FAT City: Is Fresno the greatest taco truck town on Earth?

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Happy Independence Day weekend! 

What should we be writing about for the 4th of July? Hot dogs? Barbecues? Whatever, we’re talking al pastor. Hey, al pastor is a form of barbecue.

Whenever a new restaurant or style comes to Fresno, there’s a sense of us wanting to prove that Fresno is “more than just tacos.”

I’ve probably written something along those lines myself at some point. It’s an understandable impulse, to want to prove our diversity, that we’re more than just one thing, to focus on the shiny and new. At the same time, Fresno is a taco town, and we should own it.

So many other places, even cities smaller than Fresno, lend their names to famous signature dishes or local styles — from Buffalo wings, Chicago Italian Beef, and Kansas City Barbecue at the more famous end, to Altoona and Ohio Valley-style pizza at the more novelty famous end (have you seen either of those? horrifying).

So far, there has yet to take root any synonymous “Fresno” style of sandwich, barbecue, or pizza. For any local restaurateurs, it’s right there for the taking (just make sure it looks better than Altoona-style pizza). There are times when our civic aversion to putting on airs might be a barrier to the kind of boastful marketing this would require, but. It remains a possibility.

In the meantime, it feels like taco trucks might be our best shot for (inter)national acclaim. And it’s not just blowing smoke. Certainly, Fresno isn’t the only place to find great tacos (Mexico City, for instance, has almost 10 million people. That’s hard to compete with.)

But thanks to Fresno’s peculiar concoction of geographic sprawl and historic and current status as an agricultural powerhouse, you could make a strong case for Fresno as having the most diverse and vibrant taco truck scene on the planet. Simply put, we’re a constantly refreshing petri dish for great tacos with plenty of places to park a truck.

This week, we focus on al pastor. Al pastor from a “trompo,” specifically. The story of al pastor, coming from Lebanon to Pueblo to Mexico City, picking up various tweaks, spices, and innovations along the way, is one of local customization, successful cultural borrowing and casual ingenuity. In short, all those things that help explain why I find food writing worthwhile. Humanity has a way of putting the best of ourselves into our food.

Not every taco truck has al pastor, and not every “al pastor” comes from a trompo (a point of contention; debate for another time), but the ones we profiled do.

And there aren’t many places outside of Fresno where you can get life-changing al pastor in the parking lot of a tire store or at 2 am on the banks of a canal. The settings might not look pretty enough for a tourist brochure, but they sure make me proud. Other cities might be better at branding, but we’re pretty good at doing.

— Vince Mancini, Contributing Editor, Food

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