Los Tacos No. 1 - Chelsea — Epicure Nicholas

Chelsea, New York City

Photographed - June 5, 2015
Rating: ★★★★★
Price - $

The Brief - Price to flavor ratio is out of this world.
What to Order - Adobada Especial, Tacos of your choice

A shipping container (maybe?) turned taco dispensary inside Chelsea Market

The Especial with Adobada (Pork) - my favorite order at Los Tacos No. 1

Outline:

Cheap Eats, Anyone?
Top Tier Tacos
What are Al Pastor & Adobada?
The Especial
The Best Photo

The Spread: Tacos, Especial, and Nopales

Cheap Eats, Anyone?

I just met a student while riding the train today (Oct. 9 2024) (Hi Harrison!), who asked if I had any recommendations for good, cheap food.

Fortunately for him I am a big believer in getting the absolute most delicious food you can for the money, so I had several options to relay.

He asked for something close to the Upper West Side, but for some reason the first thing that came to mind was Los Tacos. In more recent years I’ve been to the location at Penn Station, which I should have some photos of kicking around on a hard drive somewhere. I seen now they’ve got a ton of locations (4 in Midtown, this OG in Chelsea, One by NYU, and on in Tribecca, as of 2024), so you should have an easy time of it if you want to give one a try.

These, however, are from my very first trip to the OG location inside Chelsea market all those years ago. Damn, what an experience it was to have these. I made the mistake of thinking that since they’ve grown, have multiple locations, and have been in operation for so long, that almost everyone would have tried them by now.

But, that’s a reminder that not everyone is so determined to seek out and try new food as I am, and maybe there’s something to that, something I have to give and share as a result of all my determination.

And I guess the fact that you’re here reading along is proof of that someone’s interested in trying some of the stuff I think is great.

So, I’ll make a priority of adding cheap accessible eats into the guidepost here both for Harrison, and for you. If there’s something else you’re interested in seeing our hearing about, send me an email or comment on Substack. Now, let’s talk about the food.

A fun pig-shaped lava stone molcajete, a traditional vessel for making salsas.

2. Top Tier Tacos

This is one of, if not the only place in New York City that has come close to the glory I experienced at La Taqueria in San Francisco. Suffice to say that La Taqueria is probably my favorite taco / burrito place I’ve ever been, and Los Tacos is right up there with it. They both feature super juicy and creamy tacos, loaded up with sauces, but meat is the star of the show at Los Tacos, and the spit roasted Adobada is a frequent favorite of mine.

Adobada al Pastor - Marinated Pork, spit roasted and sliced to order.

3. A Little History on Al Pastor & Adobada

I just looked this up out of curiosity, and “Al Pastor” means “shepherd style” and is the result of folks from Lebanon settling in Puebla, Mexico and cooking up lamb shawarma there. Switch out the lamb for more readily available meats and local spices, and you land on this Mexican take on middle eastern food. A beautiful fusion of techniques and tastes.

Adobada, on the other hand, means “Marinated” and refers to meats soaking up adobo. Adobo, Adob-ada. So then what’s adobo? A smokey sauce of ground chilies and spices. It’s dark, rich, and intense, and here those flavors are working their way deep into the meat as it slowly roasts.

The Masa Masher, for the freshest tortillas.

A closeup or the delicious spicy salsa, one of three available for your taco topping pleasure.

The glorious Especial! Yes, the same photo as before. we got to munching too quickly for more shots.

4. The Especial

My favorite thing on the menu here is this fried quesadilla thing with a shattery exterior and gooey interior. It’s packed to the brim with flavor and texture, and one is honestly all you need to both feel full and not overly damage your health. I don’t know if this item is unique to Los Tacos, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else to date, which makes it a must order in my book. Yeah, the Tacos are excellent and you could get those, but if you’re anything like me, you wanna get the thing that you can’t get anywhere else so you can have a truly new and revelatory experience.

5. Best image of the set

My favorite image here shows off a couple of principals I tend toward these days:

Negative Space:

There’s negative space in the form of the relatively empty top left 2/3s of the frame, which kind of feeds into:

Breathing Room:

There’s enough room around the plate for the image to ‘breath’ and show a bit of context.

Human Element:

There’s the figure in the background breathing some life into the image.

Pleasing Bokeh:

The bokeh (out of focus blobs, essentially) of the flame is really pleasant to me, complimented by the blue light just beside it on the steel table. The warm glow of fire and the dim light that could indicate evening is always a comfort to me.

Clear Subject:

It’s obvious that the tacos are what you’re supposed to look at here. Your eye is drawn straight down and right to them. That’s a compositional success.

Potential Improvements:

I do, however, wish the tacos and their filling was a little more visible. This could be improved by either moving the camera a few inches higher up and shooting over the lip of the plate while trying to maintain a similar composition, or by repositioning the tacos on the edge of the plate.

If I’m recalling correctly, this little block is a staging area before they delivered the food, working the roll of ‘the pass’, where it changes hands from cook to server. That’s to say that re-staging it for a photo would need to involve asking the staff to do it, making for a slightly more involved shoot than just capturing the moment while. I’m now envisioning having the tacos directly on the wood slab, getting rid of the not-very-appealing paper plate. If I were shooting this today, I’d ask someone to do that so I could get that shot. Chances are they’d indulge me and go along with it, especially if that particular plate were my food (it was not in the case of these tacos), and that they weren’t wildly slammed and busy, which they frequently are.

Another good trick would be to show them the shot, so they can see how good it is, before you go in for the ask. Then you’re establishing that you’re not just wasting their time, but that you’re good, know what you’re doing, and have a clear vision for a better image, which should go a long way to commanding some respect that will get you what you want out of an image.