San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
WHERE TO FIND THE BEST TORTILLAS ON THE WEST SIDE.
The tale of a bass player and a quest to save ‘real music’
San Antonio is a city built on tortillas. The flat, unleavened rounds of delight date at least 10,000 years in this part of the world — well before European explorers arrived. And today, we can find a taco on nearly every corner in the city.
But finding the right tortilla for your tastes can be an overwhelming challenge. There are scores of tortillerías across the city, and it’s hard to know where to start. So we’ll be reporting periodically on where the best tortillas can be found in each part of town.
This week we’ve done the legwork to scout out a half-dozen businesses on San Antonio’s West Side that all make solid, reliable tortillas — both corn and flour — and found distinct reasons to love each.
The next time you’re planning a tortilla-based meal, consider giving any of the following businesses a try.
La Amistad Tortillería: If you’re a fan of thick, chubby corn tortillas, this is the place for you. Priced at $1.25 per dozen, these were the best corn tortillas we found during our survey of the West Side.
They’re a little on the small side and irregular in shape, with most slightly stretched into ovals measuring about 6 inches on the long end. The extra thickness in these tortillas gave each bite significant substance, heft and texture with a firm, toasty exterior and tender, fluffy interior.
La Amistad’s flour tortillas
($3.50 per dozen) were also a delight. They came hot off the press and immediately poofed up into billowing pillows when placed on a heated comal at home.
This business has been serving San Antonio for more than 20 years, and understandably so.
2754 Culebra Road, 210-4350561, Facebook: La Amistad Tortilleria
Las Conchas Panadería & Tortillería:
This feels like the big-time tortilla factory it is when you walk through the door. The bustling, cavernous space cranks out countless pounds of corn tortillas, with giant mounds of masa on several work surfaces quickly getting transformed into stacks of paper-wrapped tortillas.
The corn tortillas ($1.30 per pound) are slightly smaller than average at roughly 5 inches in diameter. They’re nicely toasted with a big masa aroma.
Las Conchas also had one of the West Side’s better flour tortillas ($2.39 per dozen) with a touch more salt than most and a perfect, tender chew.
1125 S. General McMullen Drive, 210-994-8832, no web presence
Los Angeles Tortillería, Restaurant & Bakery: You’ll have to fight for a parking spot at this bustling tortillería with a large attached restaurant, but it’s worth the wait. The first thing you’ll see inside is a crew of employees buzzing around massive tortilla ovens behind the counter.
The corn tortillas they’re producing ($2.50 for a roughly 2-pound bundle) were the most deeply browned we tried and have a pleasingly toasty aroma as result.
The flour tortillas at Los Angeles ($2.50 per dozen) are a standout, hugely flavorful with plenty of fat and salt in every bite. The tostadas ($3.25 per package) are no slouches, either. They’re almost perfectly flat and very sturdy.
Bonus: This spot has a huge selection of Mexican pastries. Be sure to grab a few conchas with your tortillas.
300 N. Zarzamora St., 210-4352400, Facebook: @LosAngelesTortilleriaWestSide
Tortillería La Grande: With several locations across the city, this operation is cooking up the platonic tortilla ideal. La Grande’s corn tortillas ($1.50 per pound) are remarkably consistent in size and thickness.
They’re also the most lightly cooked corn tortillas we found, with little if any browning on either side. They remained very soft and pliant when heated.
La Grande’s flour tortillas ($2 for 10) were similar to the corn tortillas in having a uniform, consistent shape and were cooked through with very little browning.
Expect to jockey for a parking spot. La Grande also has a small restaurant attached and does steady business serving up breakfast tacos, barbacoa and menudo, among other San Antonio favorites.
243 Castroville Road, 210-4329888,
no web presence
Tortillería La Milpa: It’s hard to miss this operation nestled in San Antonio’s Deco District. You won’t see it from its hiding spot around the corner of a building along Fredericksburg Road, but you’ll sure smell it. A gust of toasty wheat goodness greets you at the door with a busy crew placing fresh flour tortillas over large drying boxes fixed with fans to keep the air circulating.
The corn tortillas here ($2.50 per 2-pound bundle) are solid, reliable performers with just enough thickness to hold just about any kind of payload you might want to stuff inside. But the real stars here is the flour tortillas ($2.50 per dozen), including hard-to-find freshly made whole wheat flour tortillas. The whole wheat tortillas were remarkably tender and aromatic, far superior to the tough, dry and boring variety found at the supermarket.
1933 Fredericksburg Road, 210-447-7053, Facebook: La milpa,Tortilleria, taquería y gorditas.
Tortillería Valeria: This newcomer opened about four months ago, and it’s a welcome addition to the city’s tortilla landscape. Valeria is a rare case, selling yellow corn tortillas in addition to white corn tortillas (both $2.50 per pound). Those yellow corn rounds of goodness are incredibly fragrant and among the most memorable you’ll find on the West Side.
