Old people make better tortillas

When seeking out good food in unexpected places, old people are a good sign. Just as a preponderance of Chinese patrons is a solid endorsement of a good Chinese restaurant, or as a dirty roadside truck stop can be revealed to be an unexpected gem by its crowd of actual truck drivers, it's generally a safe bet that old people are an indicator of something being done right.

Old people are all immigrants from the past. And this place they came from had different rules, different customs, and different food. Before a certain time in the past, food simply couldn't help but be properly made, because the Atomic Age hadn't yet given us high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, shelf stabilizers and additives. The only prepared foods with a shelf life was in Ball jars, sequestered there by heat and pressure, not polysyllabic E-numbered potions cooked up by The Food Industry. You couldn't cheat in the old school.

The man pushing the cart loaded with Maseca bags into the side door at La Super Rica looked like he'd been alive to witness the invention of the tortilla. His posture forced him to peer at his toes as he pushed the cart into the kitchen, where comparatively young women in their 60s transformed the masa into tortillas. There's a reason that Julia Child named this Santa Barbara taqueria her favorite in the country. Real tortillas are a sign that things are being done the old way, and like most simple things in life, they're not as simple as they seem.

For the first part of my life, my entire frame of tortilla reference had been based upon a shopping-mall Santa Claus version of the real thing, the plastic-wrapped supermarket pseudo-tillas. When I had my first tortilla that had been a naïve pliable ball of masa five minutes previously, I knew I was tugging on the beard of something sublime. Alton Brown devoted an episode of Good Eats to tortillas. He explained how corn masa needs to be nixtamalized in order to release the nutritive potential, and went through the process of making his tortillas using a press and cooking them on a griddle. A great primer, but somehow, his tortillas didn't turn out quite right...the edges broke too easily, and the texture seemed a little too dry and flaky. Perhaps they're really hard to make? Or perhaps Alton isn't old enough? I don't blame him; it's not his fault he isn't a little old Mexican lady.

These old people know what they're doing. My tacos were beguilingly simple, just a pile of meat on an ethereal tortilla, with salsas available to accompany them. The tortilla loosely grasping the marinated pork was soft but slightly al dente. It was still warm from its birth on the griddle, and was never intended to survive long enough to cool down. This tortilla will not be reheated. It didn't even exist when the meat now inside it was cooked, and it quickly disappeared into my mouth.