RESTAURANTS : Tacos--Keep on Trucking

In tacos as in sex, timing is everything. If you’ve ever eaten street food in Mexico, you’ll know what I mean. On practically every corner in Mexican cities, you’ll find a vendor grilling scraps of beef an ounce or two at a time over a dented charcoal brazier, then folding the meat with minced onion and fiery hot salsa onto tiny, freshly made corn tortillas. You gulp the taco seconds after the steak comes off the grill: desire and fulfillment are concomitant, and for only about a quarter, too.

Even--especially--the busiest stands make each taco from scratch, though the operation is far too labor-intensive to be replicated in a country where everybody reasonably expects to earn more than a couple bucks a shift. North of the border, tacos are as subject to the economies of scale as any other fast-food, and even the smallest taquerias are likely to use pre-heated tortillas, prefab salsa and precooked meat kept warm on a steam table.

And expensive places are hardly better. I’m as much a fan of Tamayo’s octopus tacos as anyone, but by the time they’ve been assembled, made the rounds of the kitchen and traveled the 30-odd yards to the table, they’ve lost much of the elusive taco energy, the chi , the freshness that probably made them so damned good to begin with. Plus, you’ve got to eat them with a fork.

The closest approximation locally of the True Taco Experience, I think, is to be found at good taco trucks, where the ingredients are fresh because the turnover is awesome and there’s little storage space, and where the time elapsed between taco assembly and taco consumption is essentially nil. One friend travels out to a certain East Los Angeles construction site every Wednesday for what he swears are the tastiest brain tacos in the world; another friend, a life-style reporter, likes to do stories about mud wrestlers because she likes to eat carne asada tacos from the truck that parks across the street from the Hollywood nightclub where they work.

My particular favorite tacos come from the truck that spends its weekends parked behind El Taurino, an otherwise undistinguished taco stand on Hoover, a bit south of the dance-club district abutting MacArthur Park. At 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday night, just as the headliners hit the stage at Scream and the last stragglers lurch out of the Seventh Street bars, the large El Taurino parking lot seethes with life. Competing accordion polkas blast from new 4x4s and old Camaros; a Nova, canary yellow, bounces as it exits the lot. Two giggling teen-agers in matching dresses stop by the beverage cart for a tart tamarindo, then disappear in a whoosh of pink tulle. Piles of crumpled napkins and grease-stained paper plates look like snowdrifts in the harsh light.

You fight your way to the front of the throng, and you take a number from a deli-style dispenser attached to the truck. In less time than it takes the guy next to you to drunkenly croon the chorus of some long-forgotten norteno ballad, you hear somebody call out “ cuarante y seis .” You order in broken Spanish, specifying con todo, with everything. (The counterman answers you in unaccented English, and you feel

a little foolish.)

A gleaming column of marinated pork al pastor rotates before a simulated shepherd’s fire, and nubbins of the outside layer of meat caramelize and drip juice. Somebody hacks off a few slivers, slivers you know are meant for your very taco, and rushes to anoint the pork with finely chopped onion, cilantro and a stupendous, dusky hot sauce that perfectly accents the sweetness of the meat. There are also decent stewed tongue, carnitas and carne asada, which are as besides the point as the hot dogs at Tommy’s.

The tacos are all eaten before you even reach your car.