Valeria also makes flour tortillas, but availability can be limited as they’re one of the few places in town that roll them out by hand and may be sold out. What you definitely won’t want to miss is the deeply caramelized tostadas ($3.50 per package) made from the white corn tortillas. They’re delightfully light and flaky with an irresistibly deep flavor.
1650 W. Woodlawn Ave., 210908-9199, Facebook: Tortilleria Valeria
Wise improvising musicians sometimes impart wisdom by informing you that you already have that wisdom. They are used to creating a musical work without revision, and so they are comfortable with the notion that an answer can precede a question. The saxophonist Wayne Shorter, for example, once told me that a better question than, “What has life taught you?” is, “What can you teach life?”
Victor L. Wooten is this sort of musician. A founding member of the jazz-bluegrass group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, he is a superb bassist, a high practitioner of technique, tone and feel. Over the past few decades, he has also been known as an educator, starting (with his wife, Holly) the Victor Wooten Center for Music and Nature camp in Tennessee. He is also a writer. His first book, “The Music Lesson,” published in 2006, is narrated by a young bass player at a creative impasse — skilled but easily frustrated, and more easily impressed. He wakes from a nap to find a tall man in his living room. The man’s name is Michael. Eventually, we learn that the student’s name is Victor. Michael will become Victor’s mentor in music.
Victor didn’t invite Michael. Or did he? “I teach nothing,” Michael proclaims in that book’s early pages, “because there is nothing to be taught. You already know everything you need to know, but you asked me to come, so here I am.” Still, the core of “The Music Lesson” proceeds systematically. Michael breaks down music into 10 elements, which serve as the basis for each chapter. These include notes (which he finds “overrated”), dynamics and phrasing, but also space — the space between the notes — and listening.
The book’s sequel, “The Spirit of Music,” is a kind of action-adventure fable involving Victor, Michael and a number of other friends and teachers. There is Ali, a former minister from a “small African village” where he learned from an elite group called the Elders of Higher Learning; Seiko, a drummer from Japan who turned away from Taiko drumming to learn rock ’n’ roll; Uncle Clyde, who chose to live under a bridge in Nashville “to do his work undetected and unnoticed”; and Victor’s student, Jonathan, with whom Victor spends a few good pages early in the book breaking down Willie Weeks’ bass solo on “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything),” from the Donny Hathaway “Live” album.
Victor and his friends aren’t necessarily all virtuosos. What they have in common is that they perceive, feel and communicate through music. They are in tune with what Ali defines as a more African than European attitude toward playing music, prioritizing the why of it before the what of it. “Anyone can play ’cause everyone have Music inside,” Ali explains to Victor, “but with the Elders, you must show your calling before they take you further. If they accept you — if Music accept you — then you learn true power.”
Here is the premise: Music — always capitalized and given feminine pronouns, and understood as a living entity — is sick and may be dying.
Of what? Wooten doesn’t really specify. This is not that kind of book. What kind of book is it? It’s a bit like Carlos Castaneda’s shamanist tales, a bit like tween fiction, a bit like websites on, say, sonic healing through principles of sacred geometry and — at its best — an enactment of epiphanies told in the ping-pong dialogue of its predecessor.
Victor and his crew travel from Virginia to Nashville, evading and finally facing down a sinister force of silent enemies called the Phasers. The Phasers wear dark glasses and dark suits and have the power to render music inaudible, in the manner of noise-canceling headphones. In one of many mini-lessons throughout the book, Michael remarks that “Music brings people together, not only to feel, but to agree on what we feel.” This is why the Phasers must destroy it.
But the Phasers must be working for someone, right? Or perhaps they represent a system or process — capitalism? Digitization? Algorithms?
Again, this is not that kind of book because Wooten is not that kind of writer. Mostly (but not entirely) directed toward musicians, it’s a book that stands happily against traditional music pedagogy and canned notions of achievement. This is to its great credit. Your happiness as a reader will depend on how open you are to insights that recognize no coincidences, some of them from the crystal-indigo-rainbow file, as well as proposed, though not explained, secret-knowledge theories. If the metafictional Victor Wooten tends toward these theories, Ali tends toward them even more: For instance, he explains that a guitar is female because of its “head, neck, curves, slim waist, and a womb in the middle where vibrations grow” — and therefore, Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” is about his guitar. Or that the sixth note of the solfège scale is “la,” and the sixth note of the C major scale is A — so a-la — Allah!
Your happiness as a reader may also depend on how wary you are when told that a cherished belief system is under secret attack, and around the phrases “real musicians” and “real music,” which come up just enough for a reader to suspect Wooten feels that some of the world’s music is on the side of the Phasers. Which music? He doesn’t tell — but presumably Willie Weeks is among the good guys, as is Hendrix, and Wooten’s real-life cohort, and the visiting faculty at his music camps, who tend, like Wooten, to fall along the jazz-country-virtuoso spectrum. By the logic of this book, a lot of music made without “real” instruments — a lot of the music in the world right now, and some of the best — may start to look suspect. That’s too bad. Wooten is an includer, not a delimiter; he’s better at holistic teaching than veiled polemic.