Paris is the city of lights. L.A. is the city of signage.
Between vinyl banners advertising real human hair and cash advances, twisted metal pointing your way to the freeway, and squads of popping-and-locking inflatables, one sign leapt out at us on La Cienega: Pizz’Alif French Tacos & Pizza.
The natural next question: what in the holy hell is a French taco? We pressed forward into Beverly Hills to find out.
French tacos are a popular fast food in France, consisting of chopped and spiced meat folded four ways into a brick shape using a 12-inch flour tortilla. There’s cheese, there’s crème fraîche and gruyere sauce, there’s French fries, and sometimes there are other things, all origami-ed into a rectangular slab that looks like a microwaved Tina’s burrito just banged a Crunchwrap.
We are told they are always pluralized as “tacos,” even if you’re having just one.
The origins are hazy. Some people claim they come from the suburbs of Lyons, or Grenoble, both cities of France’s southeastern Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Some claim they’re influenced by French cooks with North African heritage. But no one seems to really know.
So we’re going to make up a story right now, and let’s all just agree to have that be the story. OK?
A young man from France, possibly with Algerian or Moroccan heritage, comes to Idaho as an exchange student. One night, his host family takes him to a kind of Mexican restaurant where the margaritas are massive and the dishes are mostly indistinguishable from each other under their melted cheese and refried beans. He goes home thinking Mexican food is alright, while raving about this place called Taco Bell that his teenage friends took him to after smoking bowls in a cornfield. Trying to recreate the menu with what he had at hand back in France, voilà, French tacos come into existence.
We good with that? Cool.
“I don't exactly know the story, but I know it's very popular in France,” says Gabriel, a partner in Pizz’Alif, between manning the register and making tacos.” And now you can find these everywhere in France and even in North Africa, too.”
Pizz’Alif has 15 locations in France and one in L.A., offering six Halal variations on the tacos, in addition to a design-it-yourself option, customizable with ingredients like merguez and chicken tenders, plus choices like extra meat, and variations such as the “gratinage,” which endows your “Tacos” with a blanket of one of five cheeses, from goat to raclette.
Alif is a petite box of black walls and cheeky neon signs, Siamese-twinned to a more heavily trafficked Subway next door. Someone takes your order, cooks some Halal beef or chicken on a griddle, mixes it up with ingredients like jalapeños or beef bacon depending on your order, puts that on a flour tortilla, stacks some fries on top, douses it all with gruyere sauce, folds everything into a rectangle, and slides it into a sandwich press for total encasement before handing it over at the cost of $14.77 per tacos, with tax.
And who comes here?
“At first, we were mostly French people, because they know the project,” Gabriel tells L.A. TACO. “But slowly, slowly, after like, almost a year, I have some Americans. And every nationality is coming, trying, and then coming back because they like it.”
And are they good?
Skeptical, yet duty-bound to question anything that dares put “Tacos” in its tagline, we ordered the “Alif” with ground beef, beef bacon, cheddar, and fries, and also ordered the “Tosti Creme” with chicken and cheddar. Both also have crème fraîche and sauce gruyère, as do all the tacos here.
To get it out of the way, these are not tacos by any definition, Angeleno or otherwise. Nor are they the pinnacle of haute cuisine or the bistronomic movement. But like many a truck taco in our lives, they find common ground as a delicious, hot, handheld feast that could be life-altering when you’re baked or fresh out of the bars at the end of the night, seeking to be full fast.
The Alif was our favorite, with its spiced blend of hot, greasy beef and softly crunchy bits of fried bacon merging with molten cheese, creamy gruyere sauce, and the familiar comfort of French fries under the protection of a toasted tortilla. What’s not to love?
The only thing missing was a lively salsa, as we ignored the packets of ketchup and mayo served on the side. And maybe some cilantro. And maybe some cebolla.
We were a little less enamoured with the Tosti Creme, which lacked complexity and was more akin to a creamy cordon bleu, coming off slightly drier and flat. This was remedied by a last-minute decision to order the “Savoreux,” which includes chopped jalapeños, to the same formulation, adding necessary heat and tang. But ideally, we’d get these back in the lab and douse them with hot sauce.
So would a taco by any other name taste as sweet? Probably. But do French tacos by the same name taste… uh … like tacos? Not exactly.
Still, we plan to come back for these sometime, regardless of their being more of an elevated Taco Bell thing than an acme of culinary Mexicellence. And were they served in a gas station parking lot or found on every corner after 11 PM, we’d probably go out of our way to eat the Alif again after some bar destroys us.
“I like the fact that we find everything on it, you know, like some bread, some meat, French fries,” Gabriel says. “You can eat it quick, like a burger. You don't need a fork or anything, you just eat it, and then that's it, which is good, amazing.”
Either way, French tacos are nothing if not another win for fork-less foods in Los Angeles.
Pizz’Alif ~ 235 S. La Cienega Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA 90211
