Tacos Árabes Poblanos

Tacos árabes are from Puebla. Not from Mexico City. Not from the north. From the city of Puebla, specifically from the centro, where Lebanese immigrants arrived in the 1930s and brought with them their shawarma trompo, their flatbread, and their way with garlic, oregano, and vinegar. They settled, they cooked, and Puebla absorbed the dish the way Puebla absorbs everything: by making it its own.

This is the ancestor of al pastor. Before the achiote, before the pineapple, before the chilango trompo turned red, there was the Lebanese trompo in Puebla turning slowly with marinated pork. The pork came from the Spanish. The trompo came from Lebanon. The bread, pan árabe, is the cousin of khubz, thicker than a flour tortilla and softer than a pita. The salsa, smoky chipotle morita, is the Mexican hand on a Lebanese-Mexican dish. If you put pineapple anywhere near these tacos, you have made al pastor. You have not made tacos árabes.

I spent two weeks in Puebla collecting versions of this dish. La Oriental claims to be the original. Tacos Bagdad serves them with the parsley still on the plate, a hand from the Lebanese cooks who started it. Every poblano family that grew up on these tacos has an opinion about the salsa, the bread, the chop of the meat. What everyone agrees on: pan árabe, not tortilla. Chipotle salsa, not green. Pork, not lamb. And no pineapple. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Puebla.