The best mortadella I’ve ever had. Here’s where to find it in Bologna.

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Above: Dario Barbieri’s take on mortadella blew my mind — and my palate — the weekend before last in Bologna. The mortadella is on the right of the cutting board.

Every time Slow Food U. asks me to come teach in Piedmont, my Italian crew and I plan at least one night of enogastronomic adventure.

For this last stint in early October, we headed to Emilia-Romagna where our first stop was the legendary Dario Barbieri’s wine bar Zampa in the city of Bologna.

Dario, whose wine program features labels from both Paolo Cantele and Giovanni Arcari (my southern and northern Italian bromances, respectively), had asked us to come on the later side that Saturday night so that we could all sit, visit, and discuss the finer points — we later learned — of mortadella.

For anyone not familiar with mortadella and more specifically Mortadella Bologna, it’s a sausage made from finely ground pork and pork fat. See the Wiki entry for some useful background info on mortadella. But see also this excellent post by WebFoodCulture.com. And also the Mortadella Bologna PGI consortium’s not-so-easy-to-find website.

Don’t confuse it with other types of mortadella made in other parts of Italy, sometimes not from pork.

Above: marinated fresh anchovies followed our salumi tasting that evening. Bologna and Emilia in general has some of the best bread I’ve ever had in Italy.

It has been considered one of the greatest delicacies of Europe since the 17th century and beyond. Even French cookery books from the pre-modern era describe with great reverence the then highly advanced techniques for making charcuterie in the city of Bologna (the French also loved and learned a lot from Milanese pastry production).

Mortadella is also the inspiration for a poor imitation that we call “bologna” or “baloney” (as in Oscar Myer; but we will leave Upton Sinclair out of this).

As Dario explained that evening, there are “three or so” classic recipes that are still being used by artisanal mortadella producers in Bologna today. They are all excellent, he told us.

Above: the crunchy oven-fired thyme sprinkled on the pâté took it over the top.

But in order to become their clients, he said, you have to be willing to take only one mortadella at a time. The key, he emphasized with his rich baritone, is to consume the mortadella immediately, within a few days after it was produced. Otherwise, it loses the richness of its flavor and delicacy of its texture.

As someone who has been obsessed with mortadella since I first traveled to Italy in the late 1980s, I am here to tell you, people, this was absolutely the best mortadella I have ever tasted.

With great pride, Dario told us the story of Ennio Pasquini, one of the great mortadella craftspeople of our time. He recently passed away and his family is now arduously defending his legacy from those who would cash in on his namesake. For those who read Italian, click on the image below to read their “open letter” to the world of mortadella lovers. Pasquini was Dario’s “mortadella mentor,” as it were. He had refused to sell Dario his sausages until Dario agreed to take only small quantities each week.

Our literally five-hour tasting with Dario was one of the greatest culinary experiences of 2021 for me. I highly recommend his wonderful wine bar Zampa in Bologna (no website, at least that I can find).

How to make eggplant parmigiana (and a short treatise on the origin of the dish).

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One of the things that makes melanzane alla parmigiana such a fascinating dish is that it is arguably Italy’s only truly national recipe beyond spaghetti al pomodoro (spaghetti with tomato sauce).

Yes, you can order pesto at a restaurant in Rome. Yes, you can choose your own style of pizza in Barbaresco. But no savvy, self-respecting italophile gastronome would ever indulge in such a transgression of the Italian culinary canon.

Eggplant alla parmigiana — aka eggplant parmigiana (without the articulated preposition), eggplant parmesan, or eggplant parm — is a dish that can generally be found in homes (although not in restaurants) throughout the country.

As the name reveals, it incorporates what many consider the greatest “food product” of all time: Parmigiano Reggiano, the famed friable cow’s milk cheese from Parma in Emilia (parmigiana is the demonym when used in reference to gastronomy; parmense is the city’s ethnonym).

The name doesn’t reveal however the dish’s connection to Sicily where eggplants were first consumed in Italy thanks to the island’s connection to the Arab and — some will be surprised to learn — to the Jewish world (Artusi, the still highly influential 19th-century cookery book writer from Romagna, writes about how only Jews in Italy ate eggplant at the time; the nightshade was believed to cause insanity but as Artusi points out with an antisemitic microaggression that I will forgive him, Jews have a “good nose” for great food).

