Creamy Braised Swiss Chard, served with crispy potatoes, roasted poblano peppers and topped with cotija cheese.
When I catch up via phone with El Grito Taqueria co-owner Joshua Barraza, he’s traveling back from Janesville, where he’s just taken some chickens to be processed. They’re chickens that his business partner, Matthew Danky, raised on his family’s farm outside Stoughton, and they’ll eventually end up in tacos served at El Grito, the duo’s new food cart. The cart will debut Aug. 8 (noon-4 p.m.) in front of Context Clothing, 113 King St.
Danky, the chef, is a veteran of such Madison restaurants as L’Etoile (during the Odessa Piper era) and Cafe Montmarte. Most recently, he was operating a puerta cerada, or “closed door” restaurant in Buenos Aires — more or less a private supper club run out of the chef’s own home.
Barraza, the cart’s marketing arm, was born in Los Angeles. Although he moved to Madison as a kid, his father’s family continues to live in Southern California.
“Nobody does tacos like L.A.,” says Barraza. Most Mexican food found in Madison is “more like Tex-Mex or from the border states,” he says, noting that Mexico has 31 states with vastly different regional specialties.
SoCal’s thriving taco scene draws from more regions, and its typical fare is “more refined,” Barraza says. He and Danky (who has family in Southern California and went to college there) will draw from L.A.’s diverse menu of tacos and also focus on natural and organic ingredients from area farmers.
El Grito will launch serving five different tacos (fillings will rotate, so the menu won’t always be the same) and two beverages — a prickly pear lemonade and horchata, the sweet rice-based, cinnamon-inflected refresher.
Customers might find a roasted sweet potato taco with ancho chili orange glaze, for instance, topped with crema, cilantro and crispy sweet potato chips, or stewed beef with smoked serrano peppers, bacon, a tomatillo-avocado salsa and radishes. Barraza also enthuses over their 27-ingredient Oaxacan mole over shredded chicken.
The El Grito “cart” is actually a retrofitted vintage 1969 Fleetwing “canned ham”-style travel trailer, towed by a 1973 Ford F 100 pickup. Although Madison’s cart regulations have dictated more rectangular, custom-made trailers, city of Madison street vending coordinator Warren Hansen says that as long as the Fleetwing is within the dimensions required in the city ordinance, it’s all good. Hansen says he doesn’t want to see the city with all “100% prefab” trailers, and notes that there’s another odd duck among vendors, Cafe Social, which sells coffee out of a former mail truck and also a converted van.
After its grand opening, El Grito plans to concentrate on special events, lunches at Epic and American Family, and, once the UW-Madison is back in session, late nights Thursday-Saturday on Broom Street. After participating in the city’s fall cart review, the gatekeeper to coveted Mall-Concourse sites, Barraza hopes they’ll score a slot on the Capitol Square for 2016.
El Grito Taqueria is one of several new carts to spend its first year vending around town via lunches at area business parks and neighborhood dinner nights, before gearing up to secure a Mall-Concourse site. Some are eschewing Mall-Concourse vending altogether, increasingly becoming a viable business strategy.
