Taste Insight, “Tacos al Pastor” with Nicholas Gilman from Inside Mexico on Vimeo.

Forgive Y&H’s obsession with tacos this week, but I’ve been fascinated by the wealth of history behind this simple Mexican street snack. Take tacos al pastor. Many taquerias don’t prepare them the traditional way, which requires a vertical rotisserie like the ones you see in shawarma shops. 

In the video above, Nicholas Gilman explains the presence of these spits in Mexican taquerias. They’re legacies, it seems, of the Lebanese natives who brought them to Mexico in a wave of immigration in the mid-20th century. Mexican taco makers merely adapted them to a meat more common in Latino cuisine.

Not that I don’t trust Mr. Gilman, but I wanted to do some fact-checking on this page in culinary history, so I turned to Mark Miller’s excellent cookbook, Tacos. Miller, if you’ll recall, is trained both in anthropology and cooking. The father of Southwestern cuisine, Miller founded the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and the late Red Sage in D.C.

Here’s what Miller says about tacos al pastor:

Read More “Tacos Al Pastor: Lebanon’s Gift to Mexico” »

Mark Furstenberg’s vision for his new G Street Food was simple: He wanted to bring some of the world’s greatest street foods to a city that has some of the worst. It’s too bad that Washingtonians don’t seem to appreciate them. Or at least don’t seem to appreciate them as much as Furstenberg and his partners had hoped.

The master baker says that revenues at G Street Food, in the first few weeks of operation, are down at least 40 percent from projections.  It’s enough to cause concern for the owners of the place, the Choi family, who “expected it to do well from the beginning,” Furstenberg tells Y&H.

Read More “Furstenberg Is Forced to Expand Beyond Street Foods” »

Bayless and Furstenberg: Men of the street

Imagine Y&H’s surprise when he stopped by G Street Food, baker Mark Furstenberg’s new operation inspired by international street foods, and saw Rick Bayless casually walk in the door.  As if the celebrity chef lives just across the street, not half way across the country.

Bayless, fresh off his victory on Top Chef Masters, no doubt wanted to chat with Furstenberg about his new project, since the Chicago chef recently launched a similar street-food restaurant in the Windy City. The two toques spoke for awhile; I tried to leave them alone, save for the picture above, but when Bayless finally said he had to go, I button-holed him near the exit.

Read More “Rick Bayless Drops by G Street Food This Morning” »

I am probably stretching the definition of street food here, since some of the comestibles I ate were actually purchased in open-air buildings that faced the street, not from free-standing carts that have to be pushed into place every morning. Regardless, the food from all of these places had three things in common: It could be bought right off the sidewalk, it had to be eaten somewhere else than the place where I bought it, and it was delicious (with one exception).

Just outside of Chichen-Itza, that Mayan tourist magnet, this dude smokes up amazing roadside chicken in a tiny burg called Piste. Our full-bird was moist, charred, and smokey all the way to the bone. We got rice, slaw, a bag of hot sauce (yep, a bag), and the chicken for the price of a fast-food meal back in the states.

Read More “What I Ate on My Summer Vacation: Street Food” »

The buns for these dainty sliders are so exquisite they look like catalog examples of the baker’s craft. Their tops are golden and crusty, coated in a light (egg-wash?) sheen and sprinkled with salt and pepper, which give them the appearance of tanned men with male-pattern baldness.

Juicy little lamb meatballs, at once tightly compressed and delicately spiced, are tucked inside these gorgeous buns. They’re topped with a slaw of shredded romaine lettuce and ribbons of piquant red pepper. The whole thing is bound together with a blue cheese aioli, which balances out the slaw and adds a little fat to the typically lean lamb meat.

These compact bites are so tasty and satisfying you have to wonder how the operators could afford to sell the pair for a measly $6.

Got an idea how?

Read More “A Surprising Source for Terrific Meatball Sliders” »

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

Three different vehicles have taken up residence at the back end of a massive parking lot that serves the Safeway grocery store at 514 Rhode Island Ave. NE. One is a converted 1995 school bus now outfitted with deep-fryers, prep tables, and coolers. The second is a square white panel truck that hauls around a giant generator, and the final is a beat-up red Chevy 1500 pickup with an equally well-used Southern Pride smoker propped up on cinder blocks in the bed.

This sprawling mobile barbecue empire belongs to Fate Pittman, a 73-year-old pitmaster who has been smoking pork, beef, and chicken for more than 30 years. Except no one calls Pittman by his family name. Everyone knows him by the handle painted onto his vehicles: Mr. P.

Read More “Young & Hungry Dining Guide by the Day: Mr. P’s Ribs and Fish” »

For years, the District was stuck in street-food adolescence, with folks forever noshing on hot dogs and candy, but suddenly the city has begun to show signs of maturity. In recent days, the Post’s food team has introduced us to two new or forthcoming street options: the Fojol Bros. and a food-cart partnership between Zola and D.C. Central Kitchen.

The Fojol concept is a sort of cheeky amalgamation of influences — part Ken Kesey’s Furthur bus, part Indian cuisine, and part Kogi Korean BBQ to Go, arguably the most famous food truck in Los Angeles. Like Kogi, the Fojol truck roams the District, alerting fans to its whereabouts through a designated Twitter feed. Unlike Kogi, the Fojol Bros. rely on a ton of shtick — fake mustaches, colorful turbans, and a converted 1965 bread truck that looks like it could be hiding 10,000 circus clowns. The Post has a righteous slide show on the truck.

Read More “The Latest from the Streets: The Fojol Bros. and Zola’s Cart” »

Believe it or not, the origins of Mark Furstenberg’s forthcoming G Street Food can be traced to a turbulent period in the mid-1990s when the master breadmaker was being forced out of the very business he started — the then-groundbreaking bakery, Marvelous Market.

“When I was failing at Marvelous Market and I was losing Marvelous Market because of my own expansion, I was invited to go on a trip to Apulia (Puglia, Italy),” says Furstenberg, who recently took part in the Washington City Paper’s debut baguette competition. “I kept seeing bread eaten on the streets in various forms.”

If that trip abroad was the first spark, then every subsequent trip that Furstenberg took, whether to Philly or to France, was just enough fuel to keep an idea smoldering in the back of the chef’s mind. Finally, after years of traveling and eating all manner of street food, Furstenberg realized he had the concept for his next restaurant. He thought: “It would be so much fun to do street food in Washington… We don’t have real street here.”

Read More “Furstenberg’s Street Food Restaurant Will Stretch Far Beyond Bread-Based Snacks” »

VendrTV is a relatively new podcast, hosted by Daniel Delaney, that focuses on the country’s street foods. VTV’s latest episode is a chatty profile of On the Fly, the eco-friendly street-vending company that has found a way around D.C.’s onerous regulations. It’s a fairly simple and straight-forward profile of the company and its products, but Y&H thinks Delaney and company should have researched D.C.’s  street-food history more before jumping into the thorny subject. Plus, On the Fly doesn’t need the publicity. The pupusa trucks in Montgomery County do.

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For some reason, whenever folks talk about local street food, they rarely, if ever, mention the taco and pupusa trucks in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing? A geographical issue? A complete lack of interest in Salvadoran cuisine?

Whatever the reason, I’d like to seriously change the tenor of our street-food discussions. Let me say this straight up: Some of the most authentic and most delicious street food is prepared and served from those mobile taquerias and pupuserias in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

Take, for example, the Sabor Latino truck, which is tucked behind the Chevron station at 8550 Piney Branch Road in Silver Spring.

Read More “Best of D.C. Hunting: Head North for Quality Street Fare” »