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

La Chingada, Surrey Quays

In some ways I wish my last post wasn't about a brand new taco place serving brilliant Mexican food, bringing to UK shores the kind of authenticity and value that we've hitherto rarely seen, because what you're about to read revisits pretty similar ground. But the thing is, there's no good reason that an excellent restaurant shouldn't be written about just because this particular blogger has happened to stumble across the same cuisine in a different city a couple of weeks previously, and anyway, if a new taco joint as good as La Chingada opened every week from now until 2025 it would still be worth writing about because food like this - rewarding, generous, faithfully executed - deserves to be discovered by as very many people as possible.

La Chingada has, of course, already very much been discovered. The intrepid food adventurers at London Eater.com recently featured it on a number of different pages - Where to Eat in London Ths Weekend amongst them - and on a subsequent Sunday afternoon it's probably fair to say staff were struggling to come to terms with their newfound fame. Battling a temporarily broken down grill and a card machine with an extreme reluctance to perform its required duties, the wait to order was, not too far into the afternoon, about 15-20 minutes, and the wait after that to pick up the food probably about the same again. But the crowd waited patiently and in good humour, and before long tantalising plates of fresh tacos were being passed overhead to those lucky enough to have found themselves a seat.

First up, guacamole. In contrast to the stripped-back Madre version (I'm going to end up comparing most of this to Madre I'm afraid, but that's a pretty good benchmark to be judged against), La Chingada's guac has chunks of onions and tomatoes in, and is "wetter", probably through use of more lime juice. Both styles have much to recommend them, and in fact given the choice on taste alone I'm not sure I can choose a favourite - both places serve it with the correct type of lightly salted corn tortillas - but it has to be said that Madre serve a whole lot more guac for £4 than La Chingada do for £4.50, and I'm not sure all of this can be excused by steeper London rents.

Continuing with the sides, chicharrones (pork crackling) were basically unimprovable - fluffy, crisp, light, and perfectly seasoned. They came with a deceptively innocent looking salsa verde, which you start by scooping up in enthusiastic amounts before realising a few mouthfuls in that your face is on fire. The vast number of different ways that taco joints make their salsas is one of the great and everlasting joys of this kind of cuisine - no two places make the same, sometimes the hottest is red, sometimes it's green, sometimes they use smoked arbol chillies, sometimes habanero, and the first thing you should do in any decent taco place is try them all, one by one, to figure out your favourite. At La Chingada I'm in love with their dark red habanero, a masterpiece of salsa work.

So to the tacos. First up, al pastor, a dish borne of Lebanese influences that swaps lamb for pork and turns the vertical spit-roasting method into a very impressive taco filling dispenser. The flavour of the pork was fantastic, the toppings super fresh, the casings soft and earthy, and the whole thing was about as good as you could expect anywhere in London except - again - that pesky spot in Liverpool had found an ever-so-slightly more attractive texture for their al pastor, being soft and blessed with irresistable ribbons of fat where the La Chingada were drier and crunchier, albeit not unpleasantly so. And I'm still only finding fault because I can - they were demolished with glee, like everything else served that afternoon.

More impressive were the suadero, confit beef with an incredible flavour and texture, which should be right at the very top of your must-order list at La Chingada. It's hard to explain why an ostensibly simple arrangement of slow-cooked beef, salad and maize tortilla should be so heartwarmingly wonderful but that's the thing about good tacos - the combination of tender meat, vibrant salad and the all-important lick of chilli goes like a missile for all the taste pleasure points without it being clear exactly why, or how. Best just sit back and enjoy it, is my advice.

And it's really not hard to enjoy La Chingada. Last on the taco list were these carnitas, pork, this time not roasted on a spit but slow-cooked (usually) shoulder which could boast a more interesting texture, if not quite the levels of flavour of the al pastor. Even so, this was a supremely enjoyable taco, and clear porky juices spilled everywhere as we demolished them without dignity or shame.

La Chingada had one final trick up its sleeve - red enchiladas, a special - served with tomatoey potatoes and a pork chop. That's right, La Chingada serve their enchiladas with a massive grilled chop, which is about the best accompaniment I can think of for enchiladas. In all honesty, chop aside this was a rather uneven dish - the potatoes were particularly odd, all wobbly and soft - but hey, where else can you get a massive pork chop and enchiladas on the same plate? Nowhere, that's where. Including, I imagine, in Mexico...

