Gabbi's Quick Stop #12: Mitos del Maiz 2013

Gabbi's Mexican Kitchen 141 S Glassell St Orange, CA 92866-1421 (714) 633-3038 Listing on Yahoo! Local Listing at The Guide Official Site

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Still no sign

From now until around August 8th Gabbi's Mexican Kitchen in Orange is celebrating the origin of corn with a special menu with several appetizers and entrees to choose from as well as a newly created dessert. Read their writeup here. And here's some pictures from when I sampled the menu last Friday:

Fish Tacos at PDM Kitchen

PDM Kitchen 1000 N. Bristol Newport Beach, CA 92660 (949) 553-1206 Listing on Place123 Listing on Taste Genius Official Site

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Was thumbing through a magazine and saw a picture of these fish tacos and made a mental note to try them sometime. After I tried them I started to see mentions of them everywhere. Wow, I guess they are popular. PDM Kitchen used to be known as Pain du Monde and has locations in Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Dana Point and Irvine.

The tacos are big and fresh and cabbage-y as well as pricey. I think it is $14.50 for the platter of three but at least they are big tacos with plenty of fish and I was okay with eating my first one like a taco and the next two by forking the contents out of the tortillas. I was slightly bummed that they didn't grill my lime halves like in their promo pics. Overall it was a decent upscale treat to be enjoyed on occasion.

Click any photo above or here to be taken to the complete flickr album.

Taqueria la Vida

Taqueria la Vida 3620 W 1st St Santa Ana, CA 92703 (714) 839-5390 Listing on MenuPix Listing on Yelp Facebook Page

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Great little taquería in Santa Ana that I never knew about until a friend pointed it out recently. Highlights are the awesome jeep outside, an awesome and extensive salsa bar, menudo y pozole, different taco specials on different days, the drive-up window, and the fearsome cartoon taco character seen on a few of their walls.

View the complete photo album (21 photos so far) at flickr by clicking here.

Taco Maria

Taco Maria Various OC Locations Facebook Twitter Official Site

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June 10, 2013

Click here to read about and contribute to Taco Maria's Kickstarter campaign to become a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Contributing to any tier promises a worthwhile reward.

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Here's an interview with Carlos Salgado from the new Taco Maria truck, which has been causing many positive waves in the OC food community recently. It was originally meant to be published along with the Tamarindo Truck piece from a couple weeks ago but they ended up each getting their own separate one. You may see that some of the questions are the same but the answers are very different:

How and when did you first get the concept for the truck?

My parents, Carlos and Maria, have owned a Mexican restaurant in Orange for the last 25 years. I grew up there, went to work in the tech industry for a while, and somehow came back to the idea of cooking for a living. After several years in the Bay Area working for some great restaurants and a simultaneous decline in my parents’ business, I decided to come home and work alongside them rather than letting them sell the restaurant at a loss. We looked at several different options, from re-­conceptualizing the existing space to moving to a new location with a new menu. In the end we realized that if we were going to make any kind of impact, we would need the ability to reach all of OC’s foodie communities and not be locked down to one spot. Coming from a community of chefs who live and breathe farmers' markets and local foods, I was inspired by what I saw happening in Old Town Orange with the Orange Homegrown Market, at SoCo in Costa Mesa and at The Great Park in Irvine. Mexican food on wheels. It was immediately obvious the route we would take.

How long from conception to reality?

From initial concept to opening day was about six months.

Have you been pretty successful in finding local, organic and sustainable food to use on your truck?

Coming from the San Francisco, where we were spoiled in terms of access to local produce, fresh seafood, pastured meats and unique varieties, it took some time to find our suppliers here in OC. But things have changed a lot, for the better, since I moved away from Orange about eight years ago. We buy out of the Orange Homegrown market in Old Town, from vendors at the Great Park in Irvine, and from the farmers at SoCo. We’ve been lucky in achieving near fixture status in Costa Mesa. There are some great vendors there and we buy as much as we can. Nicholas Family Farms, Gaytan Farms, and others have provided us with some great stuff while cutting us a deal on volumes. Many of these farms haven’t done much direct sales to restaurants yet, so we’re proud to form these relationships and close the gap with them. We also have a great relationship with Melissa’s Produce out of LA. They take good care of us and help us find the best products coming out of California. Seafood has been a challenge; the market for sustainable fish is very different here. Most vendors sell fresh only to high-­‐end restaurants, at higher volumes than our little taco truck can manage. For meats, we’re working with Daniel’s Meatpackers, the same purveyor that serves Haven, Lime Truck, and a lot of other great restaurants in OC and LA.

