Save Our Taco Trucks

dell'anima - 2 stars
38 8th Ave, New York, NY

Spice Market - 2 stars
403 W 13th St, New York, NY

A food pushcart - 0 stars
W 28th St, New York, NY

Those who do not have their finger perpetually on the pulse of the Zeitgeist may not realize the epic cultural battle going on today. Actually, I didn't realize it either until my friend Viviane called attention to it on her Facebook page: the epic battle for the taco truck being waged in Los Angeles, which was featured in a New York Times article a few days ago and even made NPR's Morning Edition yesterday. NPR played it as a battle between restaurant-owning Mexicans and taco truck-owning Mexicans, but Viviane explained that it was a generational thing - a first generation of now-established immigrants (who own restaurants) trying to use their organizations and political power to beat back a newer generation of less-established immigrants (who own taco trucks, and eat at taco trucks because they don't have much money).

My only horse in this race is that I used to really like tacos and I really like eating cheap food from street vendors. I didn't discover what for me is a "real" taco until we founded my company on the fringe of Menlo Park between 101 and the bay, which is basically East Palo Alto, where the taquerias have Mexican music in the jukeboxes and the tacos are just slightly charred beef, onions, cilantro, hot sauce, and lime juice on a small, round corn tortilla. Those tacos, along with New York City pushcart hot dogs (with ketchup and onions) and McDonald's hamburgers, are probably the thing I miss most about being a vegetarian.

Viviane also told me that there are now taco trucks in Manhattan, which when I lived there was much more Puerto Rican, Dominican, and even Cuban than Mexican. And sure enough, I passed a taco truck on 28th St. this morning leaving my hotel. But sadly enough, there was nothing I could eat there. Instead, I did the next best thing; I got a falafel sandwich from another pushcart, also on 28th St., but it was, sadly, not very good - the falafel was dry and uninteresting, the bread too soft and bland, the fillings limited to uninspired lettuce and tomato - nothing like the falafel masterpieces of the Marais in Paris, and not even as good as the falafel place in my town, which is owned and run by Latinos. I'm sure if I had ordered the chicken kebabs, or a hot dog, it would have gotten at least 2 stars.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the New York taco truck is the New York trendy specialty cocktail, which can cost as much as a meal for four at the aforementioned truck and which was the theme of the previous evening. Viviane and I started out with sidecars and three kinds of bruschetta (chickpeas, avocados, and ricotta - I liked the avocados the best, but they were all good, and the bread itself was close to perfect) at dell'anima, and took a stroll over to Spice Market for dinner, in what is affectionately known as the meat-packing district but should really be known as The Most Self-Consciously Trendy Block in the World, following my friend Marcus's rule that any superlative relative to New York applies, by extension, to the whole world. I had a ginger margarita (like a margarita, but with a stinging layer of ginger that lingered in the aftertaste) and she had a kumquat mojito (a little sweet, and in my opinion not as good as a classic mojito, which is one of my favorite cocktails) in the lush "orientalist post-colonial" atmosphere - her description, but she is a professor who has studied these things. Oh, and we had food, too, which was good, but Spice Market (by the way, the 42nd-best restaurant in New York according to New York Magazine), like Jean-Georges Vongerichten's other restaurants, is a place where it pays to eat animals.

In the early 1990s before I actually lived in Manhattan, I always wanted to live in the West Village, but unfortunately as I've made more money the price of actually living in the West Village has increased proportionately, so I've finally resigned myself to being a country mouse. But even though we have safe streets and small-town values out here in rural America, it's pretty hard to find a good cocktail.