{"id":200,"date":"2010-06-27T19:04:11","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T02:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/?p=200"},"modified":"2010-06-27T19:04:11","modified_gmt":"2010-06-28T02:04:11","slug":"32-campos-tacos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/2010\/06\/32-campos-tacos\/","title":{"rendered":"32 Campos Tacos"},"content":{"rendered":"

32 Campos Tacos<\/p>\n

June 27, 2010<\/p>\n

10814 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230<\/p>\n

Culver City<\/p>\n

Campos Tacos is a mini-chain of five or ten restaurants scattered mainly around the Westside. There was one on Venice Boulevard in Palms that became Pancho\u2019s<\/a> recently; they used to have some giant tasty al pastor tacos that you could wash down with a Negra Modelo. There is also a Campos Famous Burritos on Venice Boulevard at Motor Avenue that I visit frequently, but when I go to a place called \u201cFamous Burritos\u201d, I order a burrito. I\u2019m not a troublemaker, so why would I deliberately defy such an explicit guideline contained within the name of the restaurant?<\/p>\n

Be advised that all these Camposes serve completely different food. The Burrito place has a very savory, chorizo-like al pastor that I enjoy in burrito format; but Campos Tacos on Jefferson in Culver City, where Carmen and I had lunch today, surprised me with a diametrically opposed al pastor of super fruity sweetiness.<\/p>\n

We found this suburban-looking taco shop in the middle of the big strip mall with the Target store. The television let us watch Argentina beat Mexico at the big sportsball tournament. I ordered one each of the al pastor, carne asada, and carnitas tacos, which were well above average in size and $1.75 each. They were served con todo, with a couple different kinds of salsa preapplied, and a handful of storebought-seeming chips that I nonetheless enjoyed with the spicy verde salsa from the salsa bar.<\/p>\n

I started off with the carne asada. The ordinary tortillas were hot, steamed, but not laminated, so I performed the tortilla offset maneuver on this big taco. My first bite was very satisfying. I tasted onions, cilantro and salsa in proper balance with a beefy steak flavor sparely seasoned with salt and pepper, and citrus from the lime I had squeezed above my tacos; but on subsequent bites, I was disappointed to find much of the steak too tough, resisting one\u2019s ability to bite through it. Flavor was good, but texture was subpar.<\/p>\n

Next I ate the carnitas taco, the best of the bunch. Unlike the moist, grey carnitas at Famous Burritos, the carnitas here had a nice brown color and a dry consistency with good al-denteness. The addition of spicy green from the salsa bar helped round out this taco.<\/p>\n

Finally I ate the al pastor. Despite the very peppery-looking salsa, this taco surprised me by being the fruitiest, sweetest al pastor experience of the year, with a taste reminiscent of brown sugar. I liked it, but the carnitas was better, and I have to admit it was not better than the median of al pastor meats.<\/p>\n

Carmen ordered a hard shell taco with beef, which she declared \u201cBetter than Tito\u2019s\u201d. I took a bite and found it very tasty, with the crispy taco shell offering all the satisfactions of oily, freshly-deep-fried starches. A sign in the restaurant claimed that they have the best crispy tacos in town. That would be a fun project to verify.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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32 Campos Tacos June 27, 2010 10814 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230 Culver City Campos Tacos is a mini-chain of five or ten restaurants scattered mainly around the Westside. There was one on Venice Boulevard in Palms that became Pancho\u2019s recently; they used to have some giant tasty al pastor tacos that you could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[13,12,14,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tacos.architectureburger.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}