$10 Deal: El Mero breakfast tacos at Team Car Café
Team Car Cafe is tucked into Latting Speed Shop in Cordova and features breakfast fare from El Mero Taco, which is next door. (Chris Herrington/The Daily Memphian)
For about half a decade roughly a decade ago, I went to Austin, Texas, every year for the South by Southwest Music Festival, where breakfast tacos were, blessedly, a daily ritual for all.
Breakfast tacos, even more than brisket, felt synonymous with Austin, and not something, at the time, that was available in Memphis, at least that I knew.
Breakfast tacos are easier to find in Memphis now than they were then, but still aren’t really that common. And the sneaky best place to find them? How about in a coffee shop inside a high-end bike shop tucked back behind Germantown Parkway in Cordova?
A variety El Mero breakfast tacos are available for $3 or $4 each, and can be paired with a Team Car Cafe latte. (Chris Herrington/The Daily Memphian)
Team Car Café is a coffee shop inside the Latting Speed Shop, where you can peruse $5,000 or even $10,000 bicycles (don’t touch) while sipping really good lattes.
The shop doesn’t really have a kitchen, but El Mero Taco next door sure does, and the coffee shop and taco shop are partnered, with a staff door linking the two and El Mero serving as Team Car’s de facto kitchen.
Coffee and tacos: Two great things that go great together, but usually don’t.
At lunch you can order at El Mero and eat there or tell them to send your food to the coffee shop.
El Mero doesn’t open until 11 a.m., but their kitchen gets going by 8:30 a.m., when an El Mero breakfast menu is available exclusively inside Team Car Café.
As “Mad Men”’s Don Draper memorably said, this is what the breakfast tacos are for.
Ten dollars? No problem. (OK, if you want coffee, too — and you do — you’ll probably have to spring for a little more.)
There are six tacos on the breakfast menu for $3 (bacon, chorizo, potato, sausage — all with scrambled eggs and Monterey Jack cheese) or $4 (fried chicken, smoked brisket — with peppers, onions, eggs and cheese) each. Two is enough breakfast for all but the lumberjacks among us. You can also get any of those tacos in quesadilla form for $8 or $10, respectively.
But there’s more to the menu.
Breakfast options also include chilaquiles — homemade tortilla chips slathered and infused with salsa verde, with fried eggs, cheese and crema. (Chris Herrrington/The Daily Memphian)
I’d recommend the chilaquiles — a kind of nacho variant, if we must — with homemade tortilla chips slathered and infused with salsa verde, with fried eggs, cheese and crema. That’s $7. Strain the concept just slightly by adding brisket, chorizo or fried chicken to bring the ticket to $11.
Elsewhere, there’s chicken and waffles ($12), smoked cheddar grits ($4), avocado toast ($5) and a fruit plate ($6), along with a typical assortment of coffee-shop pastries.
The coffee, by the way, is excellent, using local Ethnos Coffee Roasters beans, and with some particularly companionable specialty lattes, including an El Mero Mocha and Cajeta Caramel.
Team Car Café is inside Latting Speed Shop, 8100 Macon Station, Ste. 101, is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and 7 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. lattingspeedshop.com.
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$10 Deal El Mero Taco Team Car Cafe coffee shop tacos Latting Speed ShopChris Herrington on demand
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Chris Herrington
Chris Herrington has covered the Memphis Grizzlies, in one way or another, since the franchise’s second season in Memphis, while also writing about music, movies, food and civic life. As far as he knows, he’s the only member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association who is also a member of a film critics group and has also voted in national music critic polls for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (RIP). He and his wife have two kids and, for reasons that sometimes elude him, three dogs.
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