El Sauz Tacos' deadly delicious carne asada

As some of you might remember, I recently talked about the importance of planning creative date nights to keep the spice alive. For us, nothing sounded more appetizing than a jaunt through some of the best known taco trucks and joints on the Eastside.

Our night consisted of 6 stops with orders consisting of 2-3 tacos to share: an asada, pastor and carnitas. So I’ll save you a lot of trouble, heartache and heartburn and let you know what was really tasty:

La Estrella (Highland Park): really good carnitas
La Estrella (Eagle Rock): good asada, dry carnitas, avoid the pastor
Taco Azteca (Glendale): great carnitas, average asada, avoid the pastor
Tres Hermanas (Glendale): pastor was good, avoid the asada and carnitas
Gina’s Taco (Glendale): very good asada, avoid the pastor and carnitas

Which finally leads me to El Sauz. As Stop #6, El Sauz had everything going against it–we were full, we were over not finding anything truly amazing and frankly, we were taco’ed out.

We pulled up, saw the dining area packed (the first busy spot of the night) and promptly ordered 1 asada and 1 pastor. I honestly can’t tell you what I thought about the pastor, because everything went white after I tried the carne asada. No mystery meat here, but tender, steak-like chunks of the juiciest, most flavorful asada I’ve had in a really long time. Was it an anomaly? Were we just reacting from the shock of finally finding something “passable?” We got asada tacos 2 and 3 to verify our findings.

Turns out we were right! It WAS fantastic! To further solidify our findings, we got two asada burritos to-go. El Sauz’ standard issue burrito consists of meat, frijoles de la olla, cilantro and onions. Initially, I was worried that I’d be disappointed by the lack of burrito rice. Needless to say, all those worries evaporated as we dove into those burritos the next morning for breakfast–total asada awesomeness!

El Sauz Tacos, 4432 San Fernando Rd., Glendale, 91204, 818-246-9701