When one speaks of Mexican cuisine, spicy, meaty and wholesome foods come to mind, that have not been able to make a toehold in the Pakistani food scene. The first Mexican restaurant in Karachi in recent memory was Nachonana at Seaview that has long since closed shop and then very recently there was Habenaro at Khayaban-e-Shahbaz that also has ceased operations.
Thankfully a slew of new restaurants and cafes are offering tacos and other Mexican delicacies in their menus. Meet a husband and a wife team that has opened TacoCat a new eatery that only focuses on Mexican street food. Both of them having studied in the United States developed a taste for Mexican cuisine over there, upon returning to Pakistan they couldn’t find many options to indulge their love for tacos so the couple took it upon themselves to bring the authentic Mexican food experience to Karachi.
There isn’t a rhyme or reason behind the quirky name as the owner notes, it was just a name that a friend suggested and got stuck inside his head. Aside from the name, the first thing that strikes you is the décor of the place, the brightly painted murals and the colourful Mexico themed wall hangings. It’s very basic, very bare bones as the way street food is ought to be.
To start off the meal I was served Tortilla chips with a side of their homemade guacamole and salsa dip sauces. The piping hot tortillas were the real deal unlike the regular generic tacos that one would find at the cinema. Next in line was a hard shell taco, which as the name suggests was crunchy and crumbling when I was eating it. It was like eating one giant tortilla chip which really isn’t a bad thing. I paired it with the traditional Mexican drink by the name of Horchata which is a concoction of rice water and condensed milk and tastes a lot like a liquid version of kheer. Then came the soft shell tacos, the beef taco was soft and tender to the taste which was undoubtedly chopped tenderloin. The star of the show for me was however, the seafood taco that has prawn, a mango reduction and green chilli sauce over it. It’s so much going on in the taste buds. Which brings me to my other point, all the sauces are homemade: the habanera sauce, the jalapeno sauce or the salsa sauce for that matter, don’t taste like they come from a bottle. And as any aficionado of Mexican food would attest, for good Mexican food the secret lies in the sauce and this is what TacoCat has done right.
To top it all off, I had the Agua De Jamaica, made from concentrated hibiscus flowers, diluted with water and sweetened with sugar. The flavour was fragrant and very similar to cranberry juice.
All in all, TacoCat is a different dining experience for people looking to sample a taste of Mexico without leaving their city. Would TacoCat’s rustic charm, an emphasis on authenticity and dedicated owners make for a recipe for success? The fickle and moody restaurant public would decide.
The writer is a freelancer and can be reached at [email protected]