How Do You Like Your Tacos?

[Kokoro Hane]

This thread is making me hungry.

 

But I do quite like tacos with a crunchy shell. I don't mind them soft though as long as it's a corn tortilla. 

[Jello]

Personally, I can't really stand tacos. My first job was working at the most popular Mexican restaurant in my town. I was 15, and you had to be 16 to work there, even washing dishes. So the manager hired me on the spot, and told me that if anyone asked me how old I was, I should say 16. Not sure how they got away with that shit.

 

It was filthy, absolutely filthy. The floors were slicked with grease from the back entrance to the dining room swinging doors, all the way back to the prep room and inside the cooler. It was just grease everywhere. Drop a tortilla on the floor while you're making something? No biggie, drop it in the fryer, that'll kill anything on it. Those rotten tomatoes that were supposed to go in the salsa? No problem, cut them up and throw them in this giant trash can that we use to make salsa in. Nobody will notice. I really haven't been able to eat Mexican food since I worked there, it was just far too disgusting. Just absolutely everything was half-assed, filthy, and most of the food was at or beyond expiration date, but it was all fried beyond recognition and over-seasoned, so you wouldn't notice.

 

It took the Mayor of the city coming down with legionnaires disease that they traced back to their fountain to finally get them shut down.

 

Years later when I told people I worked there, they always said something along the lines of "Oh, I loved eating there! I'm sad that it got shut down.". And I would always start recalling my tales from working there, and they would tell me to just shut up.

 

So yeah, that pretty much ruined Mexican/Hispanic food for me. Which sucks, but when I see a taco or enchilada it triggers my gag reflex.

[DMPhobos]

Tacos al pastor >>>>> All other tacos

No contest.

We don't have texmex style tacos (hard shell) where i live in Mexico, but we have the real deal (soft tortilla, onion, cilantro, sauce, lemon) and they're delicious. Tacos are still a thing that gets handled by local restaurants rather than fast food chains, so taste of the same taco style varies from place to place since they all distinguish themselves from each other and rarely you get to eat tacos that taste the same on 2 different taco restaurants. Funny enough Taco Bell attempted to open multiple times here and failed since no one was interested in buying fast food texmex tacos, not even after they were marketed as something different.

[Scrabbs]

Hard shell and stuff like shrimp

[Taw Tu'lki]

Never tried. So, I don't know.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

On 6/16/2021 at 12:53 AM, Jello said:

It took the Mayor of the city coming down with legionnaires disease that they traced back to their fountain to finally get them shut down.

Brutal^

 

I like Taco Libre the best, not sure how big of a chain they are. In general I'm not a huge taco person though, they're too sloppy for me and I'm always left with half of the taco's entrails being left on the plate.

[Jello]

3 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Brutal^

It was an interesting introduction to the workforce, I can at least say that. And I'm kind of glad it was my first job, because most of the jobs I've had after that I can think to myself "At least it's not as bad as my first job".

 

Although when I spent a Summer working as an electrician the company was far more lackadaisical towards personal safety, that's the only job where I was more concerned for my personal health. "You need to mount an electrical box and run conduit on a fourteen foot ceiling, but all our twelve foot ladders are at another site. Hope you have good balance, because you're going to need to stand on the top of an eight foot ladder."

[Aaron Blain]

I will happily eat any amount and combination of Taco Bell you put in front of me. I will gladly attack Chipotle until I sag like an engorged anaconda.

 

That said, I spent a few days in San Diego and the food there ruined me. The biggest thing is tortillas that have been made from scratch the same day. There's no comparison. Not even the 'gourmet' tortillas you can sometimes find in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. And all the taco places I went to had a little condiment bar where there were like six kinds of freshly diced salsa.

 

Given an option, I usually go for al pastor. Or chorizo.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

6 hours ago, Jello said:

Although when I spent a Summer working as an electrician the company was far more lackadaisical towards personal safety, that's the only job where I was more concerned for my personal health. "You need to mount an electrical box and run conduit on a fourteen foot ceiling, but all our twelve foot ladders are at another site. Hope you have good balance, because you're going to need to stand on the top of an eight foot ladder."

