Vortex's Tacos Tear a Path

It takes a lot of guts to take an Air Stream trailer, stuff it with taco fillings, and call it Vortex Mex, especially given the proximity of Dallas to Tornado Alley. Ask any meteorologist, and they will tell you the physical characteristics of trailers attract tornadoes with the same magnetic force that billboards exert on trial lawyers.

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Vortex Mex

2712 Elm St.
Dallas, TX 75226

Category: Restaurant > Mexican

Region: Downtown & Deep Ellum

Details

(214) 651-8226

Thursday-Saturday
6 p.m.-2 a.m.

$

2712 Elm St.

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But the founders of the Green Room have thrown caution to the wind and taken this trailer, once a thing called Another Roadside Attraction that plied grilled cheese sandwiches and such, and turned it into a taqueria.

Vortex Mex is simple and offers just four tacos -- grilled beef, roast chicken, braised pork, and veggie -- and charges $1.50 for each. Only problem is, your money quickly grows into about 10 bucks, because the average person with a modest appetite shouldn't order fewer than a half dozen.

Not that eating them is a chore. Packed in warm, supple flour tortillas, the signature element in these tacos is calabaza guisada, a squash stew created by sautéing onions and skinned tomatoes and then adding zucchini and squash before finishing the whole thing off with coriander and red-wine vinegar.

By far the best offering is the braised pork, a wad of shredded meat with cabbage. Though a bit overcooked, the grilled beef reeked with hearty flavors while it miraculously retained a good bit of moisture. Moist roasted chicken, which had a little tang but not much else, was the weakest in this quad. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the veggie fold. A chilled mix of firm, tender black beans, corn, and red cabbage was supple, articulate, and threaded with clean flavors.

"We've probably overengineered it a little bit," Whitney Meyers says of his taqueria. Yet this canopied trailer with yellow picnic tables and guacamole-colored brickwork in front had better be overengineered. The weather here can get really twisted for trailer squatters.