Tuétano Taqueria, San Diego

On the shortest day of the year, in the middle of the gloomiest and wettest of England's gloom and wet, I thought it might be fun to review a taco shop in southern California, because it's days like this you need to remind yourself that there are places in the world where the sun always shines.

Tuétano is Spanish for 'bone marrow', and so if you call yourself 'Tuétano Taqueria' this brings with itself a certain set of expectations. I remember being very disappointed as a child when it turned out central Liverpool chippie The Lobster Pot didn't serve lobster (yes, I was that kind of kid) but, fortunately for all concerned, expectations are more than met in this cheerful little spot in Chula Vista, where the birria tacos come with an "optional" chunk of roast bone marrow.

I put "optional" in inverted commas because quite honestly, anyone making the journey here and NOT ordering the bone marrow needs their head examined as it's the loveliest bit of offal you can order in this part of the world. And I'm including the brain and tongue tacos at El Gordo in that assessment.

Anyway I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. The menu at Tuétano is short and no-nonsense, essentially the same ingredient - birria - served in two types of taco casing and also available as a sandwich (torte). Short menus are almost always a good sign, indicating a kitchen focussed and confident in their abilities where it matters, and not trying to be all things to all people.

The first thing we ordered was the standard quesabirria taco - so their own birria mixture topped with lovely gooey cheese, either some kind of pizza mozzarella or a very close Mexican equivalent, in a standard taco casing. For $4 it was a fine example of its kind, the slow-cooked beef and cheese creating that magical combination of flavours and textures that are such an integral part of the Southern California experience, and yet so weirdly difficult to find elsewhere.

Better, as you might hope and expect, was the same filling inside with the bog standard tortilla swapped out for their own hand-pressed on-site version, fluffy little things as light as buttermilk pancakes but holding firm to the last bite - well worth the extra $1 and more than enough reason to visit by itself.

But as I mentioned, Tuetano have a little extra trick up their greasy sleeves, and it's a quite wonderful chunk of roasted bone marrow which for an extra $7 comes slapped on top of your taco speared through with a little wooden stick, like a beefy lollipop (sorry, popsickle). Push the perfectly cooked marrow through the bone onto the top of your taco and you are rewarded with a storm of beefy, offaly wonderfulness, a spritz of fresh lime and chopped coriander (sorry, cilantro) just enough to stop the whole thing tipping over into fatty excess.

They also do a lovely "consommé", not a clear broth in the French style but a heady beef soup made from their own stock, finished with chunks of fresh onion and soft, buttery frijola beans. Typing this back in Blighty with 70mph winds and horizontal rain battering the windowpane makes me think such a powerfully flavoured winter-y soup is wasted on a part of the world where the temperature rarely dips below 'shorts weather', but then life is nothing if not contradictory.

Even the drinks offering has had some love and attention directed towards it. The counter has 3 barrels of Agua Fresca, one of which on the day I visited was a homemade mint and lemonade, the plastic cup it came in dipped in chamoy - a sticky, sweet and sour paste (usually) made from tamarind, tajin and sugar. They also sell Mexican coke and a rather nice non-alcoholic sangria soda, again not a fast array of options but all making sense.

If you've added up the prices I've mentioned above in your head you may have reached the conclusion that Tuetano is a bit of a bargain, and indeed it's not far off, but this being America in 2024 every seemingly reasonable order is at the final stage slapped with sales tax and (increasingly common) a minimum 20% tip, so costs can easily head north of expectations. However, $33pp for probably the best birria taco meal in town is still more than acceptable. You can certainly pay more for less.

It's more than possible I only obsess so much about quesabirria tacos (and believe me, I do obsess about them) because it's the one thing hasn't quite been tackled successfully by any UK Mexican joint. Madre in Liverpool had a decent bash at one point but last time I tried was a shadow of its former self, and most spots in London, even the ones that are so-called taco specialists, don't even bother with birria. But then maybe, like that bottle of holiday wine that tastes so flat and dead when you've gone to the effort of bringing it all the way home, quesabirria aren't meant to travel, and I'll just have to wait for my next trip to California for my next hit. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

9/10

Anissa's Nose to Tail Lamb at the Dock Kitchen, Notting Hill

If I was feeling slightly less than charitable, this post would be about Colchis, a Georgian restaurant in Bayswater. I went with a couple of friends on Sunday and suffered the kind of incompetence that makes the job of writing it up a breeze - the wrong wine brought twice, dull food weirdly presented, and the saltiest dumplings in Britain. I could have rattled a condescending review off in record time and had the afternoon to find somewhere else to hate while the comments racked up.

