If you stand in the doorway to 5 De Mayo Food Market on a weekend afternoon and look to the back of this long, narrow grocery store, you’ll see a thin cloud of steam hovering like a promise. Walk past the fruit displays and the butcher case, all under a canopy of piñatas, and you’ll find a line of people patiently waiting for tacos.
The line moves slowly: Two cooks stand behind hotel pans of carnitas and barbacoa, carefully flipping piles of corn tortillas every few seconds on two steel comales taqueros. They chop meat into bite-size bits on a thick round of wood, and load each paper plate of tacos with the customer’s desired mix of meat, onion, cilantro and lime. Every so often, you’ll find someone dancing to the store’s music to pass the time.
Here in Jackson Heights, Queens, this micro-taqueria has been operating for two-and-a-half years, the brainchild of the butcher Jesus Fuentes. Juan Morales, an owner of the store, hired him in 2016 when he was looking for a new produce guy; Mr. Fuentes floated the idea of adding a butcher case to the store’s offerings. That summer, he started making goat barbacoa and selling it by the pound, which led to tacos.
The goat remains the stunner of the menu, impossibly creamy, with a hint of gamy flair. “Banana leaves make the meat soft and keep it juicy, and the avocado leaves give flavor,” he said. There is also lamb barbacoa, and carnitas, which, after a rough chop, is the ideal mix of crisp skin, lush fat and tender pork shoulder.
All the meat is prepared by Mr. Fuentes at 5 de Mayo’s other location, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and sold only here. He aims for “the flavor of Mexico’s villages,” he said. “In the villages, the products don’t have chemicals in them, they don’t have preservatives.”
Mr. Fuentes grew up in the state of Veracruz and worked as a waiter in Mexico City: “I’ve tried a lot over the years, and now I’m applying it here in New York.” He is rightly protective of his recipes, but admits that one secret ingredient are the two comales he imported from Mexico.
These particular cooktops each hold a moat of burbling meat and fat that surrounds a dome-like center, used to cook corn tortillas until they are charred and blistered. “On a grill, the tortilla stays soft, but later it falls apart,” Mr. Fuentes said. “On the comal, it becomes stronger, gets more texture, and has the flavor of the comal. It’s more delicious — it’s a different taco.”
Before placing a new tortilla on the dome, the cooks quickly swipe it through fat rendered from boiled tripe and suadero, a cut of beef similar to flank steak. Nestled among the meat are charred jalapeños and green onions, providing heady spice and sweetness. The comal setup benefits the meat, too: Tripe tacos offer intestine both soft from boiling and crisp from contact with the steel, all of it fragrant from its bath in the bubbling fat.
The market has just one table and a counter along the wall, so diners don’t linger for long, but the atmosphere never feels rushed. There’s always a bottle opener floating around — attached to a block of wood plastered with an old lucha libre advertisement — ready to open a bottle of soda or beer, both available in the store. (You pay for your tacos and drinks at the counter up front, but don’t miss the tip jar near the hotel pans.)
It’s easy to overlook the small caldron of consomé behind the taco table, but this spicy, meaty soup turns out to be one of Mr. Fuentes’s most stunning dishes: a base of goat broth fortified with avocado leaves and simmered with goat, rice and chickpeas. The broth turns red and fiery from dried chipotle chiles, which bob through the soup. The best thing to do is take some home and eat it for dinner.
