No hangover required

If you breakfast or lunch on a weekend at La Victoria Mercado y Carniceria No. 2, a little Mexican taqueria tucked inside a grocery and butcher shop, you’re likely to encounter parties of bleary-eyed men conversing boisterously over large bowls of menudo and hair-of-the-dog cans of Modelo Especial.

Menudo is famously a hangover cure, but on a recent visit, I’d awakened from a night as designated driver and was feeling frisky and fine. Besides, you really have to grow up eating menudo to crave a morning mountain of stinky tripe.

But that’s OK. Victoria has plenty of other dishes on offer: breakfast plates, chile verde and roja, tacos and tortas. The most unusual dish on its menu is tacos de sesos, or cow brain. They look more solid than I expect, with the humps and furrows typical of a gyrencephalic (or wrinkly) brain—a configuration that we share with our bovine friends. The flavor, besides a hint of liverishness, is almost absent. The only strange aftereffect I experienced after eating sesos was a strong desire to munch on some grass. Still, like menudo, brain is an acquired taste.

Victoria has other soups besides menudo, including pozole and birria. The food here in general has a reliable mid-level heat, and these soups are no exception. The bone-in pork in the pozole is dry, and there are scant grains of hominy—it can’t touch the pozole being offered a short distance away at Alonzo’s Coffee Shop (5649 Stockton Boulevard). The birria is a mix of goat and beef, and it comes with house-made tortillas on the side so you can roll your own. It has an abundant portion of meat, but the broth isn’t spicy or rich enough.

If Victoria hasn’t quite mastered soup, however, it distinguishes itself with its “normal” tacos, especially the cow-based ones: cabeza, lengua and asada. Sometimes I marvel at the range of textures and tastes beef tongue can cover, from tough to jiggly and soft, and from gamy to beefy as a steak. This lengua is on the tender-and-beefy side of the spectrum, happily—as is the head meat in the other taco.

The asada again demonstrates Victoria’s mastery of the cow: fatty, well-salted steak with a hint of garlic. They are served on (not house-made) tortillas fried in oil—which just adds to the decadence of the piled-up tacos.

The al pastor is rather undistinguished and lacking both pineapple and chipotle flavor. Here’s a riddle: How do you make (pork) carnitas taste like (beef) brisket? Answer: I don’t know, but it makes for an interesting taco. The carnitas shreds are lightly pink, as if smoked, and taste surprisingly like corned beef. My mind says no, but my palate says yes, yes.

The tacos come for the street-taco price of merely $1.25, served with cilantro, red salsa and onion. Or opt for the deluxe version with guacamole for an extra quarter. Since it’s an election year, I’d like to draw a strong distinction between myself and my opponent by declaring that I have a strong anti-guacamole policy when it comes to tacos. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig—a beautiful pig.

There is also an assortment of lunch plates that come with beans and rice; a plate of chile verde costs only $4.99. It’s billed as “pork loin,” but it’s clearly shoulder. The tomatillo sauce isn’t quite thick and tangy enough, but the slow-burning heat is nice, and you can’t beat the price.

Around 2 in the afternoon, Victoria moves the party outdoors, and the menu switches to one that’s only tacos, fried on a portable stovetop outdoors. The music is cranked, and it contributes to the rockin’ atmosphere of this grungy strip mall, which has possibly the most harrowing parking lot in all of Sacramento. Brave it for the beef.