Do you remember the first star you ever saw? Your first sunrise? I can’t remember any of those things. But I can tell you exactly when I had my very first taco.
I was at a flea market in my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey, at a stall with curtains drawn around for walls. We paid in quarters. By today’s food cognoscenti standards, it wasn’t much of a taco: crunchy shell, ground beef, a few feathery strips of lettuce. I was seven or eight, and I’d been led there on my bike by my preteen cousin who, in a bit of infamous family lore, my mother once said was a “bad influence.”
But here’s what I remember as much as the taco itself: the other workers at the flea market who were eating them too; the chitchat between them; how their own stalls selling welcome mats and garden tools sat empty as they stood around laughing for a few minutes. I don’t know why all this is lodged in my brain, but I suppose it’s because I keep reliving that moment at different times, in different places, in different languages. I love watching easy friendships being born over carnitas and a spray of lime.
One night 25 or so years after that, I was at my favorite taco truck, El Gallo Giro in Jackson Heights, Queens. I used to walk by it on my way home; it was always there, always open. I showed up and realized I’d left my wallet at work. No problem, the taquero told me, and held off on making my second taco until I finished my first so it would be fresh.
I was eating, huddled by the little counter at the truck’s side, when a young man asked me how it was. He was Dominican; he’d never had a taco before, and I guess I looked like I was enjoying mine. We talked for a while: He told me he was looking for a job handing out free newspapers by the subway, and I told him what he should order. He liked his tacos de carne enchilada so much, he told the taquero he wanted to buy my dinner for me. I never saw him again, but that’s the kind of thing that can happen at a taco truck.
Taco trucks—or carts, or stands—live out in the open; most people grab and go, and it’s easy to think that they’re transient and anonymous. But a great taco vendor is all about a kind of fleeting permanence, a constant point for people to gather, a place you can rely on for hot tortillas and the small bonds of humanity that keep society going.
This year, on Thanksgiving, I found myself back at El Gallo Giro. I was returning from a work trip, my wife and kid left town to visit family, and, being solo, I paid a visit to my old Jackson Heights taquero. I’d moved away, it’d been years since I’d been back, and to make sure the truck was still there, I looked it up on Yelp, where I found someone fond of posting selfies from beautiful European seaside towns noting her disappointment that the tacos were $3 “instead of $2.50 like everywhere else.”
The tacos were better than ever. The lengua was beautifully seasoned, cooked to the point just before the chewiness vanishes, the way I love it most. The truck had been upgraded, now loaded with a trompo for real-deal carne al pastor spinning before a flame, its edges charring into crispy bits, served with a few nicks of roasted pineapple.
It was cold, and the streets were empty; no turkeys were being spared on this night. I ordered one more taco: cecina, griddled salt-cured beef, and smelled the coconutty finish of lime on my hands, anticipating the moment I would notice the scent of vaporized lard on my skin. I chatted for a while with the taquero, Jorge, when we heard some raised voices. Next to the truck, a South Asian produce vendor was arguing with a customer who wanted a five-dollar bag of fruit for four. After the customer stormed off, the produce guy and Jorge commiserated, even though neither of them really spoke English. I guess there’s a universal language for people not wanting to pay you what you’re worth when you work outside in 40-degree weather.
As Jorge and his neighbor smiled off their conversation, another man came up, ordered a quesadilla, and fist-bumped the taquero. They said some things in Spanish too fast for me to understand and started laughing right away. I thought back to that first flea market taco. At a taco truck, the goods are wrapped in a tortilla. But the greatness is in the standing around, the talking and the nodding. The looking at a complete stranger and feeling, for the time it takes you to eat the six bites of a taco, that you’re here together. What price can you put on that?
Francis Lam is a James Beard Award–winning food journalist, cookbook editor, and host of American Public Media's The Splendid Table. He lives in New York City.
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