Description
Has Raul Ortega’s Mariscos Jalisco truck really been shelling out its crunchy shrimp tacos for more than a decade, parked in the same industrial stretch a few blocks east of the L.A. River? It seems like just yesterday that we encountered our first bite of tacos dorados de camaron, a shell of fried tortilla stuffed with plump shrimp, drowned in spicy salsa and crowned with a few slices of avocado. Mariscos Jalisco, it's no small exaggeration, changed the way Angelenos considered street food. The truck proved a smash hit at nearly every food festival it attended; it netted a first-place tie in L.A. Taco's Taco Madness 2012 and gained a following worthy of semiprofessional soccer clubs. It's still easy to see why: The shrimp taco here is an ideal street food, able to be grasped with a single hand and crunched down in less than a few bites, filling enough to satisfy on a budget, yet cheap and delicious enough to make you think about ordering a half-dozen more. This is portable Mexican food at its finest.