Any story behind the name Taco Maria?

María is the first name of virtually every woman in my family. As a kid, I would sometimes walk into a room at a family gathering, and yell, “María!” just to see all the heads turn. As a chef, after a while you feel compelled to drop the ego, to let go of modernism and cook food that has meaning to you and the people around you. My best food memories are ones created by these ladies, the Marias. Grandma’s mole dulce, my mom’s birthday sopes, birria slow-­cooked by aunts for celebrations. I grew into wanting to cook food that was recognizable to my family, that I could share with them and not just with the affluent. I don’t think we spent any time at all questioning or debating the name. It was Taco María from day one.

Plans for additional trucks? Brick and mortar?

Sometimes, on a food truck speeding down the 55, pots and pans rattling and vegetables tumbling, you get this feeling of commanding a pirate ship headed into turbulent waters. I don’t know that we’ll add to our fleet anytime soon, but we are definitely considering a physical location for the future. When the time comes, it will be in a slightly different concept. Something in between a taqueria and a sit-­down restaurant, and it will remain honest and affordable.

Are there certain items proving to be popular?

I could not believe how popular our Bone Marrow Quesadilla became once we opened. We all have cuts on our hands from pushing marrow every day for the two and a half months we’ve been open. The dish was something that we literally pulled out of nowhere, one night. I was talking to my mom about bone marrow, trying to find the translation in Spanish. She said something like, “I think we used to put that in quesadillas.” My jaw dropped and I couldn’t get the image and taste out of my mind for days.

For years there were Mexican lunch trucks and not much else in the way of other food trucks. When the gourmet food truck craze started the only way you could find Mexican food was if it was fused with another cuisine. But your truck is straight up Mexican while bordering on gourmet. Are people grasping this concept?

I had a Latino customer ask me the other day, “What kind of food is this? Because, it’s not Mexican. It’s good, but it’s definitely not Mexican. Where is your family from?” This is a true story. I really struggled with that comment. I am US-­born Mexican, my parents are both Mexican immigrants, and we’ve been cooking together my entire life. We just cook -­‐-­‐ using corn, chiles, rice, and beans as the core -­‐-­‐ same as any other Mexican family. Mostly people digest the concept easily, but a few have tried to force regionalism or even politics into describing what we’re doing. It’s not an attempt to change notions or rewrite Mexican food. I’m just connecting the experiences I’ve had as a chef and as a Mexican kid growing up with two cultures. Another big challenge for us is the inevitable comparison to the ubiquitous 99-­‐cent taco. Worse is the claim that that our food is inauthentic because it’s not the cheapest ethnic cuisine a dollar can buy. But, let’s face it: we all know that we can’t keep cooking and eating the lowest-­‐cost foods available. A lot of customers have trouble seeing the true cost of those cheap, factory-farmed meats and long-­‐stored, world-­travelled vegetables. We can’t serve all organic, all local, all sustainable food, just yet. Otherwise, our tacos would be $10 a piece and we’d have no customers. But we can and should make better choices about the kinds of food production we support, and that’s what we aspire to do. We believe that it’s not expensive products or luxury ingredients that make food better. It just takes care, something that costs nothing but is invaluable. So we put as much as we can into our craft, charge what is fair for our labor of love, and put ourselves out there for anyone who’s willing to try.

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Thank you to Carlos for graciously and thoroughly answering our interview questions. Here are some other pieces online about Taco Maria:

• Whoa! New taco truck will blow your mind - OC Register: Food Frenzy
• Taco Maria Signals El Return of El Native - OC Weekly
• Irvine: Taco Maria - Looking for Food Trucks
• Maria (Shut Up and Kiss Me) - Chronicles of a Charmed Life
• Taco Maria & The SoCo Farm To Food Truck Challenge - The Hessian Chef

Farm II Food Truck Challenge

This is video from South Coast Collection's Farm II Food Truck Challenge held on November 19, 2011. It mostly focuses on Taco Maria's participation in the contest but shows some stuff from other trucks as well.

