Tell me How You Like it Pancho Villa’s; I Just Want to Make You Happy
Written: Feb 18 '03 (Updated Feb 18 '03)
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Pros: Everything they do, they do better than every other taqueria
Cons: Tiny little leather butt-straps
The Bottom Line: How many taquerias are actually worth getting on a subway for? This one is.
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Pancho Villa Taqueria |
So when I joined up with this here epinions thing, over two years ago, they had a function whereby you could submit a product, and the Nirav would kinda get to it later in the day – add it in, send you an email and whatnot, and you could write away. But I was new, and I thought I’d have all the time in the world to submit products. I figured that whenever it was that I finally came upon the words to describe how much I love Pancho Villa’s Taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District, I’d be able to post it within a day.
Well, I was wrong. Turns out, Nirav wasn’t sitting around waiting for people to submit new products after all. Nobody was sitting around. And nobody was, in particular, sitting around waiting to add products to the restaurant category, the red-headed step-child of the eps family.
After a time, right around when Eps 2.0 got launched, they pretty much gave up the pretense and got rid of the add-a-product feature. So I been sittin’ around here with my big fat knuckled love of Pancho’s and nowhere to stick it. Until now.
So how much do I love Pancho Villa’s? A lot. I want to buy it presents and put up shelves in its apartment and let it do dirty things to me that I would never even think of letting any other taqueria do, unless I’d had a whole mess of Jaeger shots and was feeling especially lonely.
Yeah, I know what you’re gonna say: “But what about La Taqueria Eyore? Everyone loves La Taqueria!”
Well, you know what? Fine. La Taqueria is better looking, no doubt. Lighter, more hygienic and all that. But better looking isn’t always what’s important, okay? At least that’s what my girlfriend keeps assuring me.
“But what about Taqueria San Jose, Eyore, huh? I mean, you wrote a review entitled Big, Fat Slab of Meaty Love all about San Jose and you gave it 5 stars if I remember correctly”
Sure, San Jose makes a monster burrito. But again, as jazzbocrow keeps assuring me, size doesn’t really matter, and I choose to believe her.
No, it’s Pancho’s for me, and it always will be.
the ambiance and other stuff
Pancho Villa’s Taqueria is located on 16th Street, between Mission and Valencia, so it’s only a half-block from the Mission/16th BART station. Which means that if you work downtown, you can be there in 10 minutes. It also means it’s right there at the heart of where you’re likely to be if you’re hanging out in the Mission at night.
The storefront, and the place, is fairly massive, by taqueria standards. In fact, it may well be the roomiest taqueria in all of San Francisco. But it could still use more space, because the place is almost always filled to capacity, with a line stretching to the front door. More than once, I’ve found myself at the cash register, ready to go eat my food, and looked around to find not a single empty table among the 30 or so packed tightly throughout the room.
But it’s an amazing thing, what Pancho’s has accomplished. Somebody almost always stands up to leave just as I’m heading out to find me a seat. The timing is uncanny. They’ve got some kind of wacky Mexican Feng Shui cum voodoo thing that guarantees that no matter how many people eat there, there’s always exactly the right number of seats for everyone who needs to sit. Perhaps more than the Feng Shui, though, is can be explained by the fact that Pancho’s seats are just unbelievably uncomfortable. They have these little square wooden stool things with thatched straps of dark leather providing the only rump support. And, well, yeah, I know I have a big rump and all, but I don’t rightly believe that Jennifer Love Hewitts cheeks would fit comfortably in the little 8 inch leather hammock that dangles between these wooden frames. So people eat up and head out, without much lollygagging afterward.
the food
Maybe it’s the clarified butter that makes everything better. I’m not swearing it’s butter they squirt on some of their frying stuff – it could just be oil of some sort – but whatever it is, I’m fairly convinced that’s gotta be the difference between Pancho’s foodstuffs and those you’ll get at any of the many other Mission outposts that also serve really good, salty carne asada, delicious charred chicken and juicy, melt-in-your-mouth pork.
Pancho’s especially uses plenty of the gee-type solution for their prawn dishes. My favorite among these is the red pepper prawns, which for around $9.00 is a lot of prawns and other stuff (beans, rice, lousy salad). And when I say the stuff is good, I should clarify. I hate mushrooms. I think they’re just about the nastiest thing you can throw on a plate and I’ve been afraid of them ever since I saw Clint Eastwood get killed by a bunch of evil, hot little Southern school-girls with a basketful of ‘em in The Beguiled about 30 years ago. But the spicy prawns at Pancho’s come all mixed up with mushrooms along with the shrimps and the whole dried red chiles, and I don’t hardly mind a bit. I’ll even eat some of ‘em – the mushrooms – just to soak up a little more of that spicy clarified butter.
