Residents say a 60-cent tortilla is either a bold culinary stance or the first step toward a taco-based mortgage.
SILVER LAKE, Los Angeles, California (Screw The News) – The neighborhood council in Silver Lake held an emergency session this week to discuss a single taco, specifically a $7.49 carne asada taco on Sunset Boulevard that has led residents to ask whether Los Angeles has finally run out of things to charge for and begun charging for the idea of a taco itself. Attendees arrived with calculators, printouts and in one case a taco-shaped abacus, and left with more questions than they had before, plus a small paper bag.
The taco in question is served at Tacos Royale, which sits near the Silver Lake and Echo Park border and, according to LAist’s feature on the Sonoran-style stand, serves USDA Prime beef cooked over mesquite charcoal, folded into flour tortillas made from wheat flour, beef tallow, salt and water. The tortilla alone reportedly costs about 60 cents, compared with roughly a nickel for the standard model. The founder has described the result as a fine dining or steakhouse experience in a taco, for $7, and has said he hopes to build a family-owned chain of about 80 locations, which he calls roughly a tenth of the size of In-N-Out.
The Math Behind the Meat
Silver Lake accountants have spent the week reverse-engineering the economics. The Prime beef reportedly runs about three times the price of ordinary taqueria beef. A burrito is $15.75. A combo is $24.75. For comparison, an In-N-Out Double-Double costs about $6, and its combo about $11, a gap that one neighborhood retiree described as “the difference between lunch and a deposit.”
“People keep saying you’re paying for the quality,” said Esperanza Lindholm-Ruiz, an economist who consults for the Eastside Institute of Condiment Policy. “That’s true. You’re also paying for the quality of the person who explained the quality, and for the pleasure of being told that this salt is the purest in the world, which is the sort of claim usually reserved for a bank brochure.”
Evidence gathered by the council’s tortilla subcommittee, which meets on folding chairs outside a laundromat, includes the following:
- A single taco, at current prices, costs more than a gallon of milk and about the same as the milk’s emotional support.
- At the proposed pace of expansion, 80 locations would require approximately 80 drive-thru lanes and roughly one new Sunset Boulevard to hold the line.
- The stand is open Thursday through Sunday, from 6 p.m. to midnight, a schedule that residents say “makes it a taco for people with plans.”
- Seven out of ten neighbors surveyed said they would eat there again, and eight out of ten said they would rather not discuss it with their landlord.
Not the Only Costly Wrap in Town
Silver Lake has company in the pursuit of the extravagant handheld. Elsewhere in the city, the dining scene has produced a $27 lamb neck tamal in Venice, an $11 heirloom corn chuchito in South Los Angeles and a $21 shelling bean tamal in Orange County, all covered in LAist’s survey of the priciest tamales in the region. On Melrose, meanwhile, the sports bar Pawn Shop LA sells an eight-piece bucket of pickle-brined fried chicken for $68, a price that puts the bucket in the same financial category as a used bicycle.
Diners have noticed a pattern. In Los Angeles, a food is no longer evaluated by whether it fills the stomach. It is evaluated by whether it can be photographed next to a coffee table book and discussed at a dinner party that costs more than the dinner.
Memo From the Subcommittee
The Silver Lake tortilla subcommittee’s draft resolution, which was handed out at the meeting and promptly used as a coaster, reads as follows.
RESOLUTION 14-B: Whereas a taco costs $7.49; whereas the tortilla costs 60 cents; whereas the tortilla is the one part of the taco that we can all see; and whereas the council has no jurisdiction over any of it, be it resolved that a strongly worded letter be sent to the tortilla. Seconded by the man outside, who has been waiting for the line since the meeting began.
The Cattle Industry Weighs In
The price of Prime beef has not escaped the notice of the agricultural community, which has been on the receiving end of the city’s appetite for premium cuts. Observers in the livestock world have followed the argument at farm.fm in which a dairy cow demands back pay after a debate with a beef cow, a labor dispute that Silver Lake diners say explains a great deal about why the salt is so pure and the invoice so long.
“Nobody is saying the taco isn’t good,” said Marcus Teodorovic-Adeyemi, a stand-up comic who works a Thursday night open mic in Echo Park and eats at the stand only when somebody else’s card is on the table. “I’m saying that if my taco has a business plan, my taco has a better one than I do. It wants 80 locations. I want a sublet.”
The council has tabled the matter until its next session, when members will consider a proposal to replace the $7.49 price with a more honest figure that includes everyone’s feelings about it. In the meantime, Silver Lake residents are encouraged to bring their own tortillas, their own salt and their own sense of proportion to the stand, and to report back to the neighborhood on the findings. Further dispatches from the city’s many price points are on file at Bohiney.com, which offers one flavor, free of charge, and has never once asked a customer to sign for the salt.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/