When I’m passionate something—um, like tacos—I go all in. In the realm of tacos, I’m passionate about Rock and Roll Tacos, the Dallas So-Cal-style taco truck that rolled out in December 2011.
Quickly, Rock and Roll and its owner James Quiñonez were everywhere, organizing food truck events, forming a loose confederation of like-minded mobile food vendors, partnered with Dos Equis for the 2012 Feast of the Brave semi-exotic taco promotion and now, as I’ve been detailing, is taking over LaGrange’s kitchen and opening a full-servicerestaurant.
The ambitious and indefatigable James and Mary Ann Quiñonez —with six kids, they need to be—aren’t content to replicate their truck’s menu in a brick-and-mortar setting. No, they’re going all out with a food program and a design scheme.
For one, they are installing the bed of a 1954 Chevy pickup truck converted into a salsa bar with 15 varieties of the America’s leading condiment, working taillights and an exhaust pipe connected to a smoke machine, two-inch white walls and red pin-striping. A wall will be lined with vinyl LPs.
Menus additions will include elote shooters (pictured), shrimp cocktails, house-made mole poblano, mac n cheese with shaved habanero, serrano and Anaheim chilies, chocoflan, what James Quiñonez calls, “the works, man.”
And then there is the expanded taco program, now with fajitas, chicken chipotle, steak and Mexican gravy tacos, a fried-to-order hard shell job brisket, Baja-style beer batter-fried fish and shrimp tacos, as well as something James Quiñonez says he ate when he visited Mexico: bacon-wrapped shrimp with bell peppers, onions and jack cheese.
They’ll be joined by two vegetarian options. One with black bean, rice, avocado and queso fresco in a hard shell another with purple potatoes, mushrooms, caramelized onions and cotija cheese.
The Taco Trail 