But you know what, there's been far too much Schadenfreude around these parts lately. I know bad meals make good reading but while I don't mind laying into a Jamie Oliver cash cow or cynical tourist dive, I am less comfortable with beating on yet another mediocre-but-hardly-disastrous meal from people whose intentions may well be misguided but hardly evil. Not everywhere can serve the best food or be incredible value, and it's far, far to easy to pick fault in somewhere that isn't perfect than it is to appreciate that actually, we have it pretty good most of the time. So, from now on, I'm going to try and be more positive.

Anyway, the reason I've been in such a conciliatory mood lately is largely due to a meal I had at the Dock Kitchen in West London earlier in the week, a special one-off event and the brainchild of Syrian/Lebanese food writer Anissa Helou with the assistance of Dock Kitchen chef Stevie Parle and his team. Ordinarily writing up one-off events is the least useful thing a food blog might do - it's not like anyone reading this will be able to book themselves in for similar any time soon - but this meal was just so ...unusual, that I thought it deserved a proper report. There are two points to be made before I go any further - firstly, the meal was titled 'Nose to tail lamb', and as you might expect contained bits of a sheep you wouldn't ordinarily see on a restaurant menu. If you are feeling a bit delicate and your idea of a difficult dish is a haggis, then look away now. Secondly, despite containing some of the most challenging items I've ever paid to eat, it was worth every penny even despite the fact there were some bits I will never ever go anywhere near again. Ever.

It all started innocently enough. Chicken wings, marinated I think in pomegranate molasses, were straight from the charcoal grill, salty and sweet crispy on the outside and silkily smooth within. The house bread also deserves a special mention, this presumably being Stevie Parle's work, with the soft, stretchy texture of the finest tandoor-cooked naans.

This is a lamb's tongue. It's not pretty, is it, but surely that's just a few decades of social conditioning talking - objectively it can't really be more obscene than a salami. It tasted salty and soft, not very offally in fact but rather like dense paté, and if you closed your eyes would almost pass as straightforward. Almost.

This roast potato contained a whole kidney seasoned with butter and thyme, and I was on safer ground here as I'd had kidneys in the past. Admittedly, I didn't like them much when I had them before - it was in Canteen in Spitalfields and I remember them tasting like, well, for want of a better word, like piss... actual piss - but here they were much more palatable, soft and meaty and with no unpleasant urine tang, just a vaguely musky tinge of innards.

Finally, our favourite of the starters - another soft and crisp flatbread topped with lamb's fry (liver), sweetbreads and kidneys, and chicken hearts and livers. All delicately spiced (allspice, I think) and perfectly seasoned, this Mixed Organ Grill was great fun to pick your way through - my favourites, as in the past, were the chewy chicken hearts and the creamy blobs of sweetbread. It was enough to forget I was working my way through minor lamb glands and let my guard down. Big mistake.

"Tandoori sheep's head interlude" sounds like a good name for a band, but is actually, as you can see from the X-rated photo above, an actual entire sheep's head, eyes and brains included, on a plate. To eat. Anissa gave a brief demonstration on how to *gulp* split the skull, *wince* scoop out the eyes and *aargh* fish out the brains with our fingers, during which I attempted to appear polite and pay as much attention as possible whilst simultaneously fighting the instinct to run out of the room screaming. Since a humbling trip to Japan earlier in the year, involving raw squid and cod's sperm, I no longer consider myself the brave Mr. Mange-Tout I once did, but even so, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was, staring into the dark, sunken eye sockets of a roast animal skull.