To the northern cultural influence of Parma and the southern cultural legacy of Sicily, we must add yet another southern element: mozzarella. A great melanzane alla parmigiana is defined in part by its diversity of texture. The plastic cheese provides a sine qua non light and moreish chewiness to the best expressions of this timeworn and now international recipe.

Parmesan, Neapolitan, and Sicilian traditiones coquinariae combine to create a pan-Italian dish that I have enjoyed as far south as Lecce and as far north as Belluno.

To make a great melanzane alla parmigiana, the home cook must be patient. In the case of our family, the dish must be preceded by a tomato sauce prepared the night before to dress pasta. It’s that leftover sauce, with all of its flavors now perfectly fused and slightly desiccated, that really can take the recipe over the top.

Another important element is the olive oil you use — for both frying the eggplant rounds and greasing the pan. High-quality olive oil makes a marked difference in dishes like this.

For the recipe below, I haven’t included exact quantities. But that shouldn’t be a hindrance in making the dish the way we like it at our house. Years of translating and editing Italian recipes has taught me that the Italian indication quanto basta, an expression rendered in English as needed, is a good guide to all things in life. You just enough of each ingredient to achieve the desired result.

Melanzane alla Parmigiana
eggplant alla parmigiana

Ingredients:

extra-virgin olive oil
garlic, peeled
tomato purée (passata)
white wine
kosher salt
freshly cracked pepper
chili flakes
basil leaves (optional)
eggplant (ideally globe or graffiti), sliced into thin rounds
mozzarella, sliced
Parmigiano Reggiano, freshly grated

Make the sauce:

Over low flame, gently heat the olive oil in a large pot, add the garlic and sauté but do not brown. Just as the garlic begins to turn golden in color, add the tomato purée and bring to a gentle simmer. Add the wine and when the alcohol has evaporated, season with salt, pepper, and chili flakes to taste. Simmer slowly for roughly 30 minutes and as soon as you remove the pot from heat, add 1 or 2 basil leaves (optional). Cool and reserve, ideally overnight, covered on the stovetop (not in the refrigerator). Remove garlic cloves and basil.

Purge the eggplant:

Generously season the eggplant rounds with kosher salt. Transfer to a colander and reserve for at least 30 minutes until the eggplant purges its bitter liquid. (This is an extremely important step.) Use a clean kitchen towel to absorb any excess liquid and reserve the rounds.

Fry the eggplant:

Heat a generous amount of olive oil (roughly 5-6 teeming tablespoons or as needed) to a broad frying pan over medium flame. Once the oil has heated through, add the eggplant rounds. Turn them once they have lightly browned on one side. Once they have browned on both sides, remove and distribute over a clean kitchen towel to remove any excess oil. (Using high-quality olive oil for frying the eggplant will make this dish even more tasty.)

Assemble the dish:

Grease an oven-ready casserole dish with olive oil. Add the eggplant rounds. Top with the sliced mozzarella. Smother with tomato sauce and top generously with the grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Fire the dish in a pre-heated oven at 350° F. for 30 minutes or until a golden brown crust forms. Remove from oven and cool.

At our house, eggplant alla parmigiana is either reheated to be served at dinner or served room temperature for lunch or for a late afternoon snack. One of my favorite ways to serve it is as a sandwich on a favorite crusty bread. In my experience, letting it cool (and then reheating it) is key.

Taste with Alice Feiring (and me) at the Boulder Burgundy Festival 10/22.

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Above: Alice (right) and Tracie in Paris in 2009. (Errata corrige: the photo was actually taken at Fonda San Miguel in 2010 when Alice came to see us in Austin; the photo below is from the France trip.)

One of the most rewarding things about my teaching gig at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont has been watching my students’ eyes light up as they discover the work of Alice Feiring. Year after year, it’s happened every time we crack open her first book, The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization (Harcourt 2008).

Teaching her first book over the course of the last six years has revealed how well the work has aged. At the time of its hardback release, her pioneering approach to wine writing was viewed by some as heretical and irrelevant to the wine discourse and dialectic. But more than 13 years later, it has proved to be a guiding and shining light to a new generation of wine writers who have eagerly embraced her style — and her wisdom.

Above: another shot from our super fun visit in Paris while I was on tour with Nous Non Plus and Tracie and I had just started dating.

