By Karen Parr-Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – Street taco. It’s not an elegant description, but it is apt. These simple, inexpensive delicacies are cooked in box trucks and in small brick buildings called “taquerias,” from which they populate the streets of mostly West Coast cities.
Now two brothers from Sacramento, Calif. – where the “street taco” is the perfect taco – are making such tacos to Clarksville at their café-on-wheels, Tacos Maria.
Tacos Maria is housed in a box truck that is the lime-green tone of ice-cold mojitos. Operated by brothers Arthur Orr and Luis Leyva, Tacos Maria boasts a simple menu: street tacos filled with a choice of five juicy and flavorful meats. The brothers believe that the street taco is the best-tasting way to experience authentic Mexican food.
For $1.50 each, a few of these Tacos Maria delicacies create an inexpensive meal. Each one begins with a soft corn tortilla – the official tortilla of the street taco. (Orr says the corn tortilla, rather than a flour tortilla, brings out the flavor of the meat.) This tortilla is then topped with steaming meat – chicken, pork, spicy pork, steak or chorizo (pork sausage) – and chopped cilantro and onion. Each taco is as simple as it is delectable.
Tacos Maria offers tacos made the Mexican way, topped with steaming meat – chicken, pork, spicy pork, steak or chorizo (pork sausage) – and chopped cilantro and onion.
“The whole reason you have the small, corn tortilla is simplicity,” Orr says. “The meat tastes better with corn. Everything about a street taco is about how good the meat is.”
The next taco the brothers will add to their menu is one filled with shredded cow’s tongue, which is called “lengua” in Spanish.
“Lengua is very popular in a street taco,” Leyva says.
Tacos Maria also offers a homemade green salsa and red salsa for customers to add to their tacos. Other items on the menu include Mexican colas, called Jarritos, offered in fruit flavors, and Mexican Coca-Cola, which is made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup.
The brothers behind Tacos Maria come from a long line of taco makers, stretching back to their Grandfather Jose, who had a Mexican restaurant. Their father, aunts, uncles and cousins continue to operate eating establishments in California.
“By the time I was 11 or 12, I could run the whole thing by myself,” Orr says of his dad’s.
Orr is currently in the military, but will retire in a few weeks and will focus full-time on Tacos Maria. With Leyva, he would eventually like to settle down in one parking lot with the truck and then – ultimately – open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. But for now, the brothers are driving from place to place to sell their tacos.
Tacos Maria is housed in a lime-green box truck that travels to different Clarksville locations for lunch and dinner.
Fans can find out each week’s locations by visiting the brothers’ Facebook page. They post the whole week’s schedule on Monday, then post again each morning as a reminder of where they will be that day. Tacos Maria can also be followed on Twitter at @TacosMariaTruck.
Karen Parr-Moody began a career as a New York journalist, working as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, a beauty editor for Young Miss and a beauty and fashion writer for both In Style and People magazines. Regionally, she has been a writer at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper and currently writes about arts and culture for Nashville Arts magazine each month.