10 Obscure Mexican Dishes That You Can Find in NYC

Once you've knocked NYC's 10 best tacos off your bucket list, that doesn't mean the hunt for great Mexican food in this town is over. As we've discussed in the past, New York may not compete with Los Angeles when it comes to the diversity of its Mexican population, since 75% of the folks here come from southern Mexican states such as Puebla, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Yet there's still a wealth of regional oddities and authentic specialities that go well beyond the normal taqueria offerings. If you're a committed chowhound, you may have sunk your teeth into a huarache topped with fried grasshoppers, or slurped a steaming bowl of goat soup. But have you ever taken a shot of pechuga infused with the essence of poultry, or eaten a fried huazontle plant? Time to let the grubbing adventures begin—here are 10 obscure Mexican dishes that you can get in NYC, plus the best places to try them.  

The makings of tepache may sound more like an insider tip from a seasoned Rikers Island cellmate than a refreshing summer beverage: Cut the spiny husks off of a pineapple, combine with sugar and water, wait a week, then drink. The wonders of fruit and fermentation are known the world over, and tepache is a great example. The delicious drink is usually made in hotter months when the heat speeds fermentation, resulting in a tart and tangy brew in only a day or two. There’s a hint of residual alcohol, and the strong stuff catches your throat like vinegar, almost like a Mexican kombucha. Flavored with the brown sugar piloncillo, cinnamon, and cloves, it's a bracing alternative to the more common horchata and jamaica. Find it here: Taqueria Izucar 1503 Myrtle Ave. Bushwick, Brooklyn 718-456-0569

Diners looking for credible Mexican food in Hell’s Kitchen tend to funnel into Tehuitzingo or Tulcingo De Valle on Tenth Avenue. But there is a third option, relegated to a side street: the tiny Guelaguetza, a well-swept bodega with a kitchen in back, named after the annual Oaxacan festival that draws dozens of New York’s Oaxaqueños back to their hometowns for communal revelry each year. In the restaurant, there are brightly colored walls, knitted tablecloths, and often, the owners’ daughter coloring and watching TV. She can elaborate on the nuances of Dora the Explorer, but she can’t tell you just how good the sangrita tacos are—chunks of goat meat, garlic, onions, and blood simmered until all ingredients meld into a soft, blackish, iron-rich custard, wrapped into two corn tortillas and splashed with salsa. Deeply savory, flecked with cumin, ground chiles, and allspice, a sangrita taco is more fortifying than any multivitamin supplement, and a lot tastier too. Find it here: Guelaguetza 526 W 47th St 212-265-2626

Whoever invented the crazy dish that is chicharron preparado joins the legion of twisted culinary jokesters that includes the creators of deep-fried Oreos, KFC’s Double-Down, and the $32 foie gras-and-truffle burger at DB Bistro. It's over-the-top in all the best ways. To make it, you take a sheet of chicharron—deep-fried pork skin, browned and crackling—and treat it like nachos. Theses days a puffy, flat, pork-flavored chip called chicharron planchado usually stands for in the rustic, gnarled fried skin. Some street vendors apply an ascetic squirt of hot sauce and a sprinkle of cheese and some places pile on the salad, but Tacos Cachanilla, a restaurant operated by a family from Tijuana, does a particularly ostentatious version. They start with the fried base, beging the build with hot, orange crumbles of chorizo, then smother it in sour cream, cotija cheese, slices of avocado, lettuce, and salsa. Cueritos—curlicues of pickled pork skin—are the cherries on top. Find it here: Tacos Cachanilla 5807 5th Avenue Sunset Park, Brooklyn 718-492-4369

The swollen kernels of dried corn that bob the city’s hundreds of bowls of pozole tend to float in a thin, opaque pork broth. Occasionally, you might encounter a red bowl, spiked with chile, but the clear, unadorned pork stock is de riguer. At Sabor a Mexico in the East Village, a two-year old taqueria run by a family from Tlapa de Comonfort, a pozole verde reigns. Their version of the soup is the standard in the mountainous regions of northeastern Guerrero, a pork broth turned a foresty shade of green with pureed hoja santa and ground, toasted pepitas.  The soup is silky and verdant on its own. With slivered radish, sweet white onion, oregano, and a half of a diced avocado, to mix-in, it is a triumph. Green is the way to go. Find it here: Sabor a Mexico 1744 1st Ave 212-289-2641

The potato-filled pambazo is gaining traction in our city and rightly fully so, since the starch-on-starch sandwich tends to crush any competitors in its path—Italian potato-egg sandwiches and roti, beware. The meal starts with a sturdy, white roll which is then given the French Dip treatment, dunked in a guajillo chile sauce and left to sizzle on the flattop. Portions of the bun sear and char, toasting the chile sauce into a caramelized crust. The roll is stuffed with a jumble of chorizo-enriched crumbled potato and is layered with crisp lettuce, crema, and crumbled cheese—a glorious flurry of spice, starch, and satisfaction. Find it here: La Güera 4603 5th Ave. Sunset Park, Brooklyn 718-437-0232

