Meat up at food truck outside Meow Wolf
Family’s taco truck a mainstay at parking lot of midtown attraction
You have probably seen Taqueria Gracias Madre. You may have driven by it at its former spot on Airport Road, but the sign was too small to read. Perhaps you caught it at the Santa Fe Brewing Co. on a Wednesday. Or, if you’ve been to a concert at Meow Wolf, you found it waiting in the parking lot outside for you, an unassuming beacon of steaming delicious late-night, post-drink dinner, glowing under the robot in the night.
Taqueria Gracias Madre is a true family restaurant — the family that owns it is actually inside the truck, making and serving the food: Enrique Salas and his wife, Carmen Martinez, and, depending on whether or not it’s a weekend, their children Edgar and Eric Torres. The madre on the sign refers to Martinez’s own grandmother. It is also a true immigrant success story: Salas moved to Santa Fe 22 years ago and spent almost 20 of those years working in the kitchens of the Plaza Cafe Southside and Coyote Cafe, simultaneously. He was able to buy his own food truck two years ago.
The truck itself is bare-bones simple — orange and blue with phone numbers and a sign on the side, and a menu taped up in the order window. There is nothing advertised and no pictures to let you know what to order or what it offers. You just have to know, and if you know, its quasi-anonymity tells you how good it’s going to be. The coolest nightclubs are the ones that don’t have signs out front. This is something big-city clubbers know. The best bars are at the bottom of stairwells, the best stores don’t advertise, and the best food trucks, sometimes, are the ones that don’t make a fuss about paint. The focus, with Gracias Madre, is on the food.
Like a lot of classic taco trucks, Taqueria Gracias Madre bases a lot of its menu — its tacos and burritos and tortas — on a suite of grilled meats to choose from. These dishes are Mexican rather than New Mexican, and should be familiar flavors to people in the Southwest, but for those who might be unclear and don’t want to hold up the sometimes long lines at the taco truck, here’s a cheat sheet:
Carne asada is thinly sliced grilled beef, usually skirt steak or flank steak, usually marinated in citrus juice.
Al pastor means “of the shepherd” and consists of pork marinated in pineapple or citrus juice, often served with pineapple, a tangy style of cooking originally brought to central Mexico by Lebanese immigrants and therefore reminiscent of shawarma.
Carnitas is pork or beef simmered in its own juices and oil (or lard) for hours, resulting in a tender pulled-pork texture and mild flavor.
Barbacoa is similar to barbecue, meaning beef cooked over an open fire (or sometimes steamed or sometimes grilled in oil). In Mexico, barbacoa is often made with beef cheeks, but Taqueria Gracias Madre uses more conventional cuts for the same result.
You can also get chicken (self-explanatory), tofu or grilled vegetables on your tacos at Gracias Madre, and then, choose-your-own-adventure-style, decide if you want these things in tacos, in a burrito, on a gordita (not quite the fast-food version, these are Mexican flatbreads filled with your meat or veggie of choice), on a quesadilla or in a torta (a Mexican sandwich on a kind of brioche). The taco plate, which is $9, comes with four tacos, and you can in fact get four different tacos, which is the best way to get an idea of how different all these fillings are, hint hint.
And in case you develop a Gracias Madre habit, they have some other items for variety, like a green chile cheeseburger, a hot dog that you can get with pico de gallo, a poblano grilled cheese sandwich or fish tacos with pineapple and salsa. They don’t open until 10 or 11 a.m., but you breakfast-for-lunch people can also get a breakfast burrito or breakfast bowl. According to Edgar Torres, this is also a popular option for people getting out of late-night concerts — 12:30 a.m. is technically morning, after all. Plus there are specials that change out every week.
Taqueria Gracias Madre now has a quasipermanent regular home at Meow Wolf, one of the two food trucks that are there every day (the Kebab Caravan is the other). The scene in the Meow Wolf parking lot might be the closest thing you can regularly get in Santa Fe to something like the Austin, Texas, food truck scene — concerts letting out late at night, sending hungry, slightly tipsy people out into the night beelining for some tasty, reasonably priced deliciousness. Taqueria Gracias Madre is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday (perfect for mid-Cerrillos Road lunch, though they’re closed Tuesdays); 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday (or later, if there’s an event at Meow Wolf ); and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
“They were looking for a food truck to park here, and when they asked my dad if we could come, we were actually going to Santa Fe Brewing Company every week,” explains Edgar Torres. “That first day, we left here at one in the morning.”