I'm afraid in the general chaos and taco-chucking I forgot to take a photo of the bill, but I've posted my iPhone shot of the menu above so you can pretty much work it out. Essentially, it's good value, reason enough to make a visit even if it wasn't the only decent taco joint for miles around, which it most certainly is. It's clear that people who really know tacos, and really know how to make them, are occupying this bijou spot, and the love they pour into the product is evident in every bite, as well as in the fact that the guy behind the counter was making sure that for every takeaway order taken the recipients didn't live too far away from the shop, lest the tacos got cold and spoiled the experience. That right there is some serious quality control.

So congratulations Surrey Quays, you've beaten most of the rest of the country in the Great Taco Races, and you should be inordinately pleased that La Chingada is on your doorstep. To everyone else, well it's hardly a massive trek for Londoners and I can't imagine anyone would be disappointed with the menu here even after the journey and Eater-inflicted queue inflation combined. If anything, given the quality of the product I can only see the queues getting bigger, so why not jump on the overground now and see what all the fuss is about before it gets seriously oversubscribed. Hand on heart, for sheer ingredient bravery and those cracking margaritas, my top taco peddler is still Madre. But for those times I'm not up north and I have a craving for al pastor, I'll be heading to Surrey Quays.

8/10

Madre, Liverpool

For much of its existence as a tourist attraction, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, stately and beautiful and a fantastic place to wander around though it undoubtedly always was, was where restaurants went to die. With a massive tourist footfall ensuring that nobody really had to worry about repeat trade, and sky-high rents preventing all but most ruthless and cynical operators from setting up shop, it was home to a collection of the worst restaurants in the city, each one of them unambitious, overpriced and crap. I remember a (nominally) French creperie that reheated pre-made crepes to order, a steakhouse-turned-late night club that would serve its £35 Argentinian fillets with tiny pots of plasticky Bearnaise that cost you £2.50 extra, and - the cream of the shit crop - What's Cooking, a bizarre place selling truly diabolically bad burgers, fajitas and burritos (the vegetable version of which is £12.50) and served by a bunch of people giving the impression they'd rather be anywhere else in the world. Even more diabolically, What's Cooking is still there.

Just around the corner from What's Cooking used to be an Indian restaurant called Spice Lounge. Now admittedly, I never went, but I think I'm on fairly steady ground in assuming that it was unambitious, overpriced and crap. It has been replaced by a taqueria called Madre, and you're going to have to give me a moment to compose myself here, because I can't quite believe what I'm about to type. Here goes. Madre is a restaurant in the Albert Dock in Liverpool, and it's good. It's very good. Madre is a restaurant in the Albert Dock in Liverpool, and it's very good.

Of course, given the pedigree of the owners, I probably should have given them the benefit of the doubt but after so many decades of terrible meals it seemed somehow impossible - literally impossible - that somewhere ambitious, intelligent and keenly priced would one day live up to the standards of this building's extraordinary architecture. Madre is a kind of collaboration between one half of Breddos Tacos, Nud Dudhia*[see edit] - still the only person to make a fish taco good enough to match the ones served in TJ - and the very well-regarded Liverpudlian bistro Belzan, and from the second you walk through the door it's clear that, unlike so many of their neighbours, they want to do things properly. For example across three different nights, a margarita, made by three different bar staff, was never anything less than great - cold, crisp, dusted with tajin, elegantly presented. The best cocktail I've ever been served in Liverpool, and though that's not a particularly high bar, well, there it is.

Tortilla chips, lightly salted (not unseasoned, nor - bleugh - artificially-flavoured Doritos), came with a giant mound of fresh guacamole, a refreshingly stripped-back version involving little other than Mexican avocado, lime and coriander but which at £4 was bigger, bolder and far better than most I've been served elsewhere. You can tell almost everything you need to know about a Mexican restaurant from its guacamole. And Madre's guacamole is basically perfect.

From this flying start, incredibly things only got even better. The modestly-titled "Patatas" were crushed into charming irregular shapes then fried to crunchy on the outside, creamy inside. Served with cooling garlic sour cream and seasoned with what I think was a kind of arbol chilli paste, they were absolutely knockout.

