Congratulations on Finding the Best Tacos Ever!

Many people quest across New York City, looking for the best Mexican food. It can be elusive, not because it isn’t here, but because New York has so many terrible food places in it, places that surpass in number, cost, and often advertising the quality places to eat.

You began your quest at that ho-hum place in Soho across from REI about four months ago, and your journey since then has been anything but dull. You’ve been all the way from Spanish Harlem to Sunset Park, and while you’ve found some pretty good tacos (notably the cart on the corner of Church Avenue and Rugby Road in Flatbush) you haven’t found the best tacos ever. Nothing, in fact, to equal some of the stuff you’ve seen in Mexico City, where tacos are spiced with sadness, self hate, and gym mats are used as filler.

But today you’re going to finally stumble into the best tacos ever. Because after reading a book about the people who live under the subway you had a thought: what if the best tacos in New York City weren’t above ground, but rather concealed, where only the most deserving, those willing to wander into the dark depths of places similar to but distinct from Mexico City might find them?

With that in mind you bought a headlamp and some rope across the street from that taco place where your journey began and you descended into the darkness of the New York City subways.

We’d detail your means of ingress, but that might be dangerous, since revealing the secret location of the best tacos in New York could trigger a series of disastrous subway adventures from untrained urban explorers who want delicious delicious tacos. Instead we’ll recount, by means of this sentence, the thousands of rats who will guide you to your destination as they scurry back and forth along the ratways of the sub-subway. They’ll use select routes, you assume, for the sake of safety, and following them will eventually lead you to a massive underground amphitheater lit by a sort of glowing blue fungus. A bunch of people in tattered suits will be standing in the middle of the amphitheater talking amongst themselves, while another, smaller group of people in suits will be standing around a small metal cart. The smell that greets you will be divine.

You’ll suck it deep into your nostrils and run up to the metal cart. The people in front of it will act like your presence is entirely normal, even though you’ll be the only person who isn’t wearing rags there aside from the man in the cart, who will be wearing a stained Ed Hardy t-shirt. He’ll nod at you and ask you something you don’t understand in Spanish, at which point you’ll realize what you’ve found.

The menu will list all of the items you’re accustomed to: chicken, beef, steak, spicy pork. But there will be another option, unfamiliar to you: human. You’re nothing if not culinarily adventurous, so you’ll step up, mumble the Spanish pronunciation of human listed next to the meat type and wait patiently with the men and women in their tattered suits until the man in the cart nods at you again, says something in Spanish and, for four dollars, hands you a pair of tacos heaping with mysterious meat.

You’ll take a bite and the experience will be absolutely divine. You’ll finish one taco, then wrap the other up for your trip back to the surface. As you leave the subway people will nod at you as you go. They’ll know that it’s just a matter of time before you come back down and decide to stay. The tacos get everyone eventually. But it’s not their place to enforce their siren call: the tacos will handle that on their own.

Congratulations on Finding the Best Tacos Ever!