Zocalo, Stockholm Sweden

I was pretty excited to see this sign at Kungsträdgården a couple of days ago.  The tacos in the ad looked delicious and we have really been missing good tex-mex here in Stockholm. Our one attempt to make carnitas here was a complete disaster and when we eventually get the recipe right we will definitely immortalize it on the blog.

We were wandering through the food court in the Kista gallerian this evening and noticed that a Zocalo had opened up there. The menu looked good, promising carnitas, barbacoa and even agua fresca. We ordered the barbacoa and carnitas tacos and asked if they had horchata. Unfortunately, they were out of carnitas and didn't have the agua frescas in yet. So we went with the barbacoa tacos and the street tacos with barbacoa (can you tell we missed barbacoa?).

So, it was pretty obvious this place was spanking new. The lady at the counter was looking at each recipe for how to assemble the dishes and she had to cut our tacos out of bigger tortillas with a small cookie-cutter.

Now on to details of the food.

The high-points:

1) The lady at the counter was absolutely lovely for it being (what seemed like) her first day. When she noticed that the cilantro was sort of tired looking, she replaced it with fresh cilantro from the back of the store. She really took a lot of time and effort with assembling every taco, she didn't throw food on the plate. This may sound silly, but each of the tacos had each ingredient equally. (Yeah, maybe this means a lot more to me than it does to other people. I also like my bread evenly buttered to the very edges otherwise I get a nervous tic.)

2) The menu looked good. This is an excellent indication of what Zocalo wants to be. Lots of stuff that screams tex-mex to us. And we don't mean to brag, but we're pretty discerning about our tex-mex. They had shiny-sexy-buzzwords like jarritos and agua fresca and barbacoa and carnitas and habanero and so on. Mental food porn.

3) The texture of the barbacoa was fantastic. Speaking as a couple that routinely subjects large cuts of meat to slow, low temperature cooking for many hours,  for fun, this is half the battle won. If the texture isn't right, it will never taste good. This is particularly astonishing because the nice lady pulled it out of a freezer and nuked it in a microwave before arranging it on our tacos.

4) The food looked really good. See these pictures! Quite a lot of food for the price (especially by Stockholm standards!)

The street barbacoa tacos

The Barbacoa tacos

The low points:

1) Nothing had any taste. Well, the red onions (vinegar onions, seen on top of the street tacos) and the fresh cilantro in the street tacos were the only things that had any flavor. This is a tragic counter-point to pt 4 of the high points. Even the barbacoa, which had amazeballs texture, had absolutely no flavor. Hell, even the damned sauces were tasteless! *cue heartbreak*

Here is a word of advice to anyone who wants to open a tex-mex place...or even a Pho place...just squeeze lemon on it. It doesn't matter what it is, it will taste better. 

2) The tacos had wa-ay too much stuffed in them. Tons of lettuce and coleslaw. This may have diluted the subtle (read: weak) flavor that might have been present. It certainly made them hella difficult to pick up and eat... which is how god intended us to eat tacos!

3) It was clear from watching the lady assemble the tacos and when we ate them that she probably had never eaten a taco. The proportions were all wrong. Perhaps Zocalo needs to have a party for their staff where all the staff does is eat tex-mex and get familiar with how stuff is supposed to taste, how much of what goes in a dish and so on. 

4) There were a couple of things we were completely mystified by. In what appeared to be a corn salsa in the barbacoa tacos, for some reason, there were copious amounts of ...edemame?!  WTF?

And the street tacos contained a LOT of coleslaw which for some reason had these huge chunks of cabbage stems in them. You know, the stuff you can't actually eat because its impossible to chew?

Here is one of the sauces. I suspect it was supposed to be a sour cream type sauce? The lady called it cilantro sauce. But it didn't taste like cilantro either. It tasted like bad mayo.

I also suspect (from looking at the pictures) that the sauces are supposed to be drizzled over the top instead of put into a bowl as a dipping sauce.

Conclusions:

Zocalo didn't seem overpriced (85sek and 95sek for the tacos and I recall the agua fresca being 15 sek. There was lots of stuff on the menu under 150sek). The food looked really good but had no flavor. Nada. Ingen smak. This experience made the Martian Blinghs redouble their efforts to make a killer carnitas in their own kitchen.