This is a burrata and squash tostada, which I didn't try as I have next to no interest in squash at the best of times, but was declared "very nice" so I'll leave it at that. I'm sure it was lovely if you like squash.

I'd ordered roasted bone marrow mainly for the sheer novelty of being able to order bone marrow in a restaurant in the Albert Dock (the Albert Dock!) but it somehow conspired to be one of the highlights of the meal. Expertly cooked and dressed simply with chives, it was buttery, beefy and brilliant on its own, but I had what I consider to be the unique and brilliant idea of scooping the marrow out with a tortilla chip, thus creating the world's most decadent Mexican canapé. If you go to Madre I thoroughly recommend you do the same.

Tacos, though, are the star of the show at Madre and their versions are as exhaustively researched and lovingly created as any I've come across outside of Baja California. The quality of the pork is impressive, with just enough fat to be tender and not enough to feel too rich, deeply spiced and with a lovely lick of woodsmoke from the grill. They are topped with a little baton of pineapple, in true Al Pastor style, and a mound of fresh coriander and white onion to provide crunch and colour. But most importantly of all the tortillas were absolutely spot-on, soft yet firm, holding their shape to the last bite, and leaving your fingers for hours afterwards with that glorious soily aroma of masa flour. If you closed your eyes you could almost be in a little cantina in the arches of Mercado Hidalgo, while somewhere amidst the noise of the market a Mariachi band is on their third rendition of "Guantanamera".

Oh, Madre do fish tacos too, and yes, they're also fantastic. Generous chunks of fresh fish (cod) with a greaseless batter and gently chillified Jalapeno mayo, they too would have not been out of place served under a Mexican sun, with all the flavour and texture of the very best examples.

By this point my own astonishment at eating as well as this in the Albert Dock (the Albert Dock!) had turned into a kind of gentle hysteria - I was determined to eat as much as I could in case the whole thing turned out to be some elaborate prank or Christmas tequila-spiked fever dream. So these are chicken pibil, glorious slow-cooked chicken with orange and chilli, and like the other tacos were deeply authentic, generously portioned and sparkling with personality and flavour.

And finally, because a restaurant this good needs to have no corner of the menu unturned, we ordered a portion of "Churro French Toast", an idea every bit as filthy and wonderful as it sounds, a kind of butter-soaked waffle topped with salted caramel soft-serve ice cream. It was just on the edge of being too salty, too fatty, to much - but even after the amount of tacos we'd knocked back the bowl still got licked clean.

So. What to make of it all? Our dinner at Madre was so good, so unbelievably good, that the moment it was over I started to panic. What if it can't find an audience? What if, after so many decades of "restaurant in the Albert Dock" being a kind of local shorthand for crap, they can't convince enough Scousers to give it a try, and can't convince enough tourists it isn't just another Tex-Mex laminated menu ripoff joint? What if they lose their nerve and take the roast bone marrow and Half Pig's Head Chicharron (£35, to share) off the menu and end up being just another well-meaning but otherwise unambitious Mexican restaurant? What then?

So I'm doing two things. Firstly I'm writing this, to try (in my increasingly un-influential way) and get the word out to the country as a whole and Liverpool in particular that you have a genuine, honest-to-goodness world class gem on your doorstep, and to forget every dismal and overpriced dinner you've ever had in this part of the greatest city on earth and head immediately to Madre. You won't regret it. And secondly, I'm going to make sure that every one of my future trips up to Liverpool involve at least a bowl of guac and chips in this charming, brick-walled and stone-flagged space, doing my own selfless bit to support the business. Whatever happens though, Madre exists right now, in Liverpool, in the Albert Dock (the Albert Dock!) and that in itself is cause for heavy and continued celebration. Mine's a margarita.

9/10

Sorry about the terrible photos, my camera had run out of batteries so I had to use my iPhone.

EDIT: Madre is in fact a collaboration with BOTH halves of Breddos Tacos, with Chris Whitney also involved. Not sure why I thought otherwise - apologies and many thanks to Chris as well for this incredible place.

El Pastor, London Bridge

Timing, as they say, is everything. Had El Pastor opened even just a few months earlier than it did, further back in 2016, it would have been heralded as the saviour of Mexican cuisine in London, a slick, satisfying operation which finally showed what anyone who'd ever eaten proper Mexican food had been tiresomely banging on about for all these years (that would be me then), forever to wrestle away this most wonderful and sophisticated of cuisines from the greasy clutches of the Tex-Mex chains.

