It was the first time I’d tried this combination in a taco, and it was a welcome representation of the region. One of my favorites included boudin folded in with scrambled eggs and cheese. I passed on the Catnip breakfast tacos and opted for more barbecue-focused ones. via McAllen and then Dallas, are, thankfully, done well in Beaumont. Costras, which started as post-nightclub meals in Mexico City before moving into the U.S. “One guy just walked up to me and flat-out asked, ‘Were you high when you create these?’ ” Couzens says with a chuckle. Sometimes patrons who are unfamiliar with the tacos, in which discs of griddled cheese replace the tortillas, are confused. They evolved from the home kitchens of owners Jon Couzens and his father-in-law, James Filipich. The costra tacos, which are smaller but still hefty, are called Catnips. It’s a decadent, tasty, nap-inducing beast. I dove into a Snooze Button, a burrito jammed with two scrambled eggs, hickory-smoked brisket and pulled pork, potatoes, and cheese, and enveloped in a large flour tortilla and a griddled cheese costra. It’s a good place to spread out food for eating. The building is painted an innocuous off-white and includes a bench under a canopy near a door. Inside the auto shop are two classic Mercedes-Benzes parked behind the windowpaned garage doors. Ralatīoudin is also on the menu at James & Jon Barbeque, which opened last year and sits at the corner of an auto mechanic shop’s lot. Rather, the single link is cut on the bias, exposing a loose, rich filling of rice and meat in a shimmery casing with a good snap. I was disappointed to learn it’s not served in a taco. But folks eventually came around to Salazar’s vision.īoudin is everywhere, though, including on the Taste of Texas’s menu. Neither beef cheek nor barbacoa is prevalent in Beaumont, whose Hispanic community clocks in at 18.9 percent of the city’s population. “She wanted to bring them to her family so they could try them.” Such is the transformative power of tacos. “She got eight more to go because that’s how much she loved them,” Salazar says. She accepted and immediately ordered six tacos. “Oh, no, I hate barbacoa,” she told Salazar. One customer, in particular, started off ardently against it. “It took a minute for people to gravitate to that,” he continues. But there were a lot of “no, thank you”s from others. It’s an instant favorite of mine.Īt first, the beef cheek was hard to sell to the restaurant’s customers. Rounding out a trifecta of barbecue tacos is the splendid smoked beef cheek, which glistens with the right amount of fat. The carnitas are also finished with guacamole and pico de gallo. The meat is served on a corn tortilla that skews sweet but holds up to the shredded pork’s weight and sweet-and-salty flavor. The Taste of Texas’s carnitas are smoked over the same pecan–post oak combination before getting a bath in a bubbling pot of rendered lard. Now the pair, along with employee Josh Taylor, have a trailer with a detached offset smoker that burns a mixture of pecan and post oak. That boon allowed him to go all in with the assistance of his son and co-pitmaster, 16-year-old “Little Tony.” The younger Salazar was involved from the start and eager to work. “We became in demand for our catering,” he says. In a bittersweet way, the COVID-19 pandemic helped. Back then, Salazar was a welder, a trade he practiced full time for twenty years and in which he now only dabbles, thanks to the success of his business. It started as a side gig for the now-41-year-old Port Arthur native. Tony Salazar established the Taste of Texas Tex-Mex BBQ in 2017. The two restaurants couldn’t be more different, yet each offers fine examples of the barbecue taco. Pitmasters and taqueros continue to innovate on the art form of the barbecue taco, taking it to the new heights I discovered at James & Jon Barbeque and the Taste of Texas Tex-Mex BBQ, both in Beaumont. Texans put everything in tortillas, so why not pair the state’s signature cuisines for a handheld treat? What once started as a practice at backyard gatherings has evolved to appear on menus of restaurants like Zavala’s Barbecue in Grand Prairie and El Sancho Tex Mex BBQ in Mission. But it is a fact that the consumption of Texas barbecue as tacos is a decades-long tradition. I make this declaration as a bit of a joke, knowing it rankles a certain subsection of smoked-meat aficionados. I don’t think barbecue reaches its full potential until it’s served in a tortilla.
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