Tacos for breakfast?

Rico says he'll have to check it out next time he's in Austin, but John Edge has a review in The New York Times of the breakfast taco:

Austin can’t claim taco primacy. That category is too broad, encompassing too many variations in style. When it comes to breakfast tacos, however, Austin trumps all other American cities.
Roberto Espinosa, proprietor of Tacodeli and breakfast taco interpreter of the moment, espouses a slacker consumer theory of why Austin— a city thick with creative folk, techies, students, and politicians— has embraced breakfast tacos. “People wake up at all hours of the day,” Mr. Espinosa, a native of Mexico City, said as he served a taco, piled with scrambled eggs and drenched in a purée of russets and jalapeños that he calls Mexican mashed potatoes. “Maybe the first meal of their day comes at 11 in the morning, and maybe it comes at 2 in the afternoon,” Mr. Espinosa said, as customers queued for migas tacos, bound with jack cheese. “They want a taco, and they want breakfast. And a breakfast taco gets you both.”
Breakfast tacos, eaten by early-morning commuters and third-shift laborers, as well as rock ’n’ roll club kids, sound Mexican. Some ingredients, like refried beans and chorizo, taste Mexican. And Mexican-Americans own many of the restaurants that serve them. But breakfast tacos may owe as much to the American fast-food industry as they do to the taquerias of, say, Guadalajara.
No one agrees on which cook popularized them. Nor is there agreement that Austin was the locus of the development; San Antonio and other cities in the Southwestern United States also claim them. One recent morning, as Robert Vasquez, proprietor of the Tamale House, rang up 85-cent breakfast tacos of loosely scrambled eggs and hard-fried bacon tucked inside flour tortillas, he recalled the late 1970s, when he opened his take-away spot. That’s also when he began serving egg and refried bean tacos. Mr. Vasquez guessed that, by the 1980s, breakfast tacos where going mainstream in Austin.
Robb Walsh, an author of a number of books on Texas foods, explained that “they were a way for Tex-Mex joints to compete with Egg McMuffins.”
By the late 1980s, the fast-food industry was returning the favor. In 1989 Burger King introduced bacon-and-egg tacos in Dallas, and Owens Country Sausage of Richardson, Texas began making microwaveable sausage-and-egg tacos for grocery freezers across the Southwest. Today, breakfast tacos are this city’s totemic food. “They’re cheap, they’re good, they’re Austin,” Mr. Vasquez said.
Arkie’s Grill, a biscuits-and-gravy sort of place that has been in business since 1948, sells sausage-and-egg breakfast tacos. Polvos, a restaurant that interprets “interior Mexican” cuisine, serves ham-and-egg tacos. Coffee shops across town stock coolers and steam tables with bean-and-egg tacos distributed by Tacodeli, a local quick-service restaurant group. Porfirio’s, open since 1985 and housed in a white cinderblock coop, is a typical working-class purveyor, serving chorizo-and-egg tacos, bacon-and-refried-bean tacos and 17 other breakfast tacos.
“My aunt started when she was working at IBM in the early 1980s,” said Daniel Macias, who bought the business from that aunt, Oralia Calderon, and her husband, Jesse. “She was testing circuit boards and started bringing tacos from home to sell. The business just grew from that.” Wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed in white paper bags for carry-out, Porfirio’s chorizo-and-egg tacos and bean-and-bacon tacos are paragons of the Austin form. That means they cost less than $2. They’re built on flour tortillas. And they’re girded with ingredients that stray from conventional notions of Mexican food. Sausage figures large in the Austin breakfast taco canon. Chorizo, colored with paprika, is a constant. So is Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.
Jalapeno Joe’s, on the same stretch of Airport Boulevard as the Tamale House, recently advertised a 99-cent breakfast taco happy hour and heralded the Jimmy Dean provenance of their sausage.
Armando Rayo, a nonprofit consultant who covers the local food scene for the website Taco Journalism, doesn’t see the presence of Jimmy Dean— or a preference for flour tortillas instead of the corn tortillas that predominate in much of Mexico— as culturally problematic. At Taqueria Chapala, a vinyl-booth cafe on Cesar Chavez Street, Mr. Rayo faced down a couple of barbacoa-stuffed tacos dorado and framed his identity: “I’m the sort of person who obsesses over breakfast tacos, but doesn’t watch Spanish-language television.”
That’s the Austin breakfast taco: inspired by Mexico, but not Mexican, a composite food reflecting two cultures. Some breakfast tacos served at Austin cafes, bodegas, and taco trucks track a path back to Mexico, where, broadly speaking, natives eat tacos in the morning, and some tacos contain eggs, but breakfast tacos are not a food category.
Taqueria La Flor, a baby-blue trailer, serves nopales and eggs on house-made corn tortillas. La Mexicana, a 24-hour panaderia, dishes feathery flour tortillas topped with molten refried beans.
The next steps in the breakfast taco’s evolution are occurring on the margins of Austin’s Mexican-American community. Torchy’s Tacos, which began in a gray trailer plastered with pitchfork-wielding baby devils, is an Anglo-owned enterprise, serving migas tacos, made with a scramble of eggs and strips of fried corn tortillas, pocked with green chilies, capped with avocado slices, enveloped by flour tortillas.
In a similar vein is El Chilito Tacos y Cafe, where University of Texas students eat ham-and-egg-filled breakfast tacos while drinking soy milk lattes.
Further afield, geographically and culturally, is Donut Taco Palace II, operated by Pisey Seng, born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She sells doughnuts, sausage-and-jalapeño-stuffed croissants, Czech-inspired pastries called kolaches, and breakfast tacos, filled with everything from migas to nopales to Jimmy Dean and eggs. When asked why she chose to sell breakfast tacos from a strip-mall shop, decorated with glossy photographs of Angkor Wat, Ms. Seng said, “We wanted to be different from everybody else.” She could have been talking about breakfast tacos, prepared by a crew of Mexican cooks and Cambodian managers, or she might have had in mind the rainbow sprinkle-covered chocolate doughnut she held in her hand.

What’s for Breakfast?
PORFIRIO’S A variety of breakfast tacos, from carne guisada to potato, egg, and bacon. 1512 Holly Street (Comal Street), (512)476-5030.
TACODELI Try El Popeye— spinach and scrambled eggs with crumbled queso fresco. 1500 Spyglass Drive (Barton Skyway), (512)732-0303, http://www.tacodeli.com.
TAMALE HOUSE The owner, Robert Vasquez, talks about the taco wars, when the price went down to 35 cents. 5003 Airport Boulevard (East 50th Street), (512) 453-9842.
TAQUERIA LA FLOR This trailer sells puffy potato tacos. 4901 South First Street (Heartwood Drive.)
TORCHY’S TACOS At five locations, Torchy’s sells tacos with eggs, guacamole, fried poblanos, carrots and poblano ranch sauce, among other styles. 1311 South First Street (Elizabeth Street ), (512)366-0537, and four other locations, torchystacos.com.