City of Ate's Taco Trail ends today. It was a good run, but I'm moving on. (That doesn't mean I'll cease writing about tacos. How can I not play on the taco jungle gym that is Dallas?)

While deciding on the final City of Ate venue, I considered three restaurants. Taco Ocho, the new northern Mexican taqueria in Richardson, was the prime candidate, thanks to a menu that elicited Pavlovian stirrings and dirty thoughts that would make my priest turn salsa-roja red. Sabor: A Taco Joint was the next option. Its contemporary décor juxtaposed with a taco menu steeped in tradition makes me think the downtown restaurant is Urban Taco done right.

However, I wanted to end with something indicative of time (Texas, because Texas is unchanging. Texas is Texas) and place (Texas and its gem of gustatory offering to the world, Tex-Mex).

Then, Zuzu, the almost 20-year-old Lakewood Tex-Mex shop, a favorite with locals, especially families. It's menu reads classically. Burritos, here. Chimichangas, there. Fajitas? Check? Crispy beef tacos? Absolutely, mano. Let's not forget the Lone Star State's primordial soup, queso.

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Jose Ralat Maldonado

Entering a supermarket--or a mall, for that matter--is a stressful venture packed with potential pitfalls, so it's always comforting to see food options as an escape or security blanket. Super Plaza, a market in Upper Greenville's Little Ethiopia, is no exception.

The market has a funky smell, but it offers everything from Latin American culinary staples to fresh baked pastries and avocados the size of newborns, not to mention discolored meat. And that aroma is quickly eradicated with one bite of the bistek con papas taco, a vermillion concoction that harbors strings of dark green chilies so asphyxatingly hot that closer inspection was necessary to determine whether Szuechan peppercorns were stuffed inside the cubed potatoes.

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The dearth of information on most taquerías and Mexican restaurants in the Dallas area means that often this weekly series relies heavily on leaps of faith (and stomach). Call it food cartography, because, baby, there is no map. It's what barbecue expert Daniel Vaughn does at Full Custom Gospel BBQ and what the taco bloggers at the Dallas Taco Bracket, TacOCliff and Taco Sense do. Between us, we hope to provide our readers and fellow food lovers with a compass to good eats. Doing so, we experience pitfalls and failures galore, so you don't have to.

On Monday, Nick Zukin, a food blogger/restaurateur from Portland, Oregon, and I took to a stretch of Maple Avenue beginning at the intersection of Inwood Road, working our way toward Uptown. After five stops and one failed attempt at breakfast tacos after 10:30 a.m., two favorites came to the fore, both barbacoa.

The first was the El Rio Grande supermarket, a large grocery where your piñata and key copying needs can be met alongside ample and cheap produce. The restaurant portion of the store was at the side and consisted of several tables across from the cash register and a long case of steam tables with all manner of animal parts for the gnawing. The barbacoa de res sat in a pan submersed in its juices, while islands of the beef rose above the liquid spotted with a fatty sheen. It was lovely.

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Jose Ralat Maldanado

The small bodega, trading in beer and candy, on Gaston Avenue had been opened for 10 months before a kitchen was set up in the back of the shop. That's when business began to pick up for Big E's Food and Beverage, sparsely decorated with beer and soda memorabilia, signs, trays and figurines, beneath exposed beams and ductwork.

The cook responsible for the grub, Yolanda Lopez, of course offers tacos for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they're not half bad, especially the carnitas taco, a heap of roasted and pulled pork with a texture buoyed by crispy bits of skin and char that impart a sense of surprise. More surprising is the inclusion of balls of mashed potato to the pork filling. Aside from juxtaposition, the extra starch was a neutral element, as neutral as the industrial flour tortillas.

The chicken fajita was a moist allotment of grilled poultry strips and sautéed onions and peppers. It was messy, succulent and diverting -- the garnishes had to be slurped.

The brisket was a cracked pile of meat, with a gray tint and tough to the teeth, but it had a hefty flavor augmented by the one-two punch of the red and green salsas.