Not only did she introduce a highly personal and even intimate, some would say, model of wine writing. (Her book could have been gleaned from the New Yorker “personal history” rubric.) But she also provoked — like a tirage — a closer look at wine’s intrinsic moral and ethical valence. She was certainly not the first to ask not only whether a wine was good or bad in terms of its quality and reflection of tradition. But she was among the first to inspire wine lovers to consider whether a wine was good or evil.

Evil is a strong word but it applies here, in my view. Her conviction and ideals often inspired a quasi-bellicose tone in her diegesis. After all, her debut book, the one that put her on the wine world map, was called “Battle” (to this day, her shorthand for the tome is “Battle”).

No high-profile wine writer before her had brought such a May 1968 sensibility to the world of enography. In many ways, she is the Susan Sontag of her generation: someone whom the critical theorist and activist would have said lives their life true to their ideals.

I couldn’t be more thrilled that Alice will be presenting an Aligoté seminar and tasting this year at the Boulder Burgundy Festival on Friday, October 22. I’m not a panelist or presenter at the festival but I’ll be returning to Colorado again this year as the festival’s in-house blogger and media consultant, a gig that I’ve been doing for nearly 10 years now.

Click here for details. And if you do make it out to hers or any of the other events, I’ll look forward to tasting with you!

War in Prosecco? New York Times, give me a break!

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Elephantem ex musca facere…

Astonishing and astonishingly sensational were the first words that came to mind after reading Jason Horowitz’s story for the New York Times late last week, “A Battle of the Bubbles: War Comes to the Prosecco Hills” (October 1, 2021).

Clickbait was the other.

Yes, it’s true that last month the EU agreed to hear Croatia’s case that its winemakers should be allowed to label their Prošek, a dried-grape wine made in extremely small quantities, as an officially recognized appellation.

The issue has been fermenting (excuse the pun) since July of this year. But the EU’s nod to let the case move forward has unleashed a river of “the sky is on fire” posts across the internets.

Although the Italians and the Prosecchisti would have preferred that the EU decline to hear the case, there is still little chance that the Croatians will prevail.

As top Italian wine trade observer Maurizio Gily noted earlier this year, the Italians began exporting Prosecco many decades ago, long before anyone was trying to ship Prošek abroad. This entitles them to the trademark in the market.

What is more likely to happen is that the EU will strike a deal similar to the one the Italians obtained when the lost their case to the Hungarians back in 2009. At issue was the supposed confusion between wines labeled as (and made from) Tocai in Friuli and the Hungarians’ claim to the trademark for the homonymous wine Tokaji. The Italians lost. As a result, wines labeled as Tocai can only be sold in Italy. In order to ship their wines abroad, the Friulians changed the grape name to Friulano.

And guest what? Sales actually grew after the change!

Prosecco growers, producers, and bottlers (and remember, bottlers are the biggest players here, not the growers or the producers), have had to contend with “Italian sounding” imitators for years now. The worst offenders are arguably the Australians who make tank-method wines from Glera (the main grape used in Prosecco in Italy) and label and sell them as Prosecco in Australia.

The Prosecchisti can’t do anything about it (although they have tried) because EU has no binding agreement with Australian regarding trademark protections for wine and food products. (To this day, btw, Californians still label and sell wines as “Champagne,” “Lambrusco,” and even “Brunello.”)

In the light of the above, it’s hardly a “war” or “battle” going on in Proseccoland. It’s just EU bureaucracy winding its way through the block’s byzantine legal process.

It’s also remarkable that Horowitz, a writer I otherwise admire greatly, only got quotes from a few of the (not so) major players (none of whom have a big footprint in the U.S. where his readers live). Where was Nino Franco? Where was Matteo Lunelli and Bisol? Where was Mionetto? It seems that he only spoke to a few bottlers. Where was Santa Margherita? Where was Cupcake, for that matter?

And what about the myriad family growers and family grower/winemakers? Where was their voice?

As for his claim that there is a serious discussion about creating a new name for Prosecco, I can only say, give me a break. That’s simply not going to happen, at least not in our lifetime.

I have so much to tell from my recent trip to Italy (just got back last night). Stay tuned for that. But thank you for letting me get that off my chest in the meantime!

Top image via the Gambero Rosso forum. 

A Nebbiolo by a lesser god (and checking in with Slow Food USA).

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Here in Piedmont where I’ve been teaching at Slow Food U this week, people drink red wine. When you talk to the old timers, they’ll tell you that in their day, there was no white wine to drink here. No Timorasso, no Anascetta, and maybe just a little Arneis (that no one really cared about back then). Just Barbera, Dolcetto, and the occasional Nebbiolo.

