The Hard-Shell Taco Deserves Your Respect

Bar A Tí is a serious taqueria: fresh blue-corn masa, a dark and cryptic mole that ferments for a full school year, duck confit, the works. The crispy taco, however, is a crinkled half-moon of braised beef shank flickering with garlic, chiles and cilantro under a heavy fringe of neon orange cheese.

This is not, at a glance, a serious taco. Though Andrew Ponce uses thin Kernel of Truth tortillas for his crispy tacos, and excellent tomatoes for the salsa, he also invokes the tacos of Cal-Mex diners, fast-food chains and family meal kits. He calls back, with some nostalgia, to the American hard-shell tacos that thrived in midcentury California and, for better or worse, shaped the iconography of tacos around the world.

Mr. Ponce, a Mexican American chef who opened his Echo Park restaurant about a month ago, grew up in Culver City, and when he wanted to go out for crispy tacos at Taco Bell or his local spot Tito’s Tacos, his father disapproved. Hard-shell tacos were a goofy and inauthentic misunderstanding. Besides, the family had real Mexican food at home!

”I wasn’t supposed to have it,” Mr. Ponce told me, “and that made it so much better.”

The seasoning-from-a-packet, Cheddar-crammed, hard-shell taco was my childhood introduction to the form — an exotic box kit delivered to my family in France by an American relative. But I’ve minimized its once- thrilling effect and long since learned to wave it away as a meaningless speck in the taco universe.

So much so that when I stopped recently at Taco Lita, in Arcadia — open since 1967 and conveniently close to my doctor’s office — I realized I’d forgotten the pleasures of this style entirely.