This story is tenth in a series. Zach will be posting a new story on Mexican food in San Diego every Thursday until he leaves Southern California for the San Francisco Bay, where he will continue to write and edit for The Eaten Path.

Los Angeles can stake a claim as one of the greatest food cities in the world. A sprawling landscape of ethnic hotspots and economic diversity has truly made L.A. a place where, for dinner, anything is possible. That Los Angeles also has some of the worst transit in the world – an angeleno’s access to this smorgasbord, considering car congestion and indirect highways, is limited to a small sector of the city – is the ultimate tease. Even for someone like me, who on countless occasions has driven from Venice Beach to Cesar Chavez Blvd. for a burrito, food culture becomes a casualty of traffic.

This isn’t any different in New York City or the Bay Area, where geography isolates gastronomy. Taking a trip into or out of the city for a meal requires at least an afternoon set aside. Big cities are great places to eat out, but living in big cities doesn’t mean all of it’s in reach, a fact of my life from the get-go of my career as a customer – until San Diego.

This isn’t to say that S.D.’s restaurant scene can compare to L.A.’s or N.Y’s. San Diego is a relatively small city with a very limited diversity in food culture (and culture in general). If you have a car, though, it’s even smaller. That’s the intrigue: An efficient highway system with no traffic puts all of the city at your fingertips, whether or not you care to go everywhere.

The ease of exploring S.D.’s lunch landscape changed the way this angeleno thinks about a quick bite, and I grasped the paradigm shift in one key moment; sitting in my apartment in North San Diego, wondering what I should have to eat, I suddenly realized that in less than thirty minutes, I could be biting into a carne asada taco in Tijuana, Mexico.

Even though this city’s food culture is hardly all-encompassing, there’s plenty diversity within comida Mexicana. The fact that Google Maps routinely overestimates the driving duration means that I can cruise to Chula Vista for tacos and back with plenty of time to spare in my lunch hour. It also means that the San Ysidro gateway is less than twenty minutes away, and that isn’t a bad trek to reach the end of a country, especially when the next country over has such readily tasty snacks.

Or I can save an extra five minutes and settle with the place across the street from Mexico, where Tacos Yaqui enjoys a clear view of the waving green, red and white flag. That trip is doubly worth it, considering Tacos Yaqui – named after a native tribe from the area – serves Sonoran cuisine, a meal that would have otherwise required a much longer drive through deserts and vacationing Arizonans.

Tacos Yaqui isn’t the kind of Sonoran food that New Mexico, Texas and the rest of the chimichanga belt consider comfort Tex-Mex, nor is it unfamiliar to Californians. Tacos Yaqui is no different than a zillion other taco shops in San Diego – except for a couple of ingredients – and all the usual tacos are on the menu, even if some of them look a little different, like the adobada taco pictured above. They still taste great, and there’s even a little salsita bar with labels, so you know which salsa goes with which kind of carne, something this gringo appreciated.

Maybe it’s a little weird to have beans and tortilla disks as an appetizer instead of pickled peppers and salsa, but that’s where the estilo Sonora comes in. If the northern state of Mexico does one thing culinarily better than anywhere else is Mexico, it’s refried beans, and that boast is on full display in Tacos Yaqui’s complimentary bowl of rich, meaty and fatty frijoles.

The most unique thing about Tacos Yaqui, in my Californian opinion, are the flour tortillas, which are the bases for Sonoran tacos, a snack food both similar to and different from most tacos I’m familiar with. That’s because these tortillas are so paper-thin that the taste and feel is foreign to me, and so are the tacos. Take Tacos Yaqui’s flagship dish, tacos perrones, which, no, doesn’t mean “dog.” Perron is slang for “the shit” or the like, and Tacos Yaqui’s “the shit” tacos live up to their slang. A cross between carne asada and machaca adds a stewy weight to the lightweight tortilla, and a wealth of familiar toppings turn each bite into a full meal.

Then there are the chicharron tacos, which again probably don’t mean what you immediately think. Chicharron, which can mean “deep-fried” in most taco shops, can refer to any kind of meat, and in many cuisines south of the border, chicharrones de pescado are common. In Sonora, these handily bite-sized, crispy fish cubes are also served on the classic flour tortilla and offer alternatives to carne, though I doubt I’d ever give up a taco perron for one.

Maybe Tacos Yaqui isn’t amazing enough to warrant a drive to the edge of the country for lunch, but then again, time and space work oddly in San Diego, where eating at your convenience means something entirely different. All roads lead to Sonoran fast food when there’s no traffic to slow you down.

Tacos Yaqui
111 W Olive Dr
San Ysidro, CA 92173
(619) 662-2454

Zach’s San Diego Countdown
Week 1 – Super Cocina
Week 2 – Los ‘Bertos
Week 3 – El Tio Alberto
Week 4 – Ranas Mexico City Cuisine
Week 5 – La Fachada
Week 6 – Aqui es Texcoco
Week 7 – La Playa Taco Shop
Week 8 – Las Cuatros Milpas
Week 9 – Tacos El Paisa
Week 10 – Tacos Yaqui
Week 11 – Tacos El Gordo
Week 12 – Mariscos El Pescador
Week 13 – Rudy’s Taco Shop

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under San Diego.