Time for a change of pace here, kids.
So this is the result of a trip to Los Angeles in the spring, where I had possibly the best journalism assignment OF MY LIFE. Eat Mexican food til it comes out your ears and write about it.
(For those who care, I paid my own way and all my own restaurant bills.)
I may have gone a little overboard the day I had three lunches, but otherwise it was bliss. I got to see parts of Los Angeles that I might have thought of driving into. Not Boyle Heights or commercial East L.A. That was fine.
But some of the more desolate parts of Olympic Boulevard, hmm. However, there I discovered the Mariscos Jalisco truck, which I still dream about. A simple truck, across the street from a social housing complex and surrounded by light industrial elsewhere, it had the most unusual tacos I’ve ever tasted. Filled with shrimp and a touch of octopus, crimped on the edges and lightly fried, then covered with a tomato-y sauce.
Plus the fun of eating on the planter in front of some warehouse with a bunch of other foodie nutters who have driven out to eat and moan over their food, plus a young Hispanic couple with a mattress in the back of a truck who drove up — not, I imagine, because they had seen a glowing reference to the truck in LA Weekly but because the truck is just, well, a shrine.
Oh dear, I’m getting sad and hungry just writing this. And there is nothing like this in Vancouver. I don’t care what all of you have written in the past when I have whined on about the lack of Mexican food here. We are a wasteland.
La Taqueria has great flavour combinations, but the menu is limited. And I like Sal Y Limon on Fraser, but it should be one of about 100 places like this in Vancouver that are all up and down the spectrum of cheap/fancy, regional/general, traditional/fusion.
So please, we are begging all of you — leave Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Republicans will never let many of your people become citizens anyway, and come here.