flea at laff #9: choncho's tacos.

snack: grilled fish tacos
drink: mexican coca-cola

for me, it was one hell of a long, lazy summer, one with diminished writing output, copious beer drinking & scant traveling, one that was wholly unproductive but one that was at least occasionally punctuated by mostly-satisfying saturday trips to the brooklyn flea. since the summer officially came to an end last wednesday, on the previous saturday i decided to make one final summer trip to the flea. the weather report for the day: pretty rad. it was jeans weather but sunny & mid-70s. none of that disgusting sweaty summer weather. i'm pretty sure that stuff's done for the twenty-ten. thank jebus.

as usual, i met up with my trusty flea companion, jessica & by the early afternoon, we headed over. when we arrived, neither of us were in the mood for casual, pointless flea browsing, so we went straight for the food.

for my final flea snack & drink of the summer, i revisited choncho's tacos, who i had actually tried earlier in the summer but never got around to writing about. unlike many of the flea food vendors, choncho's also has a physical setup with a full menu. it's served at loading dock (on tillary street in brooklyn), which is open for brunch tuesday to sunday & dinner wednesday to saturday. we're talking a variety of different tacos, burritos & sides. loading dock also doubles as an art gallery, which is cool, but at the moment their website appears to be infected by some sort of weirdness & the tumblr site doesn't have any info on the art, so i'm not sure what sort of stuff they currently have up. i guess i could go find out in person, but i'm kinda lazy. tacos & art though...sounds like a good combo to me.

at the flea, choncho's gives you the option of getting either grilled or fried shrimp or fish tacos. they're basically known for their fish tacos, so when i had their tacos previously, i went the fried fish route. this time i opted to get them grilled & after trying both types, i have to say that the fried version wins. don't get me wrong. grilled is good, but the fried version is lightly beer battered & much more flavorful. both times i topped my tacos with with radish, cilantro, lime & white sauce. with a lil hot sauce that i added for good measure, the ingredients made for a nice mix of adequately-cooked fish, crunchy veggies & spicy, creamy sauces. i've only had a few fish tacos in my day, so my fish taco palette isn't all that well defined, but choncho's are definitely the best i've had.

if there's one piece of motherly advice that i've retained from my time as an adolescent burrito, it's "if you can't have a corona with your fish tacos, you should at least have a mexican coca-cola." i've always listened to my mom & there were no coronas in sight, so i went with a mexican coca-cola. as i mentioned back in april when i had one with my milk truck grilled cheese sandwich, while the mexican version is made with cane sugar, the u.s. version is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup for some CRAZY reason. oh, excuse me. the u.s. version isn't sweetened with HFCS. it's made with "corn sugar." the corn refiner's association says so. high fructose corn syrup sounds too sciencey, so they now prefer that you call it "corn sugar." phillip morris, altria, blackwater, xe, potato, potato. whatever. regardless of what you call it,  mexican coca-cola tastes better, so F you corn lobby.

after a summer where i traveled to the brooklyn flea at least a dozen times & had food from nine different vendors, here's my assessment: the flea's one of my favorite things about summers in brooklyn. it's 75% because of the food, 25% because of the brooklyn babes & 0% because of the main flea attraction--junk for sale--but that's okay. the flea's just got a great vibe & pretty much everyone i see there seems to be having a great time. if you didn't make it there this summer, you've got a few fall months to check it out. come november 21st though, the flea closes up shop for the season & you'll have to wait til spring of 2011 to sample a bunch of creative, yummy food vendors on a weekend afternoon in a lot on lafayette ave. i wouldn't wait that long. after all, for all you know you could be dead by next spring.