I have been visiting this same taco stand since 2001 when I first began visiting Mexico. Saltillo was my first destination and periodically I return to the place where it all began, and to the taco stand to which I have always been drawn.
SALTILLO — A young chef in an orange shirt and a black face mask slices slivers of meat dripping with flavor and tease from a rotating vertical rotisserie.
The air from Plaza Acuna brings its menagerie of sensations into the dining area; the guitar players, the candy sellers and the children with their colored balloons creating a revolving cacophony of sensory delights.
Taqueria El Pastor at the intersection of Calle Juan Aldama and Padre Flores in Saltillo in the Mexican state of Coahuila is a pulse, a thrill, a spice, a clattering of things and a movement of things simple and glorious. It’s a memory, a hope, a reflection, a liberation from the exhaustion and the annihilation of the busyness of things in the northern places.
I have been visiting this same taco stand since 2001 when I first began visiting Mexico. Saltillo was my first destination and periodically I return to the place where it all began, and to the taco stand to which I have always been drawn.
The journal entries from years before reveal it’s vivid and extended presence in my mind. One entry from the early 2000s recalls a short portly man with narrow laughing eyes directing me to have a seat.
“Two clowns, a man and a woman, have walked in,” I write. “The male clown wears big white pants and a black and white shirt, eyes and mouth rimmed in white, eyes squared off with black liner. He plays an accordion, sings a few lines, takes a collection and disappears with the woman.”
“Outside, a man in jeans, T-shirt and white bandana rapidly carves meat from a vertical rotisserie and moves it toward another man who slaps it into tacos and passes them off. I hear the sounds of sizzling meat, the clatter of knives and spatulas, the anxious noises of children, the quiet conversation of diners. Waiters and cooks bark orders of “Tacos al Pastor!” “Tacos de Barbacoa!” and “Seis tres!”
“The waiter asks what I want. I point to an orange sign that says, ‘Orden de 4 tacos al pastor $18. Orden de 4 tacos de barbacoa de cabeza $12.’”
“Al pastor?” he asks, and I say, “Si.”
Skip ahead to September 2021 and I describe a somewhat different experience with as much vigor and vitality as ever but Taqueria El Pastor has alterations that show movement and a lessening of things.
This visit was in the early recovery time from COVID. Upon arrival in Plaza de Armas in front of the Cathedral of Santiago – it has been my practice always to begin my journey there – I had begun walking toward this taco stand and at first I didn’t even recognize Saltillo.
“I head down the street I think will take me there,” I write in 2021, “and I’m at first alarmed as everything is closed up and I think the taco stand might have been a casualty of the pandemic. However, I then see the plaza isn’t where it’s supposed to be, either. Surely, they didn’t just up and move the plaza since my last visit.
Then I look left and see my favorite taco stand about two blocks down another street.”
(At this point the journal entry from 2021 reminds me of a painful episode that would have deterred many people from continuing their trip. While walking from the McAllen parking garage to the bus station, I stepped off a curb only to have my right angle buckle sending spasms of agony and through my body and causing me to fall fast forward onto the street, my left leg taking the brunt of the fall. I’d sat there rolling with pain for a few months and then, instead of returning home, I limped to the bus station and headed south as planned.)
OK, back to Saltillo.
“Relieved, I hobble down on my busted-up knee and ankle – nothing will get between me and Saltillo tacos – and I see to my delight all the wealth of activity and sensations of Plaza Acuna and the taco stand doing a brisk business as always.
But I notice immediately some changes. The vertical rotisserie isn’t outside anymore, it’s been moved inside. And the stand used to be completely open air with no walls. Now it has walls with large windows. I take a seat and recall the many years I’ve been here, at the same table (or its equivalent).
Taqueria El Pastor has always been an adventure with its continuously changing arrangements of sounds, flavors and smells. It’s been a place of clowns and old men playing guitars and children selling chewing gum and families gathering at what my friend Diego says is the most popular taco stand in Saltillo.
Now I’m back here again in February 2023, looking forward to another fine meal and a fresh collection of memories.
It’s still as fine as ever, but the pandemic has had its effect, and I think possibly – I don’t know for sure – they may have remodeled it and moved the rotisserie inside for health reasons, and built walls for the same reason. I miss the faces of the cooks who now wear masks – so much of life’s vitality emerges in the unique and changing expressions we see all around us – but this is a reality we have all come to accept. The world and it’s people and its times are always moving and transforming and switching out the obsolete and the stale with the vital and the innovative. Some would force the world and its societies to remain static, but that’s a fatal and futile effort.
In spite of the change in response to challenge, Taqueria El Pastor is still a fine place. I take a moment to look around.
Young couples, aging grandparents, children and teenagers crowd round tables set with carousels with cups of condiments and salsas. The one with chopped onion and cilantro catches my eye. I’ll definitely be dipping into that one in a few minutes for my tacos.
Outside in the plaza, visitors stroll down broad walkways set with worn pavers in a zig-zag herringbone pattern. They browse newsstands or look over racks of hats and face masks or stop and get their shoes shined. A man with black lizard-skin cowboy boots sits on a concrete bench and leans against an iron fence with chipped black paint.
Inside the tacos stand, I consider I’ve never been disappointed, not only for the religiously consistent service and flavor of the food, but for the activity out on the street and the plaza. This isn’t a magnet for tourists – in fact I’ve never seen another gringo here in all the times I’ve visited – which makes it more real, more authentic, more powerful for its lack of pretense. In other words, no one’s trying to impress anybody. It’s the real deal.
Now I’m back here again in February 2023, looking forward to another fine meal and a fresh collection of memories. Vendors beyond the doors sell balloons, shoeshines, cacahuates and magazines, and locals recline on ornate iron benches, smoke, consider life and listen to the mariachis and the growling traffic.
Here in Taqueria El Pastor, locals spoon onions and cilantro into their tacos, waiters bark out order to the chefs at the far side of the establishment where steam rises and griddles snap, sizzle and exhale.
The cooks behind the counter where the orders pass all wear distinctive orange shirts. Arms and hands and spatulas move like clashing electric pulses, shifting the meat and spices into endless reformulations of the same basic ingredients.
The seamless innovations in such a place are intriguing. There’s the gringa – pastor con queso en harina. Pirate: bistek con queso en harina. The campuchana normal is carne de bistek y pastor en tortilla de maiz.
I’m not sure if these are new additions to the menu, but I do see the familiar listings: tacos al pastor, tacos barbacoa, tacos bistek, tacos suadero, tacos tripa de res.
Tacos al pastor. Always my favorite, my only choice, the plate I imagine in my dreams when I think of Saltillo.
I dare to be different, and I exercise that difference by ordering the tacos barbacoa.
While the cooks quickly prepare my order, a boy in a red jacket speaks slowly with his father while his sister presses her lips to a soda and drinks quickly. There’s the swishing of a knife on a honing rod, the flurry of conversations across tables, a man in a windbreaker wipes his mouth.
My order arrives – five flour tortillas wrapped around large helpings of barbacoa and melted cheese. It looks deceptively small on its plastic plate, and I’m satisfied before I finish.
I pay my bill, thankful for another memory in this place, and move back into the plaza again to see what more pleasures and surprises await me.
Valley Morning Star reporter Travis M. Whitehead is sharing his insight on the Mexican city of Saltillo in a three-part series of commentaries exploring his travels there. Find the first part of the series here:
