the height of sophistication. In the picture, I am sitting in a leatherette booth looking glum, surrounded by a mostly uneaten hamburger, a stack of French fries and a tall, frosty Coke. I had probably ignored the age-old admonition, "Don't fill up on bread!" and now I was too stuffed to eat what I thought was the best hamburger in the world. "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach," my mom sighed, not for the first time, not for the last time.
Fast forward a decade or so. I was 18 years old and had only been living in Los Angeles for a few months when I encountered my first taco made with a soft tortilla. Despite a bit of turmoil in my early life, I had lived a sheltered upbringing as a brainy, socially awkward weirdo. The scrappy, immigrant kid of a scrappy, immigrant single mom who had climbed the socioeconomic ladder all the way to the soul-destroying suburban hellhole that is Silicon Valley, I was dying to experience the Big City. And UCLA was my ticket.
I was born in Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine but once part of the big, bad USSR. My mother was an excellent cook. She had become one by necessity because her mother, my grandmother Yulia, was not. At around 15 or 16 years old, my mom took over much of the cooking for her family. When we came to the United States a decade-and-a-half later, she continued making the food she knew, an amalgamation of Ashkenazi Jewish and Eastern European fare with heavy Mediterranean influences. We ate potatoes, dark bread, farmer's cheese, kasha and more potatoes. I was into weird pickled things before they were cool. In toto, it was about as far from trompos and tortillas as you could get.
These carnitas tacos from Carnitas Michoacan in Lincoln Heights are among the many tacos the author of this essay has consumed since her "taco awakening." Photo by Elina Shatkin/KCRW
Tacos were so far outside my mom's culinary wheelhouse, they may as well have come from another universe. The only tacos I ate while growing up were your classic Taco Tuesday/school cafeteria/hardshell tacos. I probably tried them at Taco Bell (Del Taco still hasn't made deep inroads into Northern California) or by sampling another kid's lunch. It wasn't until I was living in L.A. and hanging out with my Rieber Hall dormmates that I tried "real" tacos. I don't put too much stock in that word — "real." It's fun to explore the roots of a dish but if you go back far enough, everything we eat was influenced by some other culture and shaped by some combination of geography, necessity and creativity. Every culture borrows, every household iterates. Authenticity is a ghost. All I know is what I like.
I knew next to nothing about tacos before I moved to Los Angeles. I still don't know enough. But I know that from that first carne asada taco when I was 18 to the quesabirria taco I had last week, I have appreciated every bite of every taco I have ever had, even the sad, bad, boring, overcooked, mediocre ones. My mother wasn't wrong. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach but my curiosity has been bigger than both.