For me, food and people are intricately connected. Eating and socializing. Chewing and talking. Though that last combination should probably be avoided in polite company.
I used to cook a lot, and a decent percentage of my cooking involved pretty complicated and sometimes improvisational recipes. I enjoyed doing it. I did it eight hours a day, six days a week at a local restaurant for a year and I still enjoyed doing it. Then I came to grad school and I stopped cooking entirely, save for the most basic meals. I could blame this on the workload, but in all honesty, I completed my English major in its entirety in my last 1½ years of my time as an undergrad, and I didn’t find grad school to be much more time-consuming than that. The truth of it was that I no longer had roommates, no longer had close-by friends or family, and the idea of fixing an extravagant meal (or even a basic one) just seemed pointless without others around to partake, to share food and table space. I’ve had friends from home or elsewhere visit a few times in the last few years, and the first thing that comes to mind to do after their arrival is to cook a meal for them. So obviously there’s a connection between people and food somewhere in my mind.
What does this have to do with my favorite meal ever? Nothing really, now that I think about it.
Instead of choosing one particular meal, I’m going to choose a place where a significant portion of my favorite meals have taken place. My mom and grandma would probably box my ears for not involving them in this discussion directly because of all the wonderful and insanely gigantic meals they’ve prepared over the years for family gatherings, but instead of them I want to talk about a restaurant called Taco Tonto’s in Kent, Ohio.
Taco Tonto’s is a little restaurant just off of Main Street in downtown Kent. Years ago, it was located on Main Street itself, in the tiny basement of a bar called The Loft, which I wasn’t old enough to get into at the time but would come to perfect navigating using an inebriated stagger a few years later. It stayed in that basement long enough for me to discover it in the midst of an awkward first date in the fall of 2003, and then it moved out, made way for a pizza place which would also eventually go out of business (turns out a bar basement isn’t a good place for a daytime restaurant, who’d have thought?) and got its own actual building. It was competing directly at this point with the chain “Mexican” restaurant across town, Chipotle, which is the place I would eventually end up doing the cooking I mentioned above for. But despite the fact that Taco Tonto’s couldn’t afford to advertise, had a somewhat poorer business location, a smaller building, and served its food on paper plates wrapped in blank wax paper, it held its own.
For me, it became the epitome of downtown Kent, a place that embodied the spirit of embracing and supporting local business. A place that was fun and easy to walk to, a place that you could go to anytime and run into someone you knew, a place that you could not eat at for a few months and the waitress would still remember your “usual”. So naturally, it became a favorite spot for me, my roommates, and a few of my other friends, whether we were gearing up for a bar crawl or just grabbing something to eat while watching the sun set on an early spring weekend and then heading home early to get ready for Monday’s classes.
A few years later the Zephyr, the local indie-rock bar that my friends and I frequented, added a large open-air patio that ran right up against Taco Tonto’s. From there it was only a matter of removing a few bricks from the wall and the Zephyr had a Taco Tonto’s “drive thru” window that bar patrons could use whenever the urge for a giant burrito struck them (which, for certain patrons who shall remain nameless was amazingly often).
The combination of these two establishments was, at least in my mind, a mecca for a lazy, hungry college student with a few bucks in his pocket, and though I might not be a college student anymore, it’s still one of my favorite things about the town I think of in a lot of ways as my hometown. I’d be hard-pressed to pick a particular favorite meal between all the fantastically tomato-y black bean veggie burritos, quesadillas and bizarre but always great-tasting specialty burritos, between all the visits with friends, homecomings, leavetakings, dates, and times that I just went alone and sat at the little two-seat table in the back corner, kicked back with a burrito and a book and let two or three hours melt away. So instead of choosing, I’ll just go with the most recent memory I have.
It was the summer of 2007, and I was mitigating the confusion of having an MA in English and absolutely no direction or employment prospects in my life by burning days at a time on recording sessions in the music building on the Kent State campus and on long walks through town and along the edges of Lake Pippen. A few of my old friends that I had so far failed to catch up with since my return from Pullman were going to be in town that night, and so we instinctively decided to meet at Taco Tonto’s.
The goal was to use the aforementioned drive thru to get our food and then spend the night sitting on the patio in the humid late-May Ohio air. I had to head over to the bar early because I had lost my ID by launching it off the roof of my moving van somewhere on I-77 a few weeks earlier and the only real chance I had to avoid getting carded by the bouncer was to enter the bar early enough that nobody was really paying attention yet. My friends Matt and Mike offered to come along for company’s sake, as I would basically be sitting on the patio by myself for something like two or three hours otherwise. The visit had all the elements of a classic Taco Tonto’s meal; the food was good, it was cheap, I was surrounded by some of my best friends, and it turned out the cashier was a girl I had worked with a few years earlier at Chipotle, who I hadn’t seen since and had thoroughly expected to never see again. We spent a few minutes catching up until burrito-duty called her away, and then I spent the next hour or so sitting at a huge wooden table that I jokingly (and nerdily) call “Hrothgar’s Mead Table” having the type of conversation that people always write out in books but that never actually happens in real life: the kind that ends up being about life, the universe, and everything.
This conversation eventually culminated (for some reason) in Matt and Mike fake-fencing with invisible swords (as near as I could tell) all the way across the patio, on top of a few tables, and then on top of the handrails of the under-construction scaffolding of the three-story stairway leading up to the top floor of the bar, much to my amusement and I think the shock of everyone else in the immediate vicinity. It just seemed like the right kind of thing to do on that kind of night, in that kind of place, at least to me. A real Peter Pan kind of moment.
The rest of the night came along eventually, and disappeared in that mesmerizing combination of alcohol and spring-in-Ohio humidity which eventually just blurs everything together into a tidal wave of smiles and colors and laughs that’s part nostalgia and part new memories that sometimes, if you’re paying attention, you can see being made while they’re happening. The food wasn’t bad either.
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