A&E

Local chefs get crazy creative at Motley Brews’ Hopped Taco Throwdown

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The Drunk Rabbit taco by Chef Nicholas Aoki with Herringbone Las Vegas during the Motley Brews Hopped Taco Throwdown about The Backyard at Zappos on Saturday, August 12, 2017.
Photo: L.E. Baskow

It’s an obviously genius idea—a beer festival that’s also a taco festival. What we didn’t expect at Motley Brews’ inaugural Hopped Taco Throwdown (at Zappos on August 12) was a platform for some truly talented Las Vegas chefs to present deliciously innovative, even avant-garde takes on tacos, an overwhelming display of culinary creativity.

Well, maybe it wasn’t that much of a surprise. Motley doesn’t do anything in an ordinary way, always twisting and tweaking its events in order to create the most appetizing beer-fueled experiences. And the lineup of local chefs representing some of the most popular restaurants in the city certainly created an expectation of taco glory—but then they went ahead and blew away those expectations.

Hopped Taco Throwdown

Three competitive categories—Taco Dolce (sweet taco), Taco Loco (craziest taco) and Hopped Taco (a taco using beer as an ingredient)—inspired the chefs to push it to the limit. Herringbone is not a restaurant known for tacos, but its chefs—Geno Bernardo and Nicholas Aoki—really staked their claim for taco supremacy. Bernardo created an Italian-themed shaved porchetta and rapini taco inside a light, crisp, tasty shell made from brown ale-infused pizza dough, but it was his delightful pizzelle (Italian waffle cookie) shell stuffed with Philly-style cheesecake and strawberry granite that took the top prize in the Dolce division. His protégé Aoki killed it with a lager-braised rabbit taco with jicama and passion fruit, and a crispy pork katsu taco with banh mi slaw. Here’s hoping for a taco pop-up at Herringbone soon.

Jamie Tran from the Black Sheep won the craziest taco award for a crunchy-cool creation of tuna and salmon tartare with jalapeño sauce and tobiko inside a taco shell made out of salmon skin. It was like a taco from another planet. The other big winner was Fix’s Sterling Buckley, whose beer-braised pork belly with drunken pickles won the Hopped Taco trophy.

For just straight-up powerful flavor, my pick goes to Dalton Wilson from DW Bistro, who was serving up a Jamaican jerked pork leg taco garnished with a tangy, beer-infused barbecue sauce and crispy onion straws in a corn tortilla. Super spicy and succulent, this taco had me coming back for more. I also made repeat visits to the Goodwich station, where Josh Clark concocted the way-out-there beer-marinated duck heart taco with pineapple pico de gallo, a Mediterranean-style ground lamb taco swaddled in eggplant, and the sweet “plato de queso” taco, basically a cheese plate in taco form with a crispy, chewy Oaxaca cheese shell.

If you missed this event, you really missed out. Let’s hope the Hopped Taco Throwdown becomes part of Motley’s annual schedule.

Tags: Dining, Food, Beer
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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of editor-at-large at Las Vegas Weekly magazine. ...

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