My Year With Marvel: Tiny Deadpool's Taco Tour

Early this month, I headed on down to America for my birthday. The United States, unlike my part of Canada, is littered with Mexican restaurants. You can’t go very far without running into a quality purveyor of tacos, and I decided to take full advantage of this by going on as full-on a taco tour of Fargo, North Dakota as one can in two days.

I brought Tiny Deadpool, of course. Dude loves tacos. How could I even think of leaving him out?

Tiny Deadpool and I began our quest for tacos at an unlikely venue: Famous Dave’s, a barbeque joint that recently added “urban tacos” to their lunch menu. I’m a sucker for their catfish (which shows to best advantage on a po’boy, though catfish fingers are also delish), so of course I had to get the catfish tacos.

Each one contained a goodly amount of crispy baked catfish, plus greens, spicy remoulade, jalapenos, and lime. (The last time I had these, the chef put the lime wedges in the tacos, which was weird and uncalled for. Thankfully, this chef knew enough to stick ‘em on the side so I could just squeeze the juice on.) Tiny Deadpool and I both approved.

Our next stop was Vinyl Taco, a place we happened to drive past as we entered Fargo’s historic downtown. I love music. I love tacos. There was no way I was gonna pass this joint by.

It was everything I hoped it would be. The inside is all uncovered brick, music-themed artwork, and atmospheric lighting, spiced up with classic rock played on a turntable behind the bar. It’s my new favourite place on earth. If I lived in Fargo, I would eat there every week.

Luckily, Vinyl Taco’s tacos lived up to the window dressing. I had the carne asada with plenty of julienned radish (divine!), along with a crispy fish taco packed with red slaw and spicy lime sauce. It was a miracle of flavour and texture. A miracle.

My mother, with whom I traveled, had a chimichanga. It was a bit too spicy for her tastes, but Tiny Deadpool was happy because chimichanga is fun to say.

Chimichanga.
Chimichanga.
Chimichanga.

See?

Finally, we headed to a place called Paradiso because they give you a free meal on your birthday and like hell was I gonna pass that up. I ordered the taco platter, of course: two hard tacos (one chicken; one beef) and one soft taco, garnished with Spanish rice, lettuce, and a pool of refried beans.

Friends, it defeated me. Much as I'd like to say my appetite for tacos knows no bounds, three is my usual per-meal limit--and it’s not totally obvious in the photo, but each of those hard tacos was double sized. It was the taco mother lode.

I managed to down both hard tacos alongside my delicious lemonade margarita, but I could only eat about a third of the soft taco and I lapsed into a food coma pretty soon after we got back to the hotel. Tacos, dude. They’re delicious, but they’ll most likely betray you in the end.

Tiny Deadpool can relate to that.

I also intended to go to this place called Taco Shop, but I looked their menu up online first to make sure they actually had quality food, and GUESS WHAT THEY DIDN'T HAVE.

Yeah. For real.

Much as I'd like to hope they just left tacos off the menu because they were too obvious to bother stating, I wasn't willing to risk it. I left town without visiting. Maybe next time.