Unfortunately for them - and by "them" I mean the Hart Bros, the brains behing Barrafina and Quo Vadis - the opening of this shiny spot in Borough Market coincided with not just one but two or three other top-drawer Mexican operations that also landed towards the end of 2016, and what would have been a full-on, focussed love affair mere months earlier was, in the end, diluted with a little more, well, reality. Reviews were positive, but not glowing, and I wonder whether for restaurateurs so used to unqualified praise for their Spanish concept (again, guilty), for London not to be bowled over by El Pastor may have come as somewhat of a disappointment.

But all restaurants must be placed in context, and I could no more ignore the existence of Breddos while reviewing El Pastor than I could ignore Barrafina while assessing José Pizarro or La Tasca(!) or anywhere else. And although El Pastor is clearly a very good restaurant, objectively serving very nice, authentic Mexican food for not a great deal of money, in an exciting "industrial chic" space, and however annoying it is to all of the people that have so obviously put so much hard work into the place, I'm just going to sit here and tell you why I liked Breddos more.

Firstly, the salsas. One of the utter joys in eating in Mexico is that no two restaurants will make salsa tasting the same. I don't just mean variations the levels of heat or that some offer green instead of red. I mean that the house salsa offered for dipping your nachos in when you sit down can be a kaleidoscope of variations from smokey to sugary, savoury to salty, vegetal and chunky to a processed, refined sheen. You never know what you're going to get, and it's enormous fun. El Pastor's selection is of a fairly workaday tomato/coriander chunky affair, a hot habanero (presumably) that was my favourite, and a tomatillo which needed a bit more something. Seasoning, perhaps, or fresh herbs. I'm sure I don't know. But I do know that it pales in comparison to the vibrant and full-flavoured verde at Breddos.

Next, the tortillas. This being London 2017 it almost goes without saying that El Pastor grind, mixamatosis (sorry, nixtamalise) and press their own tortillas, and in fact you can see the whole process happening in the mezzanine level towards the back of the main room. On the face of it, they're doing everything right, including using a rare strain of maize rescued from near-extinction by an artisan producer somewhere in Mexico (apparently). So why do I find the end product a little dry and bland, and not quite as bouncy and full of flavour as the Other Guys?

To assemble your taco you take some of the pork filling - the El Pastor itself - a nice moist pile of slow-cooked pig, a few of the pork scratchings (sorry chicharrón), a bit of salsa, a scattering of fresh coriander, then fold it up and wolf it down. This is why most people will be coming here, and quite rightly too, as it's definitely a top bit of taco work, each element considered, refined and intelligently sourced. Whether you're more of a DIY enthusiast or prefer your taco coming already assembled and dressed, well, that will ultimately be down to personal choice, but I don't like to be left in charge of balancing ingredients and dressings in a cuisine I'm not an expert in. I don't even much like being left in charge of dressing my own salad. But even so, this was a good taco.

There were, despite my grumblings, some very impressive things on the menu at El Pastor. Tuna tartare was a generous pile of fresh tuna bound with a complex chile-sesame paste; easily enjoyed.

Chicken tacos, rubbed in adobo, were nice and moist and full of flavour, hard to find fault with.

And short-rib, also precisely cooked and prepared, equally difficult to complain about. It was all very confident, mature, clearly well researched, and well executed. There was nothing wrong with any of it.

Maybe, in the end, whether you're a Breddos or El Pastor person comes down to your position on the thorny question of authenticity. Do you value as close adherence as possible to the traditional methods of the cuisine in question, possibly at the expense of surprise and running the risk that some ingredients will necessarily be different (inferior) to those in the motherland? Or do you take the personality and main techniques of Mexican food but apply it to masa-fried chicken, Cornish mackerel and Iberico pork and the rest and see what sticks? Which of these scenarios would you be more happy with?

Or maybe that argument is completely reductive, I don't know what I'm talking about and El Pastor, and Breddos, and (for all I know) Corazon and the rest are each perfectly good restaurants all worth your money and I should just shut up and enjoy the fact that we have any decent tacos in London at all. Yes, do you know what, I'll do that.

7/10

We were spotted by the PR and this meal was comped.

