The Mango Lassie

When I looked up the restaurant listing on New York Magazine’s website for Piaxtla Es México Deli Ricos Tacos y Antojitos (commonly known as Ricos Tacos), the site listed the restaurant as Rico’s Tacos, as if Rico were a guy who had opened up this hole-in-the-wall taqueria in the heavily Mexican, Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park. But there shouldn’t be an apostrophe in the restaurant’s name; “ricos,” in this case, is an adjective referring to the tacos, and it means delicious. It is a name that sets a high bar, and I wanted to see if the food measured up. My friend Fry Girl, who has spent some time in Mexico, gamely agreed to come along and to drive me to the restaurant in her car.

The inside of the restaurant has all the charm of a dingy diner, with faded orange formica booths, a high counter displaying prepared foods, a glass-doored fridge filled with Mexican sodas and a small jukebox on the wall. Much like it was during my visit to Tulcingo Deli VI, also in Sunset Park, we were the only gringos in the place. We sat at a booth in the corner and proceeded to order a veritable feast’s worth of food. It was a cold night, so soup sounded like a good first course. There was pozole, the traditional Mexican soup made with pork and hominy, and there was menudo, another traditional soup made with tripe in a chili-based broth. They were both cheap, so why not order one of each? The pozole wasn’t the best example of this soup I’ve tried; it could probably have used more seasoning. But it was rich and thick with a creamy consistency that comes from the blend of stewed hominy and fat. In other words: pretty satisfying. The menudo was tasty too, replete with big chunks of tripe that melted in the warm, spicy broth. Fry Girl isn’t a big fan of tripe so it was up to me to tackle most of this one. Luckily I didn’t finish it because there was a ton of food still to come. I washed the spiciness down with a sip of the restaurant’s sweet horchata (cinnamon rice milk).

Next came the tostadas. Thinking these would be as small as their $3 price tag, we ordered three of them in addition to three tacos, which were also $3 each. Notable among these were the tostada de tinga—a crispy corn tortilla topped with a sweet-spicy combination of shredded chicken blended with salsa, vinegar and white onion, and the tostada de enchilada—a spicy combination of shredded meat coated with tomato and chili sauce. The latter was tender and complex—our favorite dish of the evening. All came topped with lettuce, cilantro and crumbly cotija cheese. The al pastor was best of the three tacos we tried, although even that was not up to the standards of Tulcingo Deli (let alone my beloved Erick’s Tacos in Chicago). I found it a little sweet and not nearly as nuanced as other preparations I’ve tried. The beef taco was a bit dry and bland, and the chorizo was unimpressive. The restaurant’s tasty salsas, including a spicy salsa verde, a smoky salsa rojo and an avocado sauce, made the less worthy tacos more lively. Of course, it’s possible that the reason we started losing interest had more to do with having eaten far too much than with the fact that the food could have been better. Most likely, it was a little bit of both.

So did these tacos live up to their name? They were tasty enough, but even in Brooklyn, I’ve eaten tacos more ricos than these.

Piaxtla es México Deli Ricos Tacos y Antojitos Mexicanos
505 51st St.
Brooklyn, NY 11220
718.633.4816

I will admit it: I was wrong. More than once, I have ranted about the lack of authentic regional Mexican food in New York. In a city where Spanish is primarily spoken by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, it’s no surprise. But having lived across the street from an awesome taqueria in Chicago and having done most of our shopping at a well-stocked Mexican grocery store there, I was spoiled. I was also annoyed by the assertions of fellow New Yorkers that the generic gringo-infused Mexican restaurants of Manhattan and Brooklyn were “really good.” But as it turns out, I had simply not been looking in the right place for my tacos, tortas and platillos de carne asada. It was all right under my nose in my latest food neighborhood of choice: Sunset Park.

To be fair, I had known about the Mexican restaurants in Sunset Park for quite some time, but I had never made the move to try them. The New York Times, and a number of people I spoke with talked up Tacos Matamoros, but Empanada Boy tried it and was disappointed. If that was the best Sunset Park had to offer, I feared my standards would never be met. But EB and I decided to try our luck again last weekend. I found a informative article from Serious Eats about a taco crawl on Sunset Park’s 5th Ave. Two spots stood out to me. One ended up being closed when we got there, so we headed to the other: Tulcingo Deli VI. The name itself held promise, and when we walked into the nearly full restaurant and saw we were the only gringos, thing started looking even better. After we were seated at one of the empty tables, the waitress came over to take our order. Every non-native Spanish speaker knows about that awkward moment where you wonder whether the server will be annoyed at you speaking Spanish. Our waitress jumped right over that hurdle by immediately launching into Spanish. Gringos though we might be, we were speaking Spanish that night.

While we waited for our food, we sipped our beers andchowed down on the excellent chips and slightly sweet chunky salsa. We were later brought two other kinds of thin spicier salsa– one made with smoky red peppers and other made with chiles verdes. Both were nuanced and delicious, boding well for the tacos to come. All of a sudden, a group of mariachi musicians clad in white suits studded with silver fastenings stood up and started to sing and play at the front of the restaurant. I am not always a huge fan of mariachi music, but something about the way the band enlivened and excited everyone else in the restaurant (singing and clapping) caused the music to have a similar effect on me.

