The Best Meal I Ever Ate Was a Taco in a Town That Was On Fire

I have eaten in some good places. I have been cooked for by people who do it at the highest level, in rooms designed to make you feel that the meal matters. I have had the tasting menus and the things with foam on them and the waiter who describes the farm the radish grew up on. Some of it was wonderful. I am not above any of it.

The best meal I ever ate was a taco I bought from a place/building/area in a town in Baja that appeared, on arrival, to be partially on fire.

Let me back up, because the taco does not make sense without everything in front of it.

We had gone deep into Baja to surf. I won't be specific about where, partly because the people who know will know and the people who don't shouldn't, and partly because the whole point of the trip was that it was the kind of place you don't put on a map. Which turned out to be more literally true than we'd bargained for, because large stretches of where we were going were, in fact, not on any map we had. We drove all night to get there. We left the market in Tijuana with a few warm beers, a carton of eggs and cans of things and packs other things and drove all night, the headlights carving through a kind of dark that has no towns in it, taking turns at the wheel and taking turns being certain we were lost.

We were certain because we were. By my count we took eleven wrong turns, though "wrong" implies there was a right one clearly marked, and there wasn't. This was before GPS .

We were navigating by anecdote. By the accumulated hearsay of other surfers, passed down secondhand and thirdhand and probably embellished at every handoff, which meant our directions were less a map than a kind of oral folklore. Turn left a while after the rock that's bigger than it seems. We drove on faith and folklore and the conviction of young people who believed confidence was a substitute for information, and you took eleven wrong turns because eleven of the rocks looked bigger than they seemed, and only one of them was the rock. And I was distracted by a girl which made the literal way finding much harder.

The maps we had showed empty.

And we had let our enthusiasm get out ahead of our planning, which is a polite way of saying we'd planned essentially nothing. We had boards and fuel and a vehicle that mostly started and a heroic underestimation of how far we'd be from anything resembling a store. What we had for provisions, as best I can reconstruct it, was crackers, some things in cans, some rapidly perishing fruit, a bottle of tequila, and — I think - some ramen we never quite figured out how to cook.

So that was the diet. Crackers. Tequila. The idea of ramen.

Except it wasn't quite the whole diet, because there was Nathan.

I don't fully know how to explain Nathan. There's one in every group, I've since decided — the person who, while the rest of us were treating trip logistics as a vague rumor, quietly went home and packed like a man preparing to outlast a siege. The person who was someone’s friend’s boyfriend who wasn’t really not invited. While we had crackers, Nathan had a cooler. A real one. With a latch. We did not know what was in the cooler, because Nathan did not open the cooler in front of us. We knew only that it was heavy and that at certain points in the day Nathan would wander a distance away, turn his back, and eat something that was clearly, audibly, devastatingly better than crackers.

He would not share. The years have not softened this: it was not that Nathan ran out, or rationed carefully, or shared what little he had. Nathan had plenty. Nathan had abundance. Nathan had, we later confirmed, sandwiches — actual constructed sandwiches, with components — and a stock of other provisions that suggested a level of foresight bordering on the prophetic. I believe that he had pickles which are basically the dessert you have after a sandwich. And he ate them more or less in front of us, while we gnawed crackers, with the serene conscience of a man who had read the understood trip plan we had and simply chosen to believe it.

I have come to respect it, honestly. Nathan was right and we were wrong, and he saw no reason to subsidize. But at the time it was an outrage so pure it almost kept us warm.

It also nearly got us all arrested, or worse, which I'll get to, because the cooler has one more scene to play.

Somewhere in the long drive — I genuinely can't tell you which non-road — we came around something and into a checkpoint. Police. A lot of police. More police than the empty sand could possibly have seemed to require, with the kind of weaponry that seems overstated. They moved with a quickness that was practiced and a posture that was learned. They wanted to know who we were and what we were doing this far out and where the drugs were hidden, and the honest answer — we drove all night to surf a wave we can't quite locate and we're living on crackers — did not, I think, fully reassure them. There was a stretch where it was not clear in which way was encounter was going to tilt.

And then they found the cooler.

Here is the thing about a heavy, latched cooler that one nervous gringo is guarding in the middle of nowhere: it is, from a certain professional point of view, extremely interesting. The police converged on Nathan's cooler. There was a moment — I am not exaggerating this for effect, it is simply what happened — when there were guns pointed at Nathan's food. The most heavily defended sandwiches and charcuterie in Baja.

It was, of course, a man who had simply packed a really good lunch. I'd like to report that they made him share. They did not. But they let us go, and we drove on into the dark, and Nathan learned nothing about sharing or about Policia.

