Megan Ryan knows the tacos in her part of town. Over the past four months she has eaten an estimated 80 of them from about 20 different Baltimore eateries, most near her Fells Point home.
She has discovered that a taco labeled "meat" can have one of a dozen different fillings, everything from steamed flank steak to "lengua," better known as tongue, a favorite offering of the taco truck that sets up shop on South Broadway near Bank Street.
She has decided that the tilapia cooked with cloves from Arcos Restaurant is a hit. But the orange roughy topped with orange marmalade from Annabel Lee Tavern is a mess.
If visitors were hunting for a goat taco, she would direct them to La Guadalupana, a combination restaurant and grocery store at Eastern Avenue and Wolfe Street. There, they could get a mango from the grocery store side of the operation, slice it and place it on a taco cooked in the restaurant.
Thanks to some students at Maryland Institute College of Art, Ryan's taco reconnaissance, along with illustrations and a map, will soon be available to the eating public.
Fourteen members of Rebecca Bradley's MICA class, called Illustrating the Edible, are in the process of putting the information on the Web site baltimoretacos.com. The site is expected to be completed this week.
In addition, illustrations of the taco adventure are on exhibit on the third floor of MICA's Fox Building at Mount Royal and Lafayette avenues.
The taco project has been a joint undertaking of Bradley, who is assistant chair of MICA's illustration department, and Ryan, who works for Walden University. The two met through the Baltimore chapter of Slow Food, a group Ryan once headed. The students in Bradley's classes, armed with Ryan's notes, were assigned taco eateries to visit. They drew illustrations of the establishments and the fare.
Although the project was dubbed a taco tour of Baltimore, the scope was limited to locations that the students could easily reach by public transportation, water taxi, bicycle or on foot. "The neighborhoods were South Baltimore, Federal Hill, Harbor East, Fells Point and Canton," Ryan said.
Bradley said one reason she chose tacos as the subject matter was that they fit a student budget. Most of the fare sampled started at about $2.50 and climbed toward $10. The student assigned to Blue Agave got a scare when she saw the $23 price tag of the taco entree on the main menu. But Ryan advised her to order from the bar menu, where two tacos go for $6.
