O’Tacos, not to be confused with U’Tacos, outranks McDonald’s France on Instagram, where it generates a cheeky mix of tacos-centric memes and plastic-tray portraiture. “One day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was, and nobody knows how they lived without it,” he said. (In 2018, the Belgian investment fund Kharis Capital acquired a majority stake in the brand.) Pelonero likens the French tacos to the iPhone. “But I’ve watched a lot of series about tacos on Netflix,” he said, speaking from Dubai, where he currently lives. Pelonero had never been to Mexico, still hasn’t. Eventually, he joined up with a pair of childhood friends to create O’Tacos, which now has two hundred and thirty locations in France. He often ate French tacos for lunch, so, during the construction off-season, he took thirty thousand euros in savings and opened a French-tacos shop. In 2007, Patrick Pelonero was working as a drywaller in Grenoble. Such is the success of these chains that, according to a French economics magazine, some are “turning fat into gold.” The owner of one snack near Lyon started out making cheese sauce for his French tacos in the kind of saucepan you might use to heat up soup now he uses twenty-litre stockpots. The trade publication Toute la Franchise recently declared that “the French tacos is without a doubt the product that will drive the market for dining out for the next ten years.” Chain restaurants have proliferated: New School Tacos, Chamas Tacos, Le Tacos de Lyon, Takos King, Tacos Avenue (which used to be called Tacos King before a trademark spat broke out). “The French tacos is a mutant product, France’s own junk food.” “France is a country that, for decades now, has been urban, industrial, and diverse,” Loïc Bienassis, of the European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food, told me. There are many stories, but none, except that of unpredictable cultural mixing, perfectly tracks. You could trace it back to a pair of butcher brothers, inspired by a dish their mother used to make or perhaps it was a short-order cook, experimenting with a cheese sauce for a pizza-dough wrap or maybe the French tacos is a take on mukhala’a, a North African stuffed pancake. The earliest innovators of the French tacos were probably snack proprietors of North African descent in the Lyonnais suburbs (suburbs in the French sense of public housing, windswept plazas, and mass transportation, rather than the American one of single-family homes, back yards, and cars). The unifying concept is the lack of need for a fork. Typically, they sell kebabs, pizza, burgers, and, now, French tacos. “Snacks” are small independent restaurants offering a panoply of takeout and maybe a few tables: snack bars, basically. The precise genesis of the French tacos is the subject of competing folklores, but it’s commonly agreed that it was invented sometime around the turn of the twenty-first century in the snacks of the Rhône-Alpes region. What are French people eating right now? The answer is as likely to be French tacos as anything else. The latest rage has nothing to do with aspics or emulsions. Although these dishes remain standbys, alongside pizza and couscous and other adopted staples, French cuisine can be as fickle as any. Bœuf bourguignon, quiche Lorraine, onion soup, chocolate mousse. In the American imagination, French cuisine can seem a static entity-the inevitable and unchanging expression of a culture as codified by Carême and Escoffier and interpreted by Julia Child. “In short, a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito,” according to the municipal newsletter of Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon in which the French tacos may or may not have been born. First of all, through some mistranslation or misapprehension of its Mexican namesake, the French tacos is always plural, even when there’s only one, pronounced with a voiced “S.” Technically, the French tacos is a sandwich: a flour tortilla, slathered with condiments, piled with meat (usually halal) and other things (usually French fries), doused in cheese sauce, folded into a rectangular packet, and then toasted on a grill. Which is to say, they are not tacos at all. French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers.
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