Breddos, Clerkenwell

It was, up until a couple of weeks ago, the one cuisine that this country hadn't yet quite got to grips with. Mexican food in the UK was, for almost as long as I've been alive, only known by way of rotten Tex-Mex brands like Las Iguanas or Chiquito, and those Old El Paso kits from the supermarket that made everything taste exactly the same no matter what ingredients you throw at them. To anyone lucky enough to have tried the real deal in Mexico or Southern California, trying to explain why Mexican food was one of the truly great global cuisines was nigh-on impossible - a bit like trying to extol the virtues of Italian food to someone whose only exposure to it hitherto had been a tin of Heinz ravioli. Not that there's anything wrong with Heinz ravioli of course, but just try telling an Italian that.

But here we are and whatever else 2016 will be remembered for (and don't get me started on that) there is at least one shining beacon of redemption, that Breddos have opened up shop on Goswell Road and finally - finally - decent Mexican cuisine has landed in London.

Everything to enjoy about Breddos is summed up in one dish - their "Baja fish taco", about which I can lavish no higher praise than say it's every bit as good as the ones they serve up at Machatlán Mariscos Chávez in Tijuana - moist, fresh fish, a delicate thin batter, a chilli-mayonnaise dressing and all resting on a simply stunning tortilla, soft and earthy, that speaks of many man-hours of research, training and experimentation. So for most of you, homesick (Baja) Californians in particular, that should be all you need to know - the Breddos fish taco is about as good as fish tacos can get.

But why stop there? Because there's more. Another must-order from the taco section is the masa-fried chicken, which would be a wonderful bit of chicken-craft even without being complimented by that zingy chilli-mayo and the loving embrace of one of Those tortillas.

And the beef short rib, luxuriant and rich, sharpened with something called "lemon onions" and a neat pile of fresh coriander. I have a sneaking suspicion you could pile up much more inferior ingredients than these on Those tortillas and for it to still taste wonderful but that's not to take anything away from the obvious effort and skill that's gone into the toppings.

I should say not all the tacos are wonderful. I didn't much like the sweetbreads, which hadn't been prepped properly and was a bit like chewing on fried testicle (and I should know). But how fantastic they were even attempting a sweetbreads taco - I'm sure, given time, it will be just as good as the rest.

And anyway, that's just the tacos. More delights can be found elsewhere on the menu, for instance this pork chop with grilled spring onions and lime chutney. The meat itself was perfectly seasoned and full of porky juices, but even better than that was working through the meat-soaked onions beneath; I found dangling them into my mouth from above, calçot-style, worked best for this but you may very well have your own, less extravagant, method.

In much the same way as I'll forgive a mis-step on the sweetbread taco, I'll forgive them the sea urchin tostada, which I'm imagining only truly hardcore uni fans will appreciate. I have been known to enjoy sea urchin in the past, but only under very, shall we say, controlled conditions. The bravery of essentially serving it on a cracker, in all its bright orange, fishy funk, is certainly to be commended, I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy it. The octopus one, though, is much nicer. So have that.

Far more accessible, and easily enjoyable, is the Queso Fundido, basically melted cheese with crisps for dipping and so therefore why the hell wouldn't you. The cheese is studded with chorizo, for extra meaty punch, and the "crisps" are actually "nixtamalised potatoes", the same process (don't ask me) that fluffs up the corn tortillas. Nixtamalised potatoes are a fantastic thing, light and potatoey but strong enough to withstand a hefty scoop of melted cheese, which of course is extremely important.

Finally, Breddos do a very decent ceviche, perhaps not as knockout as the ones I've tried over in Baja itself but still well worth the money. It's beautifully presented too, in one of those thick earthenware bowls and dressed with various colourful bits of this and that.

So yes, I enjoyed Breddos and if you've got any sense of fun and adventure, so will you. And in fact, judging by the crowds on all of my visits so far, so is London already - it seems it's not only taco-starved foodies that have been waiting for a decent Mexican joint to open; this is a cuisine whose time has finally come. So for fantastic food, a great time (try the Mezcal) and a bill that won't break the bank, Breddos is to be welcomed with sticky, lime-soaked, open arms. What it represents for the future of Mexican food in London, though, is what's truly exciting.

8/10

I was invited to one press dinner at Breddos, but went back twice on my own wallet because I liked it so much.