Bottom Line: The Smoked Brisket Tacos from Taco Cabana deliver some good, Texas-style beef that you can kick up with their fresh salsa bar.
In Texas, brisket is king when it comes to barbeque and smoking meats. Across the state, you will find many establishments that are proud of their brisket, and you will find some pretty tasty beef as well. Texas-based Mexican food chain Taco Cabana previously tapped into that by smoking up some brisket Lone Star State-style and stuffing it into tacos, and now that is back on the menu.
The brisket is slow-smoked for more than 14 hours over real mesquite and served street taco style (in small, corn tortillas) or with their in-house made flour tortillas, and with spicy barbeque sauce on the side. You can get the tacos a la carte, or as part of a plate (with rice and beans), or as a combo (with chips, queso, and a drink). They also have a breakfast taco with eggs and brisket meat. I purchased the combo with the two soft tacos.
The brisket is nice and meaty and well-seasoned with some good smokiness to it, and they put a good amount of the beef in the taco so it is rather filling. Some pieces of the meat are a little chewy, but overall it is fairly tender. I don’t detect much in the way of the Mexican flavors you might expect from a place like this like cumin, so I am guessing the seasoning is mostly salt and pepper (which is the standard for Texas beef). Shredded cheese might have been nice with the taco, but some might think that detracts from the brisket. Their always tasty and fresh-made tortillas do a good job of holding everything together and that rounds out the taco quite nicely.
The brisket itself has no heat, but it comes with a barbeque sauce that is sweet and smoky and has a bit of a bite. With that, it gets up to the Mild level on my scale. But since Taco Cabana has its fresh salsa bar available, I prefer to head there to kick things up. The Pico de Gallo works particularly well with the brisket and that gets the taco to about Mild. If you want even hotter, add their Salsa de Fnego which has a sweetness and smokiness and kicks it up a little above Mild. They also have jalapenos available at the salsa bar if you want even more heat.
Taco Cabana does not give the nutrition info on these tacos (they get a pass on that with limited-time items), but I found one site that lists them at 240 calories each which sounds about right. So two of these are not bad for drive thru items, but you may want to go easy on the sides. If you get the chips and queso with the combo, you may want to save the chips (340 cals) for later and dip some veggies in the queso (140 cals).
If you plan on heading to your local Taco Cabano to try these out, I should first give you a fair warning on the sticker shock you may experience. I got the combo and when the nice person at the cash register rang it up, the total came to fifteen bucks! The tacos themselves sell for five bucks each, so this is definitely a pricey meal, especially for the drive thru. I understand that beef prices are high these days, and the cost of slow-smoking kicks that up even more, but wow! I enjoyed these tacos, but I won’t be heading back on a regular basis at these prices. The smoked brisket tacos will be on the bus back to Limited-Time-Only-Ville at some point, possibly sooner rather than later. So if the price doesn’t deter you, then give these a try before they disappear.