"Yo-ho, yo-ho, a taco life for me." The benefits of the taco lifestyle were on naked display to everyone at Tacolandia, Saturday's celebration of the city's favorite staple. These convictions were doubly confirmed spying the event's culinary curator, Bill Esparza, strutting through the massive with Miss Los Angeles on one arm and Dita Von Teese on the other. Direct benefits of the man's dedication to this here taco life. In fact, everyone at Hollywood's Palladium that afternoon reaped the rewards of Esparza's epicurean experience and deep connections to gifted chefs as various and voracious members of L.A.'s many taco tribes joined up under the sun in the parking lot of the Palladium to sip drinks and shoot the breeze, all while eating very well. The L.A. TACO crew amped up our own appetites by biking up from a ride across Wilshire during CicLAvia and offering crucial product testing to a new hand-held doohickey called The PAX (it gets four and twenty thumbs up!). Arriving at the L.A. Weekly-sponsored event around 2:00 P.M., it only took stops to three of the included 30 taqueros to overstand that this taco event was playing on the highest level, the assembled restaurants rich with heavy-hitters of the Mexican food scene both in L.A. and below the border. Each brought their best creations or else pushed their own boundaries with inspired new combinations and ingredients. Come along and take a look at some of the highlights in our look back at the first (and surely the start of many) Tacolandia festivals from L.A.'s own trusted Street Gourmet.
Jimmy Shaw's D.F.-style L.A. taqueria, Loteria, had one of our favorite tacos of the day. Called "Bilingua," it featured beef tongue in a red salsa on half of the torilla, pork tongue with tomatillo on the other. They had another one on hand called "Tres Cochinitios" with bacon, carnitas, and chicharrones.