The ground beef was the traditional taco-meat stuffed job with cubes of tomato. It skewed dry, but its simplicity earned my respect.

Unfortunately, the kitchen was out of shrimp, stopping my curiosity dead in its public-transportation riding tracks.

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Google maps had failed us again. The missus and I were en route to see the season-opening bouts of the Dallas Derby Devils roller derby league in North Richland Hills when we realized we were lost, but not before coming across 5-week-old Oscar's Taco Shop (no relation to Cowtown's expansion-giddy Fuzzy's).

The freestanding food hut looked out of place across the street from a field and next to the NRH2O water park. The drive-through menu board didn't install much confidence, listing as it did crispy tacos and a jam of combo platters starting at $6.90. Perhaps it was indeed associated with the Starbucks of tacos, I considered.

All doubt and misgivings were washed away by the first bites of the hefty south-of-the-border sandwiches. Each taco was garnished with bright helpings of pico de gallo and creamy wedges of avocado. Not one of the four we ordered was disappointing. They were all worth the $2.35 price tag each.

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Up and down we drove, hungry for tacos after La Carretera Argentina's satisfactory empanadas consumed at Oak Cliff Earth Day. Surely Jefferson Boulevard would produce happy sustenance. It did -- kind of. Jefferson is cluttered with taquerías, some advertised with gaudy neon, others off-putting with their

crumbling facades and adhesive interior surfaces. There is even one set to open soon (more on that with time). Tiquicheo, a sleepy shop named after a city in the Mexican state of Michoacán, offers kind, prompt service and cleanliness -- things not always found at taco joints -- one block north of the commercial strip.

The small one-room restaurant is sheltered by a colorful front that includes a comical declaration of the monarchical supremacy of its offerings. In the case of Tiquicheo, this is not a hollow claim.

As a Mexican soccer game played on the corner-mounted television, we dug in. The sports announcer's shouts of Gol! punctuated by our wows.

The shredded, stewed preparations known as deshebrado offered in chicken and beef meted out brief karate chops to the base of the throat. The shock from the unexpected heat was too much for my wife. Had she waited a bit, perhaps taken a sip from the Coca Mexicana between us, Mrs. Ralat would have found the second bite tolerable, the third downright delicious, the fourth, the fifth, all gone.

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Not enough is written about breakfast tacos in Dallas. That's regrettable given that, like barbecue, breakfast tacos are a hallmark of the state's foodways, something so uniquely Texan that after my initial visits after marrying a D/FW native, I scoured the streets of New York in search of the ideal means of starting the day. (Saturday mornings aren't Saturday mornings without my wife's chorizo, eggs and cheese tacos.) I failed all those many years ago.

Rusty Taco, a polarizing taco shop in a repurposed gas station, serves excellent breakfast tacos, performing magic tricks with ingredients most muck up. The tuberous cubes in the potato and egg option have crispy outsides that snap lightly between the teeth. It's notable that something I always apply to a potato and egg taco is salt. The version at Rusty Taco needs no such extra seasoning. It's spot on.

The bacon in the bacon and egg was -- wait for it -- actually cooked properly. The strips of belly meat were crunchy strata with alternating hues; the curls of fat had bounce. Eating one of those tacos does not run you the risk of food poisoning from undercooked pork.

The three cross-sections of jalapeño breakfast sausage around which eggs were folded in the next taco also had snap. It lacked the kick expected from meat with a pepper in its name. Still, as far as breakfast sausages go, I was pleased.

The chorizo had the heat I wished was present in the links. That became a conflagration when I squeezed a generous amount of the habanero salsa onto the filling. The refreshing Cherry Coke from the gazillion-flavor-option Coca-Cola machine inside eased the mouth fire.

All the breakfast tacos were topped with shredded orange cheese that slowly melted while I sat at one of the picnic tables on the side patio. The saltiness of the cheese certainly contributed to my ignorance of the saltshaker I later realized had been in front of me during the meal.

