Daily Meal’s 35 Best Tacos in America feature came out Monday and it listed El Real’s Chicken Puffy Taco as #7 in the nation. It’s a little embarrassing to be rated higher than Henry’s Puffy Tacos in San Antonio, the taco that we modeled ours on, but we aren’t complaining.
Here’s what they had to say:
7) El Real Tex-Mex Café, Houston: Chicken Puffy Taco
Located inside a restored theater in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, El Real serves Tex-Mex classics like chile con carne, nachos, and Frito pie, but we recommend you head directly for the San Antonio Puffy Taco Plate, with smoked chicken. The deep-fried shell gets a smear of refried beans, then the smoked chicken (which is smoked whole before being shredded) is liberally applied. Lettuce and tomato come on top, and it’s a taco you’re not likely to forget any time soon.
Austinite here. I’d rank you over Torchy’s any day of the week, and (since I go to Santa Fe a lot) also definitely over The Shed.
I was reading your book “The Texas Cowboy Cookbook” expecting it to be a cookbook. Instead, it seems to mingle recipes with lots of PC, which, in my view, is not the best way to cook. You wrote that “modern scholars” have been challenging the old view of cowboys. I am not a scholar or historian; I have read thousands of books for the pleasure of reading—the most varied subjects, from fiction to non-fiction. Also I always took cowboy movies to be mostly fiction—so did everybody I know. Yet, I find hard to believe that someone who wrote an account on cowboys in 1920 would be less accurate than the new view of “modern scholars” on the subject (i.e., historical revisionism). And to say that women played “major roles” seems to me to play into the politically correct idea that women and men are alike. I am pretty sure cowgirls were aware of their physical strength—or lack of, in this case, which certainly lead them to value men: they knew women could never be as physically strong as a man. (Well, unless you have a revolver handy, that is!) And I say: vive la différence!
Since you labeled your mother a religious Conservative, I feel free to label you an atheist Liberal—if I missed your self-styling throughout the book, forgive me, but I doubt I could change my view after your comments on Brokeback Mountain. You inferred your mother was wrong simply because “She didn’t see it,” yet, her explanation for not watching it sounded perfectly rational and logical to me: BM was indeed “another attempt by Hollywood to advance its morally bankrupt Liberal agenda.” (And by the way, shame on you for your lack of respect for your mother!)
Considering the insignificant number of homosexuals in this country, the frequency in which Hollywood portrays them is inversely related to reality. If this doesn’t clearly denote an agenda, I wonder what else it could mean…
Maybe it is because when my Brazilian family lived in California, my 6 year-old brother took pictures with Roy Rogers and Trigger, but I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually. I really like those sequined shirts…