Restaurant Review: Carnitas Ramirez in the East Village

Long before tacos exploded onto menus worldwide, they were quite literally explosive.

During Mexico’s economic boom in the late 18th century, tacos were the makeshift sticks of dynamite that silver miners used to excavate rock. According to a popular theory from the food historian Jeffrey Pilcher, the name entered the food canon when those miners realized that their lunches — boiled potatoes wrapped in tortillas, often with a splash of hot sauce — resembled their incendiaries.

It took about two more centuries for tacos to travel to New York, where they have settled into every kind of setting and style — street food, fine dining, desserts, Indian cuisine and even as part of an omakase.

There’s merit to all that creativity. But what makes the tacos at Carnitas Ramírez so special is that they are, in a way, unremarkable. They follow a classic formula that you’ll find at other taquerias: a pliable tortilla, a deftly seasoned filling and a brightly stinging salsa. Many taquerias get two out of the three elements right. Carnitas Ramírez nails them all, and goes a step further — it reminds diners that, as ubiquitous and varied as tacos may now be, they began as a staple of the working class.

When the married couple who co-own the restaurant, Tania Apolinar and Giovanni Cervantes, opened their first place, Taqueria Ramírez, four years ago in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, neither had any restaurant experience. Mr. Cervantes, the chef, spent the coronavirus lockdown teaching himself to make tacos like the ones he grew up eating in Mexico City — where thousands of New Yorkers had decamped during the pandemic.

The cross-pollination between those cities has stirred great interest here in the couple’s traditional approach: preparing cuts like tripe and suadero in bubbling lard inside a comal choricero. Taqueria Ramírez made many Mexicans feel at home, and others feel as if they were on vacation. The owners’ background in photography and their social media savvy certainly helped. The restaurant quickly became the most talked-about New York taqueria since Los Tacos No. 1.