San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hardy tacos with soul of an enchilada
Handmade tortillas form solid foundation
Back in July, taco teams from San Antonio and Austin put their pride on the line for the San Antonio Food and Wine Alliance’s Taco Rumble. In a back room at the judges’ table, I got to taste all of them, entries that ranged from old-school carnitas and puffy tacos to ones with a modern twist like a banh mi taco with a jicama tortilla and a birria taco with maguey worm salsa.
Most of them were one or two bites, built for the eye as much as anything else. But then Jeremías Márquez of the San Antonio taco trailer La Generala walked in, a man from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas built like a defensive tackle. La Generala’s taco was a full-size beast, built on a thick corn tortilla patted out by hand, covered in pork rib with green chile gravy and a trio of salsas on the side.
La Generala didn’t win that day, but that costilla taco left an impression worth a follow-up on the trailer that Márquez started a year ago with his mother, Blanca Márquez. Parked next to a tire shop on the West Side, they’re enriching the street taco canon with a blend of respect, creativity and style that’s worth a drive.
Best dish: Jeremías Marquez describes La Generala’s Cholita’s Tacos not as tacos, but rather as Michoacán-style enchiladas, made by spreading mashed potatoes and aromatic housemade chorizo over small corn tortillas, folding them in half and dunking them in chile guajillo, vinaigrette and garlic before frying them in oil just until the edges get crispy. The little
red crescents, five to an order for $12, laid down a smoky, earthy, spicy foundation for a cascade of tangy pickled cabbage,
potatoes and carrots over the top.
Other dishes: La Generala offers five kinds of meat to build
its tacos, quesadillas and other creations: pork al pastor, beef carne asada, stewed pork short ribs called costillas, stewed chicharrón and pork guiso rojo. But the catalyst for La Generala’s menu are thick corn tortillas with a balance of flexibility, chewiness, corn flavor and strength.
They held together everything from a taco filled with pork al pastor as fragrant as a barbecue ($3) to a questaco packed with melted cheese, grilled onions and juicy cuts of beef carne asada that behaved like rib-eye ($5).
That tortilla also provided a resilient base for an oversize quesadilla ($8), one with real heft and volume and not just the toasted pancake grilled cheese to which we’ve grown sadly accustomed. With the option of one or two meats, the quesadilla
made an excellent platform for lush pork chicharrón and pork costilla in tangy tomatillo gravy, the ribs still carrying the bones that gave them so much character in the first place. You’ll have to watch where you bite, but the payoff ’s worth it.
La Generala turns the quesadilla dial all the way up for something it calls the pizzaquesadilla, a $20 leviathan with Frisbee-size corn tortillas top and bottom, served in a pizza box so heavy you could load it on a bench-press bar for a workout. Cut in four pieces with up to four meats and gobs of melted cheese and grilled onions, it offered a tour de force of La Generala’s menu. Along with carne asada, costilla and al pastor, I picked guiso rojo, a spicy stew of pork and chile guajillo that stained my smile as red as cherry Kool-Aid.
That guiso rojo was a cornerstone for the Generala Plate ($12), a fortifying combo that also included costilla, refried beans, chopped nopales and fresh corn tortillas for scooping like a trainyard vagabond (or just a hungry dad at a picnic).
Salsas flashed like bolts of Technicolor lightning throughout the menu: radioactive orange with chile de árbol and tomato, iridescent green with emulsified jalapeño and oil, and a calico salsa tatemada supercharged with serrano chiles.