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Food

Auckland Likes Its Tacos with Beef Tongue and Lambs' Brain

After soaking up all the Taco de Lengua and chipotle they could in Mexico, two Auckland chefs learned one thing: you can put anything in a taco. And so they did.
All photos courtesy The Lucky Taco.

It's not often that I'm up to my wrists in brain, tongue, and bones before lunch. And yet here I am, in the kitchen of an Auckland taco van, tweezering monkfish, marinating lambs' brains, and slicing boiled tongue into perfect snack-sized strips.

If your idea of a taco is a gum-strafing hard pudenda of crispy yellow corn, filled with iceberg lettuce and three flicks of cheddar cheese then, firstly, hello Ms. Spragg, and I hope you're still enjoying life as a dinner lady. But secondly, boy, are you in for a shock if you ever get a proper one.

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The soft corn and flour tortillas of Auckland food truck The Lucky Taco are about as far from the flavourless semicircular Doritos of my youth as a bacon sandwich is from a Frazzle. But what is interesting about these authentically Mexican pockets of meat, spice, and merriment is that almost every single ingredient is as Kiwi as a sunburnt thigh.

READ MORE: You're Eating Fake Tortillas, and Diana Kennedy Is Pissed About It

You see, New Zealand is a fertile place; they even call it God Zone (Kerala and Texas already put tabs on God's Own Country). You could drop a tissue here and it would put down roots and produce fruit eventually. So the vast majority of the ingredients used in a Lucky Taco were grown, plucked, and picked right here, in the land of the long white cloud.

"We get our eggs from our lesbian neighbours," Lucky Taco co-owner Sarah tells me, as I get about slicing, coring, and hollowing out a huge stainless steel bucket of tomatoes. "We take them over our food compost from the truck and they feed it to the chickens. Then they deliver us our eggs to go into the brunch tacos."

Of course, not everything can be as hyperlocal as a sapphic neighbourhood ovum, but thanks to the high cost of importing food (remember, the distance from the vegetable-growing region of Australia to New Zealand is still over 3,752 km, more than from London to Jordan) and the fertile climates of areas like Hawkes Bay, Nelson, and Northland, in many cases it is cheaper, easier, and tastes altogether better to go local.

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"We were using a big meat supplier," says Sarah's partner, Otis, his giant tattoo-covered shoulders almost blocking the door of this small commercial kitchen in their garden. "But then our local butcher—this Sri Lankan lady—said that she would match the price if we started using her." It was this butcher who suggested they start making lambs' brain tacos, inspired by a brain and egg dish she ate as a child.

"She runs the business and her nephew Eddie butchers the actual carcasses," Otis tells me, as I start tweezing stray bones out of huge fillets of monkfish like plucking a huge, fleshy eyebrow. "They did run an old folks' home but it got too sad because the kids would get really attached to the residents but then, of course, they'd die." And so they moved into butchery. Well, of course.

What is interesting about these authentically Mexican pockets of meat, spice, and merriment is that almost every single ingredient is as Kiwi as a sunburnt thigh.

Talking of monkfish, in New Zealand, this meaty white fish isn't considered the high-end delicacy it is on British shores. "People are kind of au fait about monkfish over here," says Sarah, a fiesta of tea towels about her waist.

New Zealanders are also very familiar with other common Mexican ingredients. In 2012, this small island country exported $45.6m worth of avocados, which means that when the season is right, The Lucky Taco can make a great quantity of their delicious avocado cream, using yoghurt, lime, coriander, and spices. The only problem? Limes and coriander aren't in season at the same time as avocados. Good one, God Zone.

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And yet they still produce a fucktonne of the stuff—I watch their assistant Ruby blend up a huge plastic bucket's worth using what, to my untrained eye, looks suspiciously like a hedge strimmer. A couple of hours later, I watch, open-mouthed, as Ruby uses a smaller, hand-held blender to blitz seven small lamb's brains into a pink smoothie of offal. "The brain taco is very moreish," Ruby tells me. "Like a salted cracker." I'll take her word for it.

Sarah actually grew up in Britain, in Merseyside, raised on a classic 80s British diet of Findus Crispy Pancakes and microwave chicken chausseur. It was only after she moved to New Zealand and fell in love with Otis that she started wanting to cook.

READ MORE: New Zealand Scientists Are Electrocuting Steaks

"I think you want to feed the people you love," she tells me, as we stop for a cup of coffee on their veranda, overlooking the giant spray-painted hibiscus wall of the kitchen. "The seed of the idea to do a food truck was planted during our honeymoon in LA," she tells me. "But, when we came back, we realised that we're not Mexican, so we'd have to go over there and learn."

So in 2012 they went to Mexico City and enrolled in Ruth Alegria's food school, Mexico Soul and Essence, to learn about tacos, agua frescas, and salsas. Alegria took them on a tour of the great food joints in the fashionable Condesa district, and gave them one pivotal piece of advice: you can put anything in a taco.

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Of course, they don't put any old shit in a taco—each new taco is a well-crafted combination of flavours, textures, and local ingredients, although some may have surprising origins. The marinade for the pulled pork taco, for instance, started life as a Jamie Oliver recipe for pork and pepper goulash. And their Taco de Lengua—as any Spanish speakers out there will have guessed—is chock full of the old talking muscle: a tongue taco.

The next day, after a 10 km run around an extinct volcano and along the shore of an obscenely blue sea, I stop by the truck to reap my reward. A mushroom and egg taco, a healthy dollop of own-recipe chipotle sauce, and a glass of homemade horchata: I don't know if tongue tacos and sweaty Lycra-clad Brits was exactly what God had in mind for this Zone. But it certainly makes for some lucky eating.