I first tried some cheek - "hmm, not bad" - then graduated to a teeny morsel of brain - "eek, well, OK" - but it was really the eyeball that I was most worried about. I stared at my dinner, and it stared back. I took a few deep breaths and, as instructed, sliced off the dark iris with a knife and fork. The two sections wobbled apart looking like nothing that should ever be eaten. I should say that my friend, much more brave and level-headed than me, was tucking into her side of the head with gusto - not only did she pop the entire eyeball into her mouth as if it was nothing more offensive than a marshmallow, but she also ate most of the tongue and was tearing at the brain with her fingers for as long as the front of house left it on the table. Eventually, under extreme peer pressure I should add, I tried a tiny bit of the eyeball. It tasted like salty lamb blubber, perhaps very slightly less hideous than I'd expected but still not enough to get me rushing to my nearest halal butchers and buying them out of whole carcasses.

After that, a whole stuffed stomach was almost prosaic. Gently pungent tripe, ballooned with spiced rice and herbs, sat in a clear vegetable broth containing garlic and lemon and crispy asparagus. I can't decide whether it was over-eating or shell-shock but I'm afraid I couldn't manage more than half of it. Very tasty though, I assure you.

Rose water sorbet and Lebanese wild orchid root ice cream provided some kind of light relief at the end of the meal. I ate them feeling like I'd just been bungee jumping, or white water rafting - a combination of having broken some personal limits and delighted I'd even eaten as much as I did. And yes, I struggled with some bits of the meal, as I imagine many others would too, but I can't remember the last time I've finished a meal feeling such a sense of a achievement - pathetic really, as there must be people all over the Middle East tucking into a whole sheep's head like you or I might a Cornish pasty.

So, thank you to Anissa and Stevie for having the balls (which reminds me, I guess it could have been worse) to do this, and for treating me and my friend to a completely hilarious, terrifying, delicious and utterly unforgettable evening. I'm never going to be the world's biggest fan of the strange collection of objects that lurk inside a sheep's skull, but by cooking it all so well - always delicately spiced and perfectly seasoned, not a single mistake in any element of any course - they have at least convinced me that this is as good as this stuff gets, and I can safely now stop trying. And I can't tell you how much of a relief that is.

Edit: Apparently lamb's fry were testicles after all, not liver. So I did better than I thought.

Cheese and Biscuits on tour - the Mexican food of San Diego

"I can't believe you didn't get to try any fish tacos!" was my sister's first thought on my return from San Diego all the way back in 2010. If this area of Southern California is famous for anything food wise, it's burgers (more - much more - on which later) and, thanks to its close proximity to the international border, Mexican cuisine, and yet thanks to little more than personal prejudice fuelled by a succession of mediocre Mexican meals in London, on my first trip to this part of the world I didn't go out of my way to eat any. "How good can a fish taco be?" I told myself. "Deep fried fish in a tortilla. Squeeze of lime. Boring. Mexican food is just the same 3 ingredients arranged in different ways, isn't it? I know what I'm talking about, I've been to Chiquito."


What a fool I was.

Of all the wonderful food we enjoyed over the course of the last few weeks in San Diego, it was Mexican that was consistently the most bold, exciting and - most importantly - good value. I was stunned not just by the quality of each individual thing we ate but also the sheer variety, making an embarrassing lie of any prejudice I may have previously held about Mexican cuisine. This is not an exhaustive list of the best San Diego/Tijuana has to offer (I was only there 14 days and had to squeeze some burgers in) but hopefully enough to demonstrate to any deprived Briton that there really is more out there than burritos.


Mariscos Germán Taco Truck, South Park



Of the Mexican food trucks that serve San Diego, a large number seem to specialise in seafood. I didn't really ever find out why this should be the case - perhaps their mobile nature makes it easier - or cheaper - to stock up daily on fresh fish than bricks-and-mortar outlets, or perhaps it's something to do with the cooking process that makes seafood easier to deal with than anything else. Either way, each neighbourhood in the city seems to be served by at least one of these large white trucks with a tiny serving hatch cut in the side, and I have it on good authority that most of them are pretty damn decent. Mariscos Germán certainly is.


We ate delicate, crisply-fried chunks of fresh fish in soft masa-flour tortillas doused in hot sauce, chunky fresh vegetables and coriander. We ate crispy fried tortillas topped with the most perfect, zingy, herby (thyme at least, amongst other things) fish and shrimp ceviche and vast slabs of buttery avocado. We also ate something called Aguachile, ordered blind but which turned out to be a chilli-spiked ceviche containing a bewildering variety of seafood ingredients. It was all unbelievably good and unbelievably good value - a vast meal for two with enough Aguachile left over for lunch the next day came to about $12.



