Tacos Tacos Tacos

I love tacos. You may think that's perfectly normal, because tacos rule! Just ask President of the United States George Bush. (My name is George W. Bush, and I approve this message. Tacos rule!)
If you aren't all that partial to tacos, you may attribute it to my Texas heritage. But my first taco was at a restaurant in Quincy, Illinois when I was ten years old, in 1974. It was, of all places, an A&W Drive-In. We were eating lunch out, likely after church on Sunday, and we kids liked to go to the drive-in, it was a novel experience since our return from living overseas. I saw tacos on the menu and I asked my Mom what they were. She described them (perhaps from the picture on the menu) and said that they were good, so I ordered them. We pronounced them "tack-o's". I remember that they came with little packets of taco sauce that was other-worldly in its exoticness to a ten-year old midwesterner. I was hooked.

A year later we moved to Dallas, and the local taco purveyor was Taco Bueno. They don't have any Taco Buenos in Houston, but I am writing this from Longview, Texas with several bueno tacos in my belly. When we moved to Houston, the local taqueria was Del Taco. When I went to college in Austin I discovered one of my guilty pleasures, Taco Bell. My UT roommate Scott Francis from Austin High had a friend named Wade (I'm ashamed I can't remember his last name) who was a Taco Bell fiend, and he showed me how to put as many packets of taco sauce on the tacos as possible. The sauce came in little tubs like Whataburger ketchup still comes in. I remember if you had $5 you could go out and drink beer all night and still have enough change to "munch out" at the Taco Bell at 2 AM. I lived down the street from one my junior year, and they knew me by name.

I've become somewhat of a Mexican food snob, I usually won't eat Mexican food in a state that doesn't border Mexico. I like Tex-Mex, but I spent a month in Villa Hermosa and Monterey and I know what authentic Mexican food is like. But I have an addiction to the cheap-o Americanized fast-food crispy beef tacos, like Taco Tico, Taco Time, Taco Johns, Taco Cabana, even Dairy Queen and Jack-in-the-Box tacos, especially if they have packets of taco sauce. I think it's all because of that first A&W taco thirty two years ago.