But the surfing was perfect. This is an essential part because it matters to the taco. The surfing was the kind you spend a whole life chasing and almost never get. You never get it but you got it. Clean, well-overhead, peeling sets coming through with the regularity of something mechanical, and — this is the part that doesn't happen anymore, almost anywhere — not another human being in the water. Not one. Just your friends and that one asshole Nathan. No lineup to negotiate, no one to share with, no one to drop in on you or paddle around you or be silently resented. Just us and a wave that kept arriving as if it had been told we were coming. We surfed until it was too hard to raise out arms. We surfed past the point of being able to surf well because you don’t give up on a wave like that.

And then, depleted in a way that is hard to describe to someone who hasn't emptied themselves out like that — running on crackers and agave and adrenaline and the residue of having had guns pointed at our friend's lunch — we got back in the van and drove until we hit a town.

I use the word "town" loosely. What we found was a cluster of low buildings, a lot of dust, an indeterminate number of fires that nobody seemed concerned about — trash fires, cooking fires, the general low-grade combustion of a place that handles its business in the open — and dogs. So many dogs. Dogs who had clearly organized themselves into a functioning society with no further need of human governance. Packs of them, trotting around with the brisk confidence of creatures who own the place, which they plainly did. It was dusk. Everything was orange, from the fires, and in that particular darkness, all the light was the color of fire. It looked, I will be honest, a little like the end of the world, if the end of the world were also somehow kind of relaxing.

And there were tacos.

I don't remember the place well. I remember it was lit by something, the building had no wall. and that there was a man, and that there was meat on a vertical spit . I remember there was no menu and no decision to make. You got what he was making. I remember the tortillas were small and warm and came in twos.

It was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth. It remains the best thing I have ever put in my mouth. Nothing has come close. Not the tasting menus. Not the radish with its life story. Nothing.

Now, I am not a fool, and neither are you, and we both know what was actually going on.

The taco was very good. I want to be fair to the taco — it was, by any honest standard, a genuinely excellent taco, made by someone who had made ten thousand of them and would make ten thousand more. But it was not the best food . The taco was a very good taco. What made it the best meal of my life was everything that wasn't the taco.

It was the all-night drive and the eleven wrong turns and the rock that was bigger than it seemed. It was the two days of crackers. It was the emptied-out body. It was the police and the guns and the cooler and the strange deflating mercy of that whole encounter. It was the surfing — the absurd, undeserved, once-in-a-life perfection of those waves, which had cracked something open in me that doesn't usually open. It was the light and the fires and the dogs and the sense of being somewhere so far past the edge of the managed world that the rules felt suspended. It was the specific, total relief of hot fresh food arriving in a body that had earned it. It was being young and indestructible and exactly where I wanted to be with exactly the people I wanted to be there with plus Nathan.

The taco walked into the middle of all of that and got to take the credit.

This is the thing I have come to understand about the best meals, and the best moments, and honestly the best trips. They are never just the thing itself. They are the thing itself plus everything you went through to arrive at it. The taco was transcendent because of the crackers, and the wrong turns, and the long dark, and the guns. The wave was holy because we'd driven into nowhere to find it. The whole experience was unrepeatable because it was earned, in the only currency that buys experiences like that, which is effort and discomfort and the willingness to be somewhere with no concierge and no plan and no idea what's coming.

You cannot order this. That's the part worth sitting with. There is no resort on earth, however magnificent, that can sell you the taco-in-the-burning-town, because the resort's entire promise is the opposite of the conditions that made the taco what it was. The resort removes the crackers. The resort removes the not-knowing. The resort removes the all-night drive and the wrong turns and the dogs and the earned, depleted, cracked-open state that turned a decent taco into the high-water mark of my entire eating life. The resort hands you, instead, a perfectly competent meal in a perfectly pleasant room, and it will be fine, and you will not remember it in six weeks, let alone in the decades I've now spent failing to re-find that taco.

I'm not telling you to subsist on crackers, or to drive all night, or to get your lunch inspected at gunpoint. Some of that found us rather than the other way around, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend the whole package. What I'm telling you is that the meals you remember for the rest of your life are not the ones that were handed to you in comfort. They're the ones that arrived at the end of something. They're the reward at the bottom of a little hardship — the warm thing after the empty stretch. Taste that lands best when you’ve done something to deserve it; so maybe Nica does too.

The resort is very good at making sure nothing is ever earned. That's the service. That's what you're paying for. And it's exactly why the best meal of your life is not going to happen there.

It's going to happen at the end of a long day, somewhere you didn't plan to be, when you're emptied out and lit up and a little bit lost, and someone hands you something simple and hot and perfect. We can't promise you a town on fire. But we know where the roads stop, we know what's cooking at the end of them, and we are very, very good at getting you to the bottom of the kind of day that makes a taco taste like that.