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Madrid Foodie Corner: TKO Tacos, Chueca

December 26, 2024December 25, 2024 Madrid Metropolitan Food, Going out, What's on Madrid

There. Were. So. Many. People. In. The. Queue.

It was long and ragged and hungry.

And it was beautiful. This is how life should be, I thought, as I stood contemplating outside of Takos Al Pastor.

What a joy to have an institution that hasn’t sold out to the Reservation. That sterile, cold online thing that brings order to Restaurant Land when Restaurant Land shouldn’t be ordered. It should be: let’s try there, and fuck it’s full, we’ll come back in an hour, and then we ended up somewhere entirely different and might just have had the best night in the complete history of best nights.

The restaurant queue is serendipity, it’s freedom, it’s the city in a microcosm.

The queue is entertained by phone calls and tears and conversations about Juana and Hakeem, every ear titillated by gossip. The queue is satisfied by every fool who joins the end, making them at least closer to the front in relative terms. The queue is alive with the risk of it all. What if I don’t have the patience? What if they run out of food? What if it’s swallowed up by a huge localised sinkhole and I’ll have queued for nothing?

That’s what was going through our minds as we decided that we couldn’t be bothered to queue fourty minutes at Takos Al Pastor. Yes, the grapevine might have already crowned them the Undisputed King Of Tacos, but fourty minutes! That’s ridiculous.

So that’s how we ended up in another queue, albeit much smaller, at TKO Tacos. If Al Pastor is the Champ, TKO is the hegemon. Eight locations it has, this one Chueca, just off Gran Via. It’s not a pretty corner, of all the pretty corners in Chueca, but the queue was suitably short and stubby, only just extending out of the door. A bad sign?

Live in Madrid and you know TKO Tacos (formerly and betterly and sort of also still known as Tiki Tacos. Why the rebrand? Have they merged with the UFC?). People like it. They say the tacos cost only a euro, and well, that’s sort of all they say about it. And they do cost a euro. That’s true.

I ordered three taco al pastor, two suadero, and two arrachera. Oh, and a quesadilla de arrachera with an agua de jamaica to wash it all down.

Tacos? Come on man, you’re called Barny…

To which I’d answer a) that is the name I was given, and b) whilst my culinary heritage thinks a taco is a U shaped hard shelled thing that you stuff with mince and cheese (deliciously to be fair), I’ve done my time in Mexico and I like to think I know my al pastor from my al pastor.

We dined (taco’d?) with four friends, one Mexican and the rest Germans (always the case or is that just me?). The waitress called me cariño which made me feel lovely and special until she called Tomas cariño too and the spell was broken. It was busy and tight and probably just on the wrong side of bustling. Tomas complained that they were playing actual Mexican music, and not a random MTV channel on the TV like they do in his town. Minus points we agreed.

As for the food, it filled a hole. The al pastor was carried by the pineapple and still I needed more. An al pastor should explode, and it sort of just fizzled. The arrachera was tasty and substantial but a bit too chewy. And the quesadilla was more like cheese with a side of tortilla. The poor arrachera inside must’ve suffocated under the dense mass of dairy. It’s already dead!

The sauces were good, the green one especially had some weight, the type that sits hot and malignant in that most fantastic way in the stomach. Because of my blonde hair, waiters often take it upon themselves to warn me about any (literally any) trace of spice that might be beyond my spice capabilities, and I always reassure them they needn’t worry. But I might’ve been a little liberal with my first application of the green stuff. I’m big enough to admit that. I needed my agua de jamaica which was strong and sweet, although it didn’t evoke the memories I wanted it to evoke.

TKO Tacos is a good place. It’s good food, done quickly, at great value. And I love the queues. As long as they’re not too long.