If almost everyone I know has a favorite taco restaurant, then they certainly have a place they wouldn’t buy a taco at to save their lives and we’re all sure to argue about which one is the best.

 There’s Arturo’s on the corner of Western and Armitage and right next door is Lazo’s, a sprawling affair of a restaurant where blaring karaoke music can be found at almost any time, day or night.  Both are twenty-four hour locations but I’ve never been able to clarify if they are competing businesses or sister restaurants.  You’ll get shitty food at either one and frankly my sope has been hard as a rock at Lazo’s on more than one occasion.  To their credit, I’ll admit that their salsa is one of my favorites but it is mild to comparison to that of, say, El Barco Mariscos.

 El Barco Mariscos on Ashland Avenue has two of the spiciest and most unique salsas that I have ever tried.  Horchata is a must for the salsa connoisseur at this location, as a margarita is not enough to fan the flame from your tongue.  The food is excellent and a bit pricey but well worth it once you see that one wall of the restaurant is a giant glass alcohol cabinet filled from floor to ceiling with different brands of Tequila.  When you order dinner, you get not just the standard fair with beans and rice but you get a two foot oblong plate filled with a cornucopia of vegetables in addition to your beans and rice.  Each table has a basket filled with key limes, which you may or may not choose to accompany your shots of Patron, which at four dollars each, come pretty cheap.

 If you get a cornucopia of vegetables at El Barco, then at Puebla, a little farther north up Milwaukee Avenue, you get a cornucopia of margaritas.  Their margaritas come in several flavors, on the rocks or frozen, and you can order one in an astounding four different sizes.  The food is great, the atmosphere brightly colored, and the salsa a bit more manageable for the mouth, which make for this restaurant easily being one of the best twenty-four spots in the city hands down.

 My favorite local taco joint though is Cardona’s.  At 18^th and Laflin in Pilsen, it’s a little off the beaten path now that I live up north but it’s well worth the trip, I swear.  And you can make that trip anytime twenty-four hours a day.  The place has zero ambience and I’ve even had the experience of stepping over a drunk customer who passed out in front of the entryway but the food is divine.  It’s so divine that I never even liked chicken tacos until I ate one at this place.  It’s all in the way they prepare their chicken.  Most Mexican restaurants either have shredded chicken or small pieces of cut-up chicken.  Cardona’s serves their chicken tacos with a thin chicken breast on a bed of warm corn tortillas.  Add lettuce, tomato, Chihuahua cheese with avocado slices, a dollop of sour cream and splash of red or green salsa and there you have it: the best taco in Chicago.