Andale!

Takes some guts to name a taco place "Andale"--strikes me as on par with calling it "Pancho's" or something equally cliched...but what do you expect from an airport?

I've been travelling quite a bit for work lately. I have an awesome job, and it allows me to see places of the country and meet super nice people that I would only otherwise talk to on the phone or on-line. It also puts me inside of lots of hotels and hotel resteraunts. These aren't really taco meccas. Frankly, I think there's some Orwellian conspiracy to turn "Blackened Chicken Caesar Salad" into the new Soylent Green.

I found "Andale" on a recent blaze through the Oakland airport. With a couple hours to kill I settled in to an Inquisition-style wooden chair and ordered, according to my receipt from "Andale Mexican Resteraunt: Terminal Two" a "jumbo taco platter." The picture on the big menu looked pretty damn good--three chubby little tacos kissing up to a lovin' spoonful of frijoles and a spry looking salad. How Taco Terriblus could it be?

Turns out, plenty.

The sweet girl took my order--I opted for asada--and called it out to a surly looking cat in a hair net who began to scoop up said asada from a metal bowl resting on the stove. It should be noted, I really have a problem with hair nets ever since I found an eyelash embedded in a slice of velveeta cheese that I was hoping to use on my version of the Shake Shack burger. Grossed me out. So I was a little nervous about the whole hair net-meat scoop relationship to begin with. After that I retreated to my chair and waited for the waterboarding to begin.

When the waitress (in the most ridiculously generous term as I never saw her again) brought my platter I had one of those moments when you really have to give credit to food photographers. Gone were the chubby little tacos. Dr. FrankenTaco had replaced them with three phlaccid mounds of meat scattered with onions and "queso." The nice pile of frijoles had morphed into a ghoulish glob of gastro-hell that challenged the senses to point of blindness. The salad was, on its best day, salvaged from some UN Relief chow station in Mumbai.

You always have choice and free will when you eat. You can always pull the plug, walk away, and try again later, someplace else. But I saw the health inspector's note tacked to the wall and figured that I'd take a small chance--after all, it's an airport...

The first bite of taco #1 confirmed what you probably know by now: it was a greasy mouthful of pig shit. The tortilla slid down my throat like a stomach-pump tube (don't ask how I know this) while the meat floated around in my mouth long enough to confirm the likeness to chewing a boiled shoe lace. "Chewing" isn't really the right verb. I didn't have to chew insomuch as let it disintegrate into a cardboard-y mess. Honestly, how many dishes have you eaten that you can say that "fresh onions" were the best part? Were it not for the insane amount of Tapatio that I doused these tacos with I may have lept through the plate glass keeping me from a 40 foot fall onto the tarmac.

The frijoles where a little like eating kidney or gall stones. And they had a similar result many hours later. I don't need to indulge any sick sense of humor, but trust me, I PAID for those beans.

The salad went untouched. By the time I finished a couple tacos I needed a 64 oz of kerosine to kill whatever it was that was making my stomach feel as if I'd been gutshot. I'll be sure to load up on veg next time I'm at Andale's.

I arrived in Phoenix later that night. Waiting for my girlfriend to pick me up, I sort of held my guts and rubbed them in a sore attempt to ease the onslaught that the taco platter had levelled against normalcy, health, or free world democracy. So the search continues. Tonight I'm heading to a puestra downtown that usually has a line of tough guy looking taco fans. It has to be better than Andales...