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Boys, boys, boys...Don't fight. There are plenty of tacos to go around.

The March Madness-style Burger Bracket might be in limbo, but its predecessor, the Taco Bracket, is back and is bigger. Joe Flowers announced this week that the 2011 edition of last year's popular food fight will take a different form. We don't mean all tacos must come in Old El Paso packaged shells. No, we mean the format is being altered.

"I'm going to separate the brackets by meat type. I'm still working on figuring out the categories, but you will for sure see barbacoa, al pastor, fish, organ meat, chicken and beef. I also want to be sure to include goat somewhere in the mix," Flowers told me via email.

He also said this bracket is to level the playing field between regions in the Dallas area. If a place in the suburbs turns out to be better than a joint in Oak Cliff, then it's all the same.

The bracket will also have a health component. "In order to make sure people know they're getting the absolute best taco in Dallas, the bracket needs to be as specific as possible. Just naming a restaurant was a great way to give people a heads-up about some places they may not have known existed. However, if they don't know the chicharrónes are life changing while the chicken tinga will make them sick, I've steered them wrong." Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Flowers, the public taco servant!

To join in the barbacoa buffoonery, visit the competition's Facebook page.

If anyone doubts the importance and popularity of tacos in Dallas, then I ask them to look at the growing number of taco bloggers. I'm not referring to everyone with an opinion on Fuel City's picadillo and an Internet connection. I am referring to those individuals who have dedicated large amounts of time seeking out the best and worst of tacos in town and sharing the information.

Most of the local taco bloggers, myself included, have read each other's work but had never met until this past Saturday, when with the organizing of Joe Flowers (Dallas Taco Bracket) we converged on In & Out Tacos in Garland. The taco stand was chosen for three reasons: because Daniel Vaughn of Full Custom Gospel BBQ had told me about it, because none of us had eaten there and because of its name. Dallas already has an In & Out. We don't need carpetbagging left-coast hippie burger peddlers.

Aside from four types of tacos (pastor, chicken, lengua and fajita), In & Out vends hot dogs, burgers (see!) and all manner of gringo eats to be consumed at uncovered picnic tables. But we were there for the tacos, and so BigChalupa, Barbaracoa and PequeñoPicadillo of Taco Sense, David and Alison Thompson from TacOCliff, Chris Bacchus of Gas Station Tacos, Flowers and I gobbled meat wrapped in flimsy flatbread.

If not for the company, the experience would have been a complete letdown. The chicken was tough and as dry as the weather has been for most of the spring. The pork also lacked moisture. Moreover, it was underseasoned, saved only by the inordinate amount of salsa verde we were given. The fajita was worthy of only a "meh."

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I found another one! This week's Taco Trail stop hosts a drag-queen revue like other taquerías around town. The show advertisement emblazoned across the restaurant's delivery van wasn't exactly the first thing I wanted to catch my eye that day, but luckily, a little salsa and a tuck mean something else when it comes to the kind of tacos I had at Los Altos de Jalisco No. 4 that morning.

The clean one-room eatery just off Northwest Highway was quiet when I entered with two thoughts. First: Ay bendito! More powdered mugs lip-syncing. Second: Give me some breakfast tacos, please.

As I sat, a waitress, one of two, brought me freshly fried chips and warm salsa that had an uneven heat. They were refreshing all the same -- if only for novelty. Who aside from college students munch chips and salsa for breakfast?

Just when I was beginning to worry that my food wouldn't arrive before the next bus and the basket of chips was depleted, the trio arrived at my table. They were a gnarled mess, a brightly colored beautiful mess. No tranny could be as tantalizing as the finger-staining chorizo with the morning-on-the-farm aroma. One whiff was tantamount to a couple of cups of coffee. No over-rouged performer could be as vibrant as the a la Mexicana breakfast taco, eggs, onions and green pepper giving it the palette of the Mexican flag. The lime juice with which I doused that taco turned the few bites into rays of sunshine that pierced the dreary spring sky.

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