Tex-Mex is the regional cuisine of Tejanos, Texans of Mexican descent, and it has been developing for centuries along the Texas-Mexico borderlands. The name itself is said to come from the Texas Mexican Railway, whose abbreviation was “Tex-Mex,” before it came to describe food and music.
Compared with interior Mexican cooking, Tex-Mex leans on wheat flour tortillas, beef, cumin, chili powder and melted yellow cheese. It gave the world chili con carne, nachos, and fajitas, the last of which grew out of the skirt steak that ranch hands in South and West Texas grilled over open fires.
The breakfast taco is a Tex-Mex treasure: a warm flour tortilla wrapped around eggs with bacon, chorizo, potatoes, beans or cheese. San Antonio and Austin have both claimed the title of breakfast-taco capital, a friendly rivalry that is best settled by eating in both cities.
San Antonio is also home to the puffy taco, made by frying raw masa so it puffs into a crisp-yet-chewy shell. And of course there is the crunchy, ground-beef hard-shell taco with lettuce, tomato and shredded cheese, the style that introduced much of America to tacos.
Signature Tacos
- Breakfast taco (egg, potato, bacon or chorizo on flour)
- Puffy taco (San Antonio)
- Crispy ground-beef taco
- Fajita taco (grilled skirt steak)
- Barbacoa de cabeza on Sunday mornings
- Bean and cheese on flour