'¿Tacos or Tacos?' Tours Central Texas
Food trucks and trailers are increasingly popular in Austin these days, serving everything from traditional tacos to kimchi fries to frozen chocolate-dipped bananas. Local filmmaker Robert Lemon, who is also a PhD student in geography at The University of Texas, compares and contrasts two very different mobile food vendors in the short documentary ¿Tacos or Tacos?, which played Cine Las Americas this week and will screen at the Hill Country Film Festival tomorrow.
The documentary focuses on Mighty Cone on South Congress and Tortas El Guero on Cameron Road. One serves gourmet meats and snacks in paper snow-cones, parked in a trendy lot devoted to food trailers; the other serves Mexico City-style tortas and tacos from a converted school bus next to a car wash. Lemon shows up on camera discussing the Austin mobile food culture and trying some of the wares from the two vendors. In addition, he interviews not only the managers/owners of the trailers but also some of the patrons.
One of the points the documentary makes is that the two different trucks reflect the culture of their surrounding community, and the way that food is important to people, especially people far from their hometown. The interviews and discussions around Tortas El Guero are especially good.
The difficulty is that Lemon is also contrasting traditional Mexican cuisine with Tex-Mex, and Mighty Cone isn't actually a Tex-Mex trailer. He interviews a couple of people in Torchy's, but I would argue that there's a big difference between Torchy's and some of the old-school Tex-Mex joints you'd find not far from the Mighty Cone trailer. I'm not sure many South Austinites would want to feel represented by Mighty Cone. Someone uses the term "SoCo Mex" at one point, a term I devoutly hope never to hear again.
I feel like ¿Tacos or Tacos? is an excellent beginning to a dialogue about Austin food cultures -- it's a little simplified but that just adds fuel to the discussion. Lemon may feel the same way: In an interview at the Sonoma Film Festival, where the movie premiered, he says he hopes to make more short films about food trucks and trailers.
[Aside: My North Central neighborhood has no food trailers, but for some reason nearby Burnet Road is attracting a surprising number of brick-and-mortar eateries that were formerly trailers, like Hey Cupcake, Cutie Pies, Lucky J's and now Man Bites Dog. Why don't we get trailers, but we do get their ensuing restaurants? An interesting side issue.]
Over at YNN, Victor Diaz has interviewed Lemon and discusses ¿Tacos or Tacos? as part of a story on Cine Las Americas and Hill Country Film Festival. And I've embedded a trailer for ¿Tacos or Tacos? below. I hope we'll get more chances to see Lemon's short doc in Austin -- an outdoor venue would be ideal, of course, one where some mobile food vendors could participate. In the meantime, I'm tempted to head over to Cameron Road and try a Mexico City torta soon.