Alice Shin

Foodie on Duty Finds Great Mexican Food

Mexican food is hard to find in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Good Mexican food is even harder. There is a tendency to either accommodate the vegan tastes of a certain type of Williamsburger by investing in soy-based faux cheese and sour cream or to throw on some dried-out niblets of meat with lettuce and salsa on a factory-produced corn tortilla and calling it a taco.

The mark of a decent burrito will normally be 1 or 2 tasty elements while every other part of the tortilla-clothed sack leaves something to be desired. There also tends to be a one-note flavor. What I mean by that is that the last bite will taste just as great as the first, but it will also taste exactly the same of the first bite as well. It’s where the potency of the margarita or the number of Coronas you empty into your gullet determines just how tasty those burritos and enchiladas are. It’s food that’s always trying to taste Mexican, but never being quite able to the grade.
That is, until now. Yes, this So-Cal taco snob has found a spot that actually produces decently delicious Mexican food. Granted, the prices are a stab steeper than what I am used to paying on Olympic and La Brea – $3.75 per taco, instead of $1.25 – but the taste makes up for all the mediocre tacos I’ve been half-heartedly grazing on in NYC.

I started with a plate of sopes – 2 crispy griddled masa corn cakes that are frosted in refried beans and smothered in a mole-thick chile sauce, cabbage, crema, chile verde and cotija cheese. While $6.50 is pricey for a couple of sopes, the dish itself could have subbed as a meal. The corn cakes are little thinner than what I’m used to, about as thick as two corn tortillas pressed together, and fried to a fresh crisp. The flavor of the corn, and not the grease, really comes through. The sauce is thick and rich, the perfect playmate for the salty snowfall of cotija cheese. Shredded shards of cabbage add a nice vegetable-based crunch to the fried crispiness of the corn cake, which develops a slight chew by the time it soaks in all that crema and sauce. If you want hangover food that actually tastes good, I’d opt for the sopes for brunch.

Next, I tackled the tacos con nopalitos – which are chilled and marinated strips of baby cactus. At first I balked at the price, but the size of the taco almost makes up for it. The corn tortilla itself – you only get one – is about 1.5 times the size of a tortilla one would normally get at one’s favorite taco truck. This is because, unlike most taquerias, Taco Chulo actually makes its own corn tortillas in-house. The result is a moister, more pliant and sturdy corn tortilla that resists cracking until it’s been sitting too long in its own taco juices.

Inside my nopalitos taco were the strips of baby cactus, pico de gallo, roasted red peppers, garlic and grilled onions. The sharp, pickled bite of the nopalitos and the savory taste of the peppers almost had me forgetting that this taco was meat-free. Who knew that the best taco I tasted in New York thus far would be meatless?

My roomie ordered the chorizo burrito, a heavy tortilla sack of refried beans, roasted potatoes, lettuce, cilantro, onion, radish and pico de gallo. The chorizo perfumed the burrito with its spicy qualities and its signature fragrant, orange grease. I dare anyone to try this burrito and call it tasteless. To be honest, I thought the roasted potatoes, as a bland vegetable, would be overpowered by the chorizo – but I was proven to be very, very wrong. And though its flour tortilla was not made in-house, it was a softly pliant and pleasant tortilla, nonetheless.

For dessert, since they were out of the chocolate and coconut tamales, I went for a non-Mexican-themed treat of key lime pie. The pie came with an extra-thick graham cracker crust and was drizzled in tequila-infused syrup. A soft splooge of whipped cream was plopped on top. Syrup or no syrup, this was the best damn slice of key lime pie I’ve had in my life (just don’t tell Steve in Red Hook.) Because the buttery sweet crust was so thick, the tang of the lime custard never took over the entire dessert. The custard itself was thick, silky and screaming with sweet and sour limes.

So if you’re looking for great Mexican food in Brooklyn, there is hope, my friends – and that hope resides at 318 Grand Street, between Havemeyer and Marcy.