So it was only natural that Slow Wine guide editor-in-chief, a Piedmontese through and through, would order a bottle of red wine when he, his wonderful family, and I sat down for an aperitivo at everyone’s favorite natural wine bar Zero in the town of Bra where most of the students live and where I stay in hotel during my teaching gig.

His selection was a Roero Rosso by progressive grower and producer Alberto Oggero, a 100-percent Nebbiolo he calls “SANDRO D’PINDETA.”

Drinking this deliciously fresh wine and noshing on salumi and cheeses, I couldn’t help but think of how Roero Nebbiolo is a category (nearly) entirely ignored by my American colleagues. Even as Alto Piemonte producers and their Nebbiolo have become the new stars of the überhipster American wine scene, it remains immensely challenging to find wines like these — Nebbiolo by a lesser god, as it were — in our market. Historically there have been one or maybe two producers of Roero-grown Nebbiolo that have made inroads in the U.S. But the category was never wholly embraced. It’s time to rethink that, in my opinion.

The wine was gorgeous, with classically sweet tannins, a hallmark of great Nebbiolo. Not prohibitively priced and ready to drink right out of the bottle, it only got better as we three adults finished it. What a great wine and value.

It was wonderful to see Giancarlo and his family (they have two daughters just like Tracie and me and the girls enjoyed visiting with them immensely we we were all here in 2018).

Back in 2016, he asked me to give him a hand in launching the Slow Wine Guide USA. For three years, he and I traveled throughout California and Oregon. We started with 70 California producers. And that number had tripled by the time, three years later, that I retired as the U.S. coordinator.

Today, he told me, they have greatly expanded their California and Oregon coverage and have added other states as well. I couldn’t be more proud to have been part of the launch. And while I don’t envy him all the headaches and heartaches that come with editing a guide, I miss our epic trips and tastings.

He said that while the Slow Wine tour was cancelled this fall (for reasons we all know too well), he plans to bring the winemakers to the U.S. in early 2022, including a stop in Austin. I’m looking forward to taking him out to a favorite barbecue and a night at the Continental Club where we first really connected when I took him to see a Dale Watson concert.

Grande Giancarlo! I’m so glad we’re friends and I’m so proud to have been a part of the Slow Wine launch in the U.S.

Exploring another passion: Italian cinema. Dinner and an Italian Movie with me in Houston, Wednesday 10/13.

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Even though our family was as stressed and frightened as any other during the lockdowns this year and last, my work leading virtual wine dinners at Roma restaurant in Houston turned out to be one of the most compelling and rewarding experiences of my career. Especially in the early months, those events were the only way we could keep the restaurant running and feed our families — including my own. And they were also a medium by which we could stay connected with friends and fellow Italian food and wine lovers.

Hearing people tell me, repeatedly, that the events were “what kept us sane” during the peak months of the health crisis has given me a renewed sense of purpose in my life’s enogastronomic mission. Food and wine, we reaffirmed, has a unique power to nourish and heal.

But those dinners and the wines we selected for them were also what led Roma’s owner Shanon Scott to appoint me as the restaurant’s wine director in the late spring of this year.

We began work in May and by June we were already producing a mix of in-person and virtual events for our guests. Since that time, we’ve also introduced a new virtual/in-person hybrid event that people can join from home or at the restaurant. And we even had a winemaker from Italy join via Zoom (there are more events like this in the works).

But on Wednesday, October 13, we are going to launch an entirely new format: “Dinner and an Italian Movie.”

I first studied Italian cinema at U.C.L.A. as an undergraduate with Marga Cottino-Jones, one of the leading American-based scholars of Italian film at the time. Later during my years as a graduate student there, I was selected to be the Italian department’s representative at a now landmark seminar and series of lectures on and screenings of Pasolini’s cinematic oeuvre. The professor was Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, who, among other things, was a translator of Antonio Gramsci’s “prison letters.” He had also met Pasolini and interviewed him in his home in Rome (in EUR).

I was hooked.

By the end of my years as a teaching associate, I had also begun teaching Italian cinema in the undergrad program. Those were the years that Scorsese was involved in building U.C.L.A.’s film archive. It was a genuine renaissance of Italian film studies and Italian winemakers visited regularly. I’ll never forget getting to shake Michelangelo Antonioni’s hand at the first screening in a retrospective of his entire filmography.