Carlitos' Diner

Carlitos's Diner 7451 Warner Ave Huntington Beach, CA 92647-5494 (714) 841-9966 WordPress Site Listing on Yelp Official Site

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(This is an "only-photos-first" post, done quickly to get photos up and a new entry on the blog, with the expectation that text may be added later. Guest reviews can also be added to this entry and each published one will be paid $10.)

View the complete photo album (13 photos so far) at flickr by clicking here.

Wahoo's Citrus Slaw Tacos

Tomorrow and the next day, May 25th and 26th, Wahoo's Fish Taco will start offering their tacos with an optional citrus slaw (cabbage, cilantro, onions and carrots tossed with lime juice & olive oil) added. It's during these first two days that if you get this option on your combo plate you will also get a free fountain drink. I got to taste these a few nights ago at a blogger event at their Fashion Island location. The citrus slaw is bright and tangy and complements the meat well. I tried it with chicken, fish and shrimp. We also got to meet with one of the Wahoo's founders, Mingo Lee, who told us all about how the chain began and about Mr. Lee's chili sauce and the saga of their stores being "stickered up" and lots more. Other food bloggers wrote about this event at Griffin Eats OC and Much Ado About Fooding.

Click here to view our complete Wahoo's photo album (59 photos so far) at flickr.

Belinda's (Buena Park)

Belinda's Taqueria and Restaurant 6072 Orangethorpe Ave Buena Park, CA 90620 (714) 670-8014 Listing on BooRah Listing on TakeOutTonight Facebook Page

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(This is an "only-photos-first" post, done quickly to get photos up and a new entry on the blog, with the expectation that text may be added later. Guest reviews can also be added to this entry and each published one will be paid $10.)

View the complete photo album (16 photos so far) at flickr by clicking here.

Cinco de Mayo 2013

2013

If you know of a Mexican restaurant in Orange County that is holding a Cinco de Mayo event (it's even okay if you work for that restaurant) please forward the information to me by leaving a comment here or e-mailing me at reviews@ocmexfood.com.

Sol Cocina

On Sunday, May 5th, we welcome all fun-loving local foodies and margarita connoisseurs to celebrate Cinco at SOL.

To help make it a party, we will offer drink specials all day and live music beginning at noon! And, of course, our legendary Sunday Brunch will be served 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

It will be slightly more sophisticated than your typical tequila-slinging, beer-guzzling party that Orange County has come to know as Cinco de Mayo - but we can't promise that some tequila-slinging won't take place.

Our waterfront location on the Balboa Marina sets the stage for those who wish to celebrate with a few cocktails and delicious brunch beginning at 10 a.m. -- of course, the celebration will continue into the night with SOL's eclectic twist on traditional Mexican cuisine offered along with cocktails and beers!

Cinco @ SOL is less than two weeks away, so make your reservations now by calling 949-675-9800.

El Corazon de Costa Mesa

Official Site

El Torito Grill

Matador Cantina

Wild Goose Tavern

Cha Cha's Tacos and Tequila

Coyote Grill

Coyote Grill is also featured at a special OC Weekly Cinco de Mayo event.

Mi Casa (Costa Mesa & Rancho Santa Margarita)

Our Mi Casa Coverage

Clancy's Clubhouse

Review at OC Menus

The Heat Ultra Lounge

Click either image to see it bigger.

Fred's Mexican Cafe

Cantina Lounge

Our Cantina Lounge Review

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IMPORTANT NOTE: All the information below is from prior years. When we get info from a restaurant for the current year then we erase their information down below and put the updated info at the top of this entry. We keep the old information because quite often a restaurant will have similar parties/deals in subsequent years.

2012

Taco Rosa

Tortilla Jo's

Tortilla Jo's even has salsa dancing lessons:

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More info at The Orange County Register's OC Latino Link and a 2011 slideshow here of restaurant recommendations by Nancy Luna, Jeff Overley and Paul Hodgkins.

El Pollo Loco info here.

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