Citizen Taco is a quick, easy, and reliable guide to finding good food, from four-star restaurants to no-name street carts. Whether you’re searching for something across the street or across the country, look here first.
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Manifesto
At this point it’s a tart cliché, a placebo—we’ve heard it so many times it no longer seems true: good food can be found around every corner. You don’t need to travel across town, or across the country, to find a memorable meal—you just need to know where to look. While some dining experiences are worth the trip (and the price), in the age of the Internet, finding a good restaurant nearby, wherever you are, should only be one click away.
Citizen Taco is a repository of good meals, past and present. Why waste time reading negative reviews, pumped up with false authority and ostentatious critique? If it’s on the site, it’s worth a trip. You won’t find any grandstanding about the latest trendy hotspots, soon to fade from the spotlight; no near-pornographic photography that looks more enticing than the food itself; and no novelistic descriptions that keep you reading for hours and rid potential meals of any mystery and surprise.
CT is the child of a long-held passion for recommending where and what to eat, cultivated over many years of travel all across the U.S. and living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Nashville, New York, Providence and Boston. Like many Americans today, I live with a growing number of dietary restrictions; since 2002, I’ve had intolerances to wheat and dairy (meaning you should look elsewhere for definitive Sicilian pizza recommendations) but as a result I’ve come to love almost everything else. I eat meat, but aim for moderation, and generally keep up with the latest sustainable trends (organic, slow, local, farm-to-table, and whatever other terms Wal-Mart is soon to render meaningless). But what matters most is eating well, and that means delicious food, thoughtfully prepared, full of surprises.
As Citizen Taco, I aim to be nothing less than the ultimate enabler for every person who seeks the same joy from their meals that they get from any other part of their lives. Food is more than a mere necessity. It has the ability to refashion us, to turn us from sour to sweet, from rotting to ripe. It stokes the fire of our bodies and powers the engine of our being. With fulfilling food comes a fulfilling life.
And now, enough metaphor. Let’s eat.
J.D. Nasaw
12/2010