They’ve also got five of six other prawn dishes, from pungent garlic prawns, to chipotle prawn cocktail, and a steak and prawn platter, and none of them costs more than $11.00.
Of course, more often than not, I get the Carne Asada Burrito Especial, which is your basic big meat burrito with all the fixins. Except maybe it’s the Carne Asada Burrito Deluxe that I get. Or maybe the Carne Asada Super Burrito. I don’t know. It seems like they’ve got about ten different ways to describe guyjantic burritos with cheese and salsa and beans and lettuce and guac and sour cream, and I just get the one that has the most stuff, but without the lettuce.
The Carne Asada is exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s lean but juicy. It’s got some burnt stuff on it, but plenty of pink medium rare stuff in there too, packed with delicious, hearty, good to the last drop, trichinosis. It’s salty and melt in your mouth flavorful and I don’t think I’ve ever come across even the slightest hunk of nasty fat or anything else I ever had to spit into a napkin.
The grilled chicken is just righteous. They keep the barbeque grill running on high all day long and these cooks know exactly how to cook these breasts just enough so that you’re almost afraid you’re gonna get salmonella, but you almost never do. And even though the insides are cooked only enough to keep the chickens juicy as can be, the outsides are lightly coated in burnt fat and charcoally flavor. I know that sounds nasty, but seriously, I mean it all in the best way. The chicken tastes like something; not just the bland generic “meat product” you get at a lot of taquerias.
Panchos has the biggest menu in the Mission, short of Taqueria San Jose, and everything I’ve had there has been top quality. Their tostadas are massive, loaded with delicious, smoky black beans, or perfectly runny refrieds, in a big old tortilla shell. The quesadillas make the burritos look puny, loaded down with decent quality white cheese and really fine home-made salsa with crisp bright green jalapeños. Their papusas look sturdy.
And oh, their nachos. My people tire of hearing me say that nachos are nature’s perfect food, but it’s true. And nature perfected the nacho, just about, when it invented the Pancho Villa nacho. These things are slathered with every bit of everything you could ever want. They don’t skimp on the cheese. They don’t skimp on the meat. They don’t skimp on the guac or the sour cream. It’s all piled about 6 inches above the relatively small plates so you can barely believe it’s holding up. But that cheese just acts as the perfect mortar, holding the entire architecture together. It’s a wondrous thing, these nachos.
And what makes everything at Pancho’s even better is that they’ve finally gotten on the salsa bar bandwagon. They used to just have these little jars of oniony, non-quite-tomatillo salsa on each of the tables. And that was fine, but I always thought a wider selection of salsa would make the place heaven o earth. Now they have the whole array of salsa bar staples, all apparently made fresh throughout the day: nice, lemony-orange tomato salsa; deep burgundy salsa studded with pepper seeds; rough cut fresh tomato, cilantro, garlic and onion salsa, cool tomatillo salsa ... the works.
And get this: They’ve got churros! Not too shabby, eh? And it’s not even the kind of churros you see at carnivals and whatnot, that just hang in some glass case under a heat lamp. These things are made fresh right there, so you can sometimes get ‘em when they’re so hot that the interior is still kind of molten. Good stuff.
the conclusion
Like a lot of fan-favorite culinary items (Caesar Salad, Irish Coffee) the origin of the burrito is disputed and its history has become muddled with competing claims and the functional equivalent of urban myths. For what its worth, there are credible claims that the first burritos in the world were made in San Francisco’s Mission District for farm-workers to take out into the fields, back when there were farms anywhere near the city. I don’t know if it’s actually true that the burrito was invented there, but I’ll box anyone who denies that the Mission is where the burrito has been perfected. And in all the Mission, there’s noplace that makes a more consistently wonderful variety of burritos than Pancho’s.
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Pancho Villa’s
3071 16th St. (between Valencia & Mission)
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: 415-864-8840
Recommended:
Yes
Kid Friendliness: Yes
Vegetarian Friendly: Yes
Best Suited For: Friends
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Epinions.com ID:
Mr.Eyore
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Reviews written: 129
Trusted by: 299 members
About Me:
I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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