Years after I filed my dissertation (on Medieval and Renaissance transcriptions of Italian poetry), Princeton University Press would publish my English-language translation of The History of Italian Cinema by leading Italian cinema scholar Gian Piero Brunetta.

So, I think it’s fair to say that I know a little bit about Italian film.

On Wednesday, October 13, my interest in and passion for Italian cinema and Italian food and wine will collide when we host “Dinner and an Italian Movie” night at the restaurant. For this first event, we’ll be screening Federico Fellini’s 1973 classic, “Amarcord.” As you can imagine, I have a lot to say about Fellini and this wonderful movie. But you’ll have to join us that evening at Roma to find out what! I hope you will.

See details here. And thanks for your continued support.

Heading back to Italy tonight after a Parzen brothers reunion near the Canadian border (and an IMPORTANT NOTE about pre-flight covid testing).

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Last Friday found all three of the Parzen brothers in Plattsburgh, New York, about an hour south of Montreal, for a long weekend family reunion. That’s Micah (left) and Tad in the photo above, snapped on the ferry that crosses Lake Champlain and delivers its passengers to Vermont.

Our father Zane, 88 years old, has lived there for many years now. It’s not the easiest place in the world to get to but it is beautiful.

I leave for Italy from the east coast tonight from New York City. I’ll be teaching at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences this week and next.

Because Italy now requires U.S. travelers to show both a CDC proof of vaccination card and a negative covid test, I had to schedule a swab while I was on the ground in upstate New York. And getting a rapid antigen test was essential because wait times for the molecular test these days can be long.

It was my understanding that you had to schedule a test no sooner than 72 hours before your flight. But when I began uploading my documents to my airline’s “travel-ready center,” I realized that you actually need to take the test 72 hours before your scheduled arrival (not the schedule departure).

Luckily for me, I was able to find an antigen test at an independent pharmacy and everything aligned.

But it’s something to keep in mind when you’re prepping for travel to Italy or other destinations in Europe.

Dagan Ministero’s room where it happened. Revisiting Terroir SF, a natural wine icon.

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De naturali vinorum historia…

My mind teemed with memories as the doors swung open and let me into Terroir Natural Wine Bar on Folsom in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood like an old western gunslingers’ saloon.

The time Tracie and I watched one of the owners chase down a thief who stole two bottles in front of our very eyes. They got the bottles back.

The time my band was playing Café du Nord and we turned Joachim Cooder onto Muscadet. He was our drummer at the time and he loved it.

The countless times that the soldiers of the new wine, the natural wine, gathered there to banter, debate, and deliberate over the new language and new world that they were simultaneously discovering and forging.

It would be hard to overestimate the role that Terroir in San Francisco played in the nascent natural wine movement. Like its counterpart in New York, The Ten Bells, it was pioneer, progenitor, and in a certain sense an ante litteram avatar of the new natural wine culture.

Looking back to 2007 when Terroir opened, when people were just beginning to wrap their minds around natural wine, it’s clear that the venue and its cast of characters — including some of the wine world’s proto-bloggers, and you know whom I’m talking about — populated an early outpost of natural wine’s fourth estate.

At the time, no one beyond a small circle of the intelligentsia had even heard the pairing of “natural” and “wine.”

It’s incredible to think that a word that we once uttered audaciously as a challenge to the wine firmament is now part of the workaday parlance of broader viti-culture and commerce. Terroir was the setting — the context — for the text. Although the words had been uttered however sparingly before that time, Terroir was at once locus and locution for some of its earliest enunciations.

But Terroir didn’t just provide the proscenium for some of natural wine’s proto-dialectic.

It was also a super fun bar to hang out in and a wondrous meta (in the ancient Roman sense) for the wine-curious. Vinyl spun on the jukebox as eno-hipsters streamed in and out. And the wines… oh the wines! There was always something macerated and/or oxidative (back then it wasn’t so easy to find those wines). And the conversation was as high-pitched as it was catholic (with a small c).

And even though one of the things that made it sexy was the slight sense of danger that you always felt there, owed in part to the hyper-urban environment where it is located, it was also a safe and welcoming space for those who wanted to expand their wine knowledge and experience.

Today, as the natural wine world has revealed its sharpest elbows, Terroir was a place where even a wine neophyte like a drummer in a faux French rock band could hang out and let it all hang out.