This reminds me of the Denny's right next to where I live. They have some poor girl who hasn't even got her license yet doing the vast majority of the electrical work there, probably paying her eight dollars an hour to do it. They do supply a ladder for her, but she is about six months pregnant so it's not exactly a kind gesture. People look down on folks who work at fast food restaurants and big franchises, but a lot of the time they're working under conditions that are unsafe, unfair, and highly illegal, and are afraid to say/do anything about it because they need the money more than most people do, or it's their first job and they're still naive/don't want to feel like a failure by quitting.

 

My neighbor's daughter recently got her first job at a convenience store down the road, which I tried to warn her against since I've known the owner for twenty years. He used her like a slave for twelve hours a day, selling products that expired when Kurt Cobain was still alive and having her deal with people who line up outside the door at 6:00AM to buy booze. Then he randomly told her she was fired one day. Of course he was paying her under the table (she didn't quite understand what this meant), so her job counted for nothing. Ten years ago someone shot him because he thought it would be a good idea to show off his machismo to someone who stole a tourist shirt instead of calling the cops, even though he knew he had a gun.

[Jello]

On 6/17/2021 at 8:05 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

This reminds me of the Denny's right next to where I live. They have some poor girl who hasn't even got her license yet doing the vast majority of the electrical work there, probably paying her eight dollars an hour to do it. They do supply a ladder for her, but she is about six months pregnant so it's not exactly a kind gesture. People look down on folks who work at fast food restaurants and big franchises, but a lot of the time they're working under conditions that are unsafe, unfair, and highly illegal, and are afraid to say/do anything about it because they need the money more than most people do, or it's their first job and they're still naive/don't want to feel like a failure by quitting.

 

My neighbor's daughter recently got her first job at a convenience store down the road, which I tried to warn her against since I've known the owner for twenty years. He used her like a slave for twelve hours a day, selling products that expired when Kurt Cobain was still alive and having her deal with people who line up outside the door at 6:00AM to buy booze. Then he randomly told her she was fired one day. Of course he was paying her under the table (she didn't quite understand what this meant), so her job counted for nothing. Ten years ago someone shot him because he thought it would be a good idea to show off his machismo to someone who stole a tourist shirt instead of calling the cops, even though he knew he had a gun.

Yeah, people really love taking advantage of young people. I mean, I had my apprentice license when I was doing the work, and had been to school for two years, so I wasn't a novice. I knew what I was doing, I just usually didn't have the tools to do the job properly. And there were still situations that I was forced into that scared the Hell out of me. Maybe more so because I actually understood just how dangerous electricity can be. I feel terrible for a novice with no training that's been forced into doing it because they have no alternative, I would probably tell them to quit on the spot if I saw anyone doing what you described.

 

Standing on top of a twelve foot ladder while installing ceiling lights, and being electrocuted and completely incapable of moving for several seconds while trying to pull your arm off the light panel because a sheetrocker hit the light switch while he was mudding around the box isn't fun.

 

Nevermind the fact that you need to have an apprentice license to do any electrical work, and you need to be working under the supervision of someone with a journeyman's license, and they need to be working for a master electrician to supervise apprentices. Electricity kills, and it's going to hurt the entire time it's killing you.

 

Got a job driving a forklift in a lumber yard after I got shitcanned at the electrical job, and I made three dollars more an hour and didn't have to spend two years in school. The last electrical job I worked at, the journeyman brought down most of the t-grid in the dining area of a restaurant that we were working in with his fat gut, so the owner had to pay to replace that. The journeyman also used outdated blue prints, so after I spent an entire afternoon installing conduit and boxes in a large wall section, I had to tear it all out and move it over to the next stud section. And another apprentice spent all day installing track lights incorrectly, so I spent an afternoon redoing that. So the owner lost money on the job, and I was the newest guy, so I got shitcanned. The only word that I can come up with for the owner of that place is "cocksucker". His employees were never anything more than an expenditure.

 

So this thread really got off track, sorry. As I said, I don't care for tacos mostly, but my Mom makes some really good chicken enchiladas and fajitas. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Jello