Super Cocina, Normal Heights



With not a taco in sight, Super Cocina specialises in a different style of Mexican cuisine - hearty, chilli-spiked soups, stews and the all-important mole. We queued up, canteen-style, with plastic trays and ordered by pointing at various of the bubbling vats of brightly coloured liquid, and again paid a pittance (about $6.50 I think) for a rich, gently chocolatey chicken mole, a soft quesadilla soaked in some kind of Mexican cottage cheese, rice and beans. I can't pretend we had an exhaustive range of the menu but judging by the queues and online reviews for this functional little cantina, their food has a loyal and enthusiastic fan base. And they can count me in, too.




Misión 19, Tijuana, Mexico


A couple of paragraphs as part of a Mexican food roundup is probably doing this very serious (and very expensive) haute cuisine joint in Tijuana a great disservice, but I include it if only to show that Mexican food can do high-end as well as the best of them. Highlights of the multi-course tasting menu included a pretty glass of deconstructed shrimp salad containing wonderfully powerful guacamole puree; a crisp-fried octopus tentacle with garlic jam, pistachios and green chickpea; a silky risotto spiked with Mexican truffle (who knew?) and fantastic "heirloom" beans and wild mushrooms; and a meltingly tender portion of stunning Mexican beef (a first for me), cooked sous vide and served with crispy, flavoursome chayote squash and vanilla-infused olive oil.


You could probably get away from Misión 19 for less than the $200 a head we spent if you went a little easier on the wine, but I hadn't risked life and limb crossing the border into one of the world's kidnapping and murder hotspots to take it easy. In all honesty though, the border crossing was completely painless, there were plenty of smart yellow cabs waiting to whisk us to and from the restaurant and the evening was a lot of fun. If you go yourself, don't miss the interesting bar upstairs (Bar 20) where they do all sorts of fancy things involving molecular mixology (cringe, but that's what they say themselves).




Tacos el Gordo, Chula Vista



I save the best until last. We wouldn't have even found this place if it wasn't a clandestine tip from my sister's Mexican hairdresser, someone very much tuned into the San Diego food goings-on and who claimed this unassuming drive-thru in the border town of Chula Vista served the best tacos in the area. She was right, of course, but just how good they were is difficult to convey without dissolving into a heap of breathless superlatives. Beef mulas were like beef taco sandwiches, moist chunks of shredded beef inside two discs of soft, thick tortilla, accompanied by a slab of salty rubbery cheese of some kind and topped with fresh salad. Other tacos came in the form of asada, beef steak strips covered in smooth guacamole and chilli sauce, and the rather more challenging Tacos de Sesos - brain (el Gordo specialise in offal and serve tacos made with tripe, tongue and the disconcertingly vague "head") with tomatillo sauce which I tried for the sheer bragging rights but can't say I'd rush to order again.


But the spicy pork and spicy beef tacos - Tacos de Adobada, shaved to order off two revolving columns of marinaded meat and doused in a yoghurt-chilli sauce - would have been worth the trip alone. I can imagine, based on my shonky pictures and without being there to taste them yourselves, that it's hard to see quite what could be so special about them; they are, after all, "just" fresh soft tortillas topped with moist and crunchy spiced meat, fresh vegetables and coriander. But there's something about the combination of all the different textures, the spices, the earthy tortilla and the fresh dressing, that makes something that, like all great cuisine, is much more than the sum of its parts. Instantly smitten on our first visit, we made a special effort to go back on the last day to have them again. And even now, writing this up back in cold, drizzly London just thinking about them is enough to get me booking the next available flight to Lindbergh Field airport.




I will be back of course - having family there is only one of a number of reasons to visit this consistently charming and likeable part of the world. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys knocking back some of the freshest, tastiest craft beers in the world in the early evening Californian sun whilst snacking on ceviche tostadas and chilli sauce well, on the one hand I feel sorry for you but on the other, there's always the beaches, the mountains, the wildlife (Black Widow spiders aside though; I had quite enough of those), and many other kinds of food if you need any more reasons to visit. Oh, and burgers. They have a few of those. Watch this space.

Mariscos Germán 9/10
Super Cocina 7/10
Misión 19 8/10
Tacos el Gordo 9/10