This weekend I had a fine meal in Saratoga at The Plumed Horse (and I had a fine chuckle at the sight of white foam scum on my plate) and drank quite a bit of expensive-tasting wine, but the sensory experience I won’t forget soon is the taste of the tacos al pastor at Metro Balderas in San Jose (1st and Virginia, right off 280). This is not the same Balderas as the one on Almaden listed in Yelp* (I think the asterisk is supposed to be there, but I will use it to request that you ignore any reviews of the area as unsafe–unless by “unsafe” you mean “Mexican”), but that one has a PUBLIC NOTICE FOR APPLICATION OF OWNERSHIP CHANGE on its window, so don’t bother chasing your dreams there.

Tacos officially start at 5PM (the only reason I know about the future state of the other location is that my heart broke there a few hours earlier) from Thursday to Sunday. They get a good headstart on the pastor meat, so don’t be afraid to get there early if you can’t wait.

I can’t tell you what the inside of the place looks like, but I have a feeling that it is cramped to make room for the TV sets (I count three satellite dishes on the roof). The waitstaff for the front of the house may be from a part of Mexico where shampoo only recently replaced DDT, but you should be ordering directly from the dude with the knife. Otherwise you may miss the sight, and smell, of bubbling grease sliding down the cone as the meat turns.

They serve a decent suadero, but who gives a shit. You’re there for there for the perfectly crusty orange meat.

Skip the green salsa. It’s OK, but for some reason it’s the default when you ask for “everything.” That red salsa is the best kind of salsa on tacos al pastor is as true as a^2+b^2=c^2 (for a right triangle with legs a and b and hypotenuse c).

The little Paisa has no idea what to do with the pineapple and lets it flop lifelessly onto a random part of the plate after slicing a chunk off, but that’s the corner he paints himself into by trying to do too many tacos at a time (sometimes he gets impatient and starts slicing meat before he gets an order—this is one of the purest expressions of evil, but I think he’ll learn after someone less patient than myself stabs one of his fingers as punishment).

Still, the meat is outstanding. One of the great bonus pleasures of eating tacos al pastor is the strong smell they leave on your finger tips, and I seriously thought about going to bed without washing my hands last night. I don’t understand why I haven’t found anything like this in San Francisco.