Huazontle is related to the American goosefoot plant, an odd-looking vegetable of gangly branches that pops up in Mexican markets around the city in the early spring. The vegetable is eaten around the time of Lent when many Mexicans shun animal matter and lean on the plant world for sustenance. Folded into omelets or dredged in batter and deep fried, huazontle tastes a bit like broccoli and a bit like spinach, but it requires much more finesse to eat than both. Unless the cook has had a couple of hours to pluck each individual bead-like cluster from the bunch, the branch is often cooked in its entirety. At Alimentos Saludables, a tamaleria in Sunset Park, huazontle appears as an elongated fritter bathed in a light tomato sauce, with the branches sticking out the side like the handle of a corndog. It’s best to peck around the edges of the fritter, nibbling like a bare-chested Grecian eating grapes from the hand of a nymph. The orgy that happens afterward depends on you and the valiance of your dining companions. Find it here: Alimentos Saludables 5919 4th Ave Sunset Park, Brooklyn 718-492-1660

You think you know your tequilas? Can you wax poetic about small-batch mezcal and bacanora? Even so, you probably have not had the pleasure of sipping pechuga, an artisanal agave-based spirit that is even esoteric in Mexico City. In the wilds of Oaxaca, where the terrain is dotted with family-run distilleries, a quiet industry of agave magicians has been crafting interesting booze for centuries. Like Sicilians who pull out casually-homemade bottles of great Nero d’Avola for guests, these distillers are making spirits mostly for themselves and their friends. Pechuga starts with mezcal. A time-honored tradition dictates a raw chicken breast—a pechuga—must be dangled in the rising steam of the distillery, dripping juices and infusing the vapor with the essence of poultry. Why? Rationale has been lost to the passing of time. Contemplate the mystery over a glass or two at Cariño, an overlooked cantina on the south end of Williamsburg. Find it here: Cariño 82 S 4th St Williamsburg, Brooklyn 718-384-8282

After eating the slapped-together grub of Tacos Morelos’ two street-carts, whose main clients seem to be in search for a salve for mild alcohol poisoning, it is surprising to find such sophisticated fare at its brick-and-mortar outpost in Jackson Heights. The restaurant is a home base, where the menu evolves from basic antojitos into stews, moles, and platters of meat. The salsa mora, or “blackberry sauce,” contains no berries but is colored instead by dried chile (many, many chiles) that looks a little like a scrunched-up, purplish fruit. This chile mora is a variety of dried, smoked jalapeno with less smoke but more heat than the well-known chipotle. Blended into a sauce with chicken stock, oregano, garlic, and onions, it smothers your choice of protein and is served with a side of rice and beans.  The meat underneath is almost an afterthought, as the salsa mora is so thick and hyper-concentrated, with a heat that stuns with the voltage of an industrial cattle prod. Find it here: Tacos Morelos 94-13 37th Ave Jackson Heights, Queens 347-832-0193

Like the occasional sightings of buche, the rare instances of great carne asada, the specials of suadero that flit around town on hand-written menus and Twitter feeds, there are many different kinds of rare taco fillings in this town. None are more infrequent than chapuline—the illustrious fried grasshopper, crispy brown nubbins with their crunchy legs still attached. Insects as taco-fillings pre-date the arrival of carnitas and are a much more viable source of protein, sustainable and damn tasty. The salty, nutty shells crunch under the tooth in a taco, a quesadilla, or a huarache, and they're a perfect carrier for any well-tuned salsa. The swarm descends mid-summer at La Estancia de la Espiga (formerly El Globo), a double-doored tortilleria in Corona that receives a couple shipments from Oaxaca every year. Find it here: La Estancia de la Espiga 42-13 102 St Corona, Queens 718-779-7898

Birria is much more than a soup. It may be a simple, roasted goat consommé, but it confirms all that’s right and joyful in the world. It is the platonic ideal of a soup, a distillation of flesh and bone, an alchemic balm to rigors of consciousness. If the dish were more widespread, we’d see birria tattoos on the forearms of line cooks, with cartoonish aroma curls rising from bowls, instead of chef's knifes and pig primals. I’ve seen more raccoons climbing fire escapes than bowls of birria in New York City.  There is one secure place to find it: In the evening, on weekends, at the El Bronco Taco truck, which traverses the southern edge of Sunset Park. It's metered out in ladlefuls of steaming broth, then sipped from blue Greek coffee cups with a thatch of diced onion and cilantro floating on the surface. Find it here: Tacos El Bronco 5th Avenue at 44th St Sunset Park, Brooklyn no phone