I was so fortunate to get to sit down with my old friend Dagan Ministero, Terroir owner and founder, last week for what I can only describe as a pseudo-séance.

We talked at length about the many luminaries of natural wine who have sat in his chairs over the years. We parsed the evolution of the language of natural wine in the 14 years that have passed since I first sat there. And we tasted… we tasted and tasted and tasted… just like the old days.

Revisiting after so many years and after the lockdowns, this space still had the same mystical, magical effect on me that it did when I first visited in 2008 (my band was still extremely active then and SF was one of our top cities in terms of our draw). And the wines were funky, cloudy, and great…

Chapeau bas to Dagan who has remained one of America’s essential hosts, soothsayers, and sorcerers. Natural wine — and wine in general — could more humans like him.

Italians can’t come to the U.S. So we’re bringing them to you via Zoom. Taste with me in Houston next week.

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best lambruscoDespite our hopes that Italian winemakers would be able to join us in the U.S. this fall, Europeans are still banned from coming to the U.S. by the Biden administration. They can come here if they quarantine in certain countries for two weeks before arriving. But they can’t come directly from the EU.

When I was in Italy teaching at Slow Food U. in August, my Italian counterparts were optimistically expecting the ban to be lifted. Slow Wine had its tour planned for the U.S. in October, editor-in-chief Giancarlo Gariglio told me over dinner at his house. Villa Sandi’s export director Flavio Geretto, another good friend, was gearing up for the Gambero Rosso tastings also scheduled for October (he was even planning on bringing his son to attend a concert in Houston!).

Italian winemakers had hoped to boost sales with in situ visits during the last and historically most lucrative quarter of the calendar year (“OND” or Octobero-November-December, as it is known in the trade). But all plans and hopes have been dashed by the continued prohibition.

And that’s why we’re bringing the Italians to you.

Next Wednesday in Houston, I’ll be hosting a hybrid virtual/in-person wine dinner with one of my dearest and closest friends, Alicia Lini. She will be joining our group of guests in the dining room at Roma restaurant, where I write the wine list, via Zoom. And other guests will be also be joining via Zoom from their own dining rooms (they will pick up the food and wine beforehand).

For those interested in attending, see the menu and details here. Roma’s kitchen is doing a wonderful seafood — yes, seafood! — menu to pair with Alicia’s white, rosé, and red Lambrusco. It’s going to be super fun. I hope you can join us. Thanks for your support and buon weekend.

Tacos El Gordo in San Diego, how is it possible that I didn’t know you? I’m late to the party but I got here as quick as I could!

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It’s hard to believe that Tacos El Gordo in San Diego wasn’t on my radar before last week. But thankfully, that culinary lacuna has been remedied.

An early flight to California had left me with some free time last Monday before our family’s Rosh Hashanah dinner. And although an attempted visit to the legendary and now Michelin-rated San Ysidro taquería Tuétano ended in failure (because it was Labor Day and the restaurant was closed), the taco fantasies of at least one lapsed Californian were fulfilled that day when the Google landed them at the amazing and totally packed Tacos El Gordo on Palm Ave. in an old converted Taco Bell in Chula Vista.

You’d be hard pressed — or should we say, hard rolled — to find an eatery that hews so closely to the tacquerìa model of the Ciudad or Tijuana, both cities where said traveler spent a lot of time as a youth.

Tempted by the brains tacos, said traveler opted instead for the venue’s flagship dish, tacos de adobada: corn tortillas laden with marinated pork that has been fired in a vertical broiler.

cabeza = head

tripa = tripe

buche = pork stomach

suadero = rose meat (so called because it is pinkish in color; see here and here)

sesos = brains

lengua = tongue

Like their counterparts in Mexico City and Tijuana, the chef at the adobada station is as colorful in their delivery as they are histrionic in their carving.

Everything was so tempting, including the loaded fries. But a first visit to this amazing restaurant called for the classic.

Tacos El Gordo opened in Baja California in the 1970s and launched its first location on the U.S. side of the border in the late 1990s.

I can’t believe I hadn’t found this place until now. But I got here as quick as I could and now there’s no turning back.

Hack alert: if you’re not ordering the adobada (which is clearly the restaurant’s most popular dish), you can skip the main (and very long) ordering line and use one of the specialized lines for fries and tacos with other fillings.