Tacos El Idolo Truck - When you're hungry for ear

By the popularity of the word "taco" in the online dating profile handles I've picked through (NYCtaco72 seeks the One), I know that most people love tacos.  Except that they're sometimes greasy and fried-shelled...I love them too.

Most people have eaten the usual - chicken, chopped pork, grilled beef chips - and school-grade taco crafted from burger meat.

But in the outer fringes of the US taco world are the mystery meats that are presumably popular in Mexico.  The Tacos El Idolo truck in Chelsea supplies exotic animal bits to adventurous, drunk, and or hungry people late into the night.

Usually, the truck is on 6th Avenues, near 14th St.  But it apparently migrates in search of customers to 4th St, and maybe elsewhere.  If it had a tracking collar, I''d have more data.

Beyond tacos, El Idolo has every Mexican dish ever invented that features a flour wrapper.  I appreciated the instructional arrow at the lower-right, providing a step-by-step guide for taco ordering.  

Here's the taco meat menu. With so many good choices, it's hard to decide.  I went for 1 lengua (tongue), 1 chivo (goat), and 1 asada (yawn).

Here are the little guys, about to be devoured on my counter at home.  Interestingly, whatever you order comes out as non threatening brown cubes. Left to right is tongue, goat, and beef.

I'll say right out this is NOT the best taco source I've had in NYC.  The meat was decent - especially the goat that has the exact same "tang" as goat cheese (really weird how that is).  The tongue was tender, flavorful, and marbled as expected, but the beef was non-memorable.

Nice how they sprinkled chopped onion and cilantro on my tacos.  The radishes were kind of incongruent, but OK.  A satisfaction-crushing omission was any kind of sauce - salsa, hot sauce, gravy, whatever - to moisturize them.  They were super dry without sauce, and it kind of ruined the recipes.

Tacos El Idolo earns 5 bellies.  Would be fewer based on how it tasted (darn lack of sauce) but gets extra belly for authentic adventurousness, and working late into night after Chipotle and the corporate guys have gone home.