The Worst Taco I Ever Ate

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About six years ago, I was working in a mall. Okay, not technically in a mall, but above a mall, one of the combination office tower–restaurant zone–hotel–shopping complex monstrosities that have dumped themselves on New York over the last decade and a half of development. This mall had a food court where those of us in the office tower would eat lunch, because where the hell else were we going to go? Outside to another place just like it down the block? The food court had a dozen branches of middlebrow restaurants ranging from almost indie (Mighty Quinn’s Barbecue) to fully corporate (Chopt). And on one day—hungry, rushed, annoyed—I had the misfortune to get on line at Dos Toros.

Dos Toros was, once upon a time, possibly decent. The chain began with a shop off Union Square in 2009, in an era when New York had relatively few acceptable Mexican eateries. The owners, from Berkeley, California, said they wanted to bring Bay Area–style burritos to the East Coast, a claim that is typically prelude to a war crime. But the shop was a success, and snagged a New York Times “$25 and Under” review, by Oliver Strand:

But on that day in late 2018, dear readers, Dos Toros not only sucked—it sucked ass. When I finally received my three overstuffed carnitas tacos, brought them over to a high metal table, and attempted to eat one, it collapsed entirely, spilling pork and beans and pico de gallo onto my metal tray. So many ingredients, so little flavor! Holding the pathetic little pile together with both hands, I mashed it into my face for one bite and then a second before I realized I was full—not of taco but of the purest, vilest hatred that any man has ever known. I am typically someone with a high tolerance for disgust: I eat organ meats, insects, stinky tofu. My name is Gross, after all. But here I faced an abomination. It was all I could do not to vomit up everything I’d consumed for the past week. Instead, I angrily threw the remainder down onto the tray, wiped my hands with several napkins, and tossed everything into the thankfully nearby trash can. A man across from me stared on in mute horror.

If you have never experienced hate-eating, count yourself lucky. I have hate-eaten just a few times, and the memories are seared in my brain: those tacos, that fried-fish sandwich in Cape Cod. What makes hate-eating so distinctive is not only the badness of the food but the absolute necessity of eating it. You must be hungry, if not hangry; you must have waited a good length of time for your obscene meal; and there must be no other options. It’s this or nothing, and yet this is somehow worse than nothing, and still you eat it. If you were not so angry, you might be crying, but instead the fury drives away the sadness. You gnash and tear at the food like a wild forest carnivore, hoping to choke it down and be done with it, and usually it resists—this hateful food hates you right back. And when, at last, you’re finished, and the soggy, scattered detritus of your loathsome feast litters the table, the floor, your face, your pants, your soul, you are filled only with purest, deepest regret. You remain unsatisfied.

This is, however, only partially the fault of the food, prepared by morons and monsters who know nothing of the culinary arts. A great deal of the hate in hate-eating is self-directed. Hatred for making a poor choice of venue. Hatred for allowing yourself to become so hungry. Hatred for investing so much of your potential happiness in what is, after all, just another fucking meal.

For me, the hatred can start to curdle over time. Rather than hate-eating a single meal, I begin to hate eating in general. I hate the decisions: what to eat, what to cook, where to eat, when to shop. But that’s basic hate, fit only for clichéd Instagram Reels about married life.

Another variety of hate creeps in alongside boredom: I like to eat, I like to cook, but sometimes the limits of my abilities—the limits of food itself—make me resent the whole endeavor. I’ve tried almost everything on the planet by now, from percebes to goat boobs to milk fruit to jasmine limes, and while there is surprise and delight with each new discovery, I still feel like I’m circling around the same flavonoids, the same tired old descriptors. Often I wish there were whole new categories of foods, not just new, unheard-of plants and animals but fundamentally alien and unimaginable consumables whose chemical compositions would react with my tastebuds in ways the coders of our DNA could never have predicted. Of course, that’s just a fantasy, but it makes the reality a slog: I will cook and eat the same sorts of things until I die.

And, worse, I will have to. This is what I hate the most—the biological necessity of eating several times a day. There is no escaping it. Hunger is our most primal feeling, the emotion driving our actions and behavior since birth. You can suppress it with coffee, cigarettes, drugs. You can ignore it, distracting yourself with work or play. You can embrace it for a limited time—a dozen intermittent-fasting hours, a Yom Kippur or Ramadan. But hunger will come for you and overwhelm you with its gaping need: today, tomorrow, forever will you eat.

Layer on a desire to eat well—to find pleasure in the regular staving off of death—and we’re back, once again, in Sisyphus territory. The seared duck breast, the sweet crunch of an early-season carrot, a soothing bowl of rice and dal, they’re our brief moments of triumph in the face of eternal need. But when good food is absent, or unavailable, it feels like an additional boulder, one we’ve freely chosen to force up Mount Tartarus alongside our usual divine punishment. The gods must be having a chuckle over that one.

I’d like to end this by saying I’ve found a way to escape this cycle and never hate-eat or hate eating again. But I haven’t. I’m writing this early in the morning, a mug of now-cold coffee on my desk, and I still feel full from my company’s holiday-party meal of steak-frites last night. I don’t want to eat, and I don’t need to eat. Yet. But I will. In a few hours, I’ll find myself in midtown Manhattan, that familiar gnawing in my belly, and, faced with the infinite options of one of the greatest eating cities on the planet, I’ll have to make a decision, the same stupid decision I’ve made for decades and will have to make for decades to come. I can’t say precisely what it will be, but I know one thing in my heart: It sure as fuck won’t be Dos Toros. 🪨🪨🪨

Read Yesterday’s Attempt