Just as the female singer launched into a Spanish-accented rendition of “Happy Birthday” (‘appy berthday to jou), our tacos arrived. I had really wanted to try the goat meat barbacoa taco, but they were out, so I ordered chorizo, suadero (wasn’t sure what it was, but was up for adventure) and al pastor. EB ordered al pastor, oreja (ear!) and lengua (tongue). These were big tacos, more sizable than the ones I typically ate in Chicago, wrapped in two layers of fresh corn tortillas. They were brimming with meat and topped with chopped white onions, cilantro and creamy guacamole. The chorizo was chunky, but nicely crisped and infused with chile, garlic, paprika and cumin. After that, the suadero, which turns out to be the soft, smooth breast muscle of a cow, was a little bland, but it did have a slightly gamey, livery flavor, which made it more interesting. When I got to al pastor, I was already feeling pretty full, but this taco brought the flavor back swinging with soft strings of well-spiced pork. I doused mine alternately with the red and green salsa, unable to decide which I preferred. EB’s oreja was tasty, if a bit cartiladgy. I preferred the lengua, which was tender and juicy. The guacamole on top of each taco added a nice touch of cooling lubrication to the mounds of spiced meat. I was in taco heaven!

After we finished eating, the mariachi band, which had been working its way around the room asking for requests in exchange for cash, came to stop at our table. EB sheepishly requested “Guantanamera,” and the band obliged with a particularly rousing version. When they asked for another song, we realized that was about the extent of our Mexican song library. That didn’t stop them; they played the Stevie Wonder song “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” which worked surprisingly well with the mariachi instrumentation. Everyone sang along. We walked out of the restaurant feeling like we had made some friends and found the authentic Mexico flavors we had been missing for so long.

Tulcingo Deli VI
5520 5th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11220
718.439.2896

Last weekend was deceptively cold in New York City, and I had to spend part of it doing our taxes. The only thing that could penetrate these doldrums was a steaming hot bowl of pho. Empanada Boy and I have eaten numerous bowls of pho in Chinatown at Thài Són and places like it, but we wanted to try something new. Apart from banh mi and Italian food, Park Slope’s ethnic offerings tend toward the bland and Americanized. I’ve noticed only one restaurant serving pho, and it was made with chicken. Where are the tendons, tripe and fatty brisket of my fantasies? For the Park Slope resident seeking pho, the answer is found just a few subway stops south on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park— the Chinatown of Brooklyn. After a bit of research, we headed off to Nha Trang Palace, a Vietnamese restaurant whose pho came highly recommended by the crazy chatroom participants at Chowhound.

Based on what I saw in the couple blocks from the N train to the restaurant, Sunset Park’s 8th Avenue had nowhere near the bustle of the Chinatowns of Manhattan or Flushing. People were waiting outside one dingy looking bar for the bus to Atlantic City, and there was a Japanese place that look fairly decent. A number of other shops were closed for the night. The decor inside of Nha Trang looked pretty much like every other pho place I’ve ever been: one mirrored wall, a couple large, round tables and numerous smaller square ones, a sign made of florescent paper with the specials scrawled across it in English and Vietnamese and a few gold-embellished Vietnamese wall hangings. EB and I were seated right away and set about ordering. We started with the Goi Cuon (pardon my lack of Vietnamese orthography), a summer roll, which was supposed to have shrimp and pork wrapped into its rice paper wrapping. We only detected shrimp, but we liked them nonetheless, especially after they were plunged into chunky peanut sauce.

Then we selected from the list of pho combinations. There are 20 in all, including a couple pork, seafood and, yes, chicken options. EB went with no. 3, the Dac Biet, a “special big bowl,” which included “six difference” brisket, navel, frank (?), omosa (tripe), tendon and eye of round. The six difference brisket is brisket cut from different parts, variously emphasizing meat, cartilage, fat, etc. I ordered no. 4, Tai Nam, which on paper had most of the same things, minus the frank, and had plain brisket instead of six difference. As it turned out, both bowls of soup looked and tasted just about the same. That was fine by me (although, I never did figure out what frank is…) because the bowls of aromatic soup laden with cilantro and slices of still-pink brisket was just what the doctor ordered. The tendon, simultaneously chewy and melt-in-your-mouth, is still my favorite element, but I was a big fan of the omosa. I’m not typically a huge tripe person, but this kind is slightly chewy and almost noodle-like in its thinness (see photo). I slurped it up.

While Nha Trang Palace certainly does not offer the world’s best pho, it upholds the standards of the dish quite adequately. I would rate it on par with the aforementioned Thài Són. In fact, when I got home and did some research, I learned that there is a Nha Trang Centre in Chinatown, right near Thài Són. To complicate the comparison even further, a little deeper digging revealed that Nha Trang and Thài Són have the exact same pho menu— I mean copied down to the last word. Is there a company out there that sells pre-made pho menus? How will I ever know which is better? Does it even matter? Pho is such an emotional food that one bowl might taste better depending on the level of my need for it at that very moment. And knowing that respectable pho exists just a few stops down the N line from my house in Brooklyn is fine comfort indeed.

Nha Trang Palace
5906 8th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11220
718.492.8916