Taqueria Tex Mex

Thursday June 24th 2010
Taqueria Tex Mex, Charlotte Pike, Nashville, TN

Having spent the entirety of the previous day hurtling forwards at 70 miles per hour from Providence all the way to Nashville, I was a little jittery and out of focus by the time I arrived. My thoughts weren’t forming properly, I’d developed a stutter, and I needed several rounds of what ended up being Budweiser to bring me back to a familiar mental state. In the morning I was rudely awakened far earlier than I had hoped by a call from a Vanderbilt psychology student trying to schedule me for a computer test. Immediately afterwards I was off to look at a prospective home, and that’s when it sunk in; I moved to Nashville.
Still shaking off my phantom movement sensations and Budweiser brain dent, despite a couple hours of couch rest and substantial iced coffee intake, I decided post house viewing that some food was in order. Crom did his best to maneuver his shapely figure into any available crevasse of space in the tightly packed and hermetically sealed Old Vanny, who naturally held up well under less than ideal conditions (as I knew she would), and from there we set off up Charlotte Pike straight to the Tex Mex taco truck.
Tex Mex is a term that rubs me the wrong way. Take the “Tex” out and then we’re talking. But hey, a burrito’s a burrito right? Wrong. Because apparently, this, this right here, believe it or believe it not, is a Burrito. I know exactly what your thinking, “That is most certainly not a burrito.”, and I’m just not too sure what to tell you.

Their menu lists all the items in Spanish with the English term in a smaller font underneath, and right under ‘Pirata’ it said ‘Burrito’, so I ordered a Pastor Pirata. Dazed, hungry, and in no type of detective mood, the malformation and possible complete mix up of my burrito initially went unnoticed, but the oddity of it slowly began to sink in.
“Is this the burrito?”, I asked Crom. He nodded yes. “What did you get?”, I asked him after noticing his plate.
“Two Quesadillas.”, he responded. I had asked, because the similarities in appearance between our two dishes were many. The only difference really being that his Quesadillas were smaller than my burrito. Crom then pointed out the lack of beans, rice, and lettuce in my burrito, but how it didn’t matter anyways, seeing as how those things are cheap “filler food”, that you could easily throw together at home. “Is there cheese in there?”, he asked. I peeled back the tortilla like so, revealing a good portion of cheese. “Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t.”, he told me, “I’m not sure what part of Mexico these people are from.”

It now being obvious that Pirata is just some “Tex-Mex” style term indicating the large size of a Quesadilla, Quesadilla indicating regular or medium, and Taco (granted the tacos are served on flour tortillas) the small size, the menu here suddenly shrunk considerably.
All nit picking, ingredient listing, and contour examination aside, my jumbo Quesdailla was good. Chewy chunks of seasoned pork, sliced avocado, onions, cilantro, all melded together with a handful of cheese and topped with a delicious and spicy orange colored sauce. Wether it was a Burrito or not ceased to trouble me once I began eating it. Maybe I’d been expecting something a little bit different, but I learned long ago that you take what you can get from places like this. Places that despite having a store front restaurant location, opt for running the business out of a truck in the parking lot.