The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi feeding schemes with food “rescued” from the food chain. Please support them here.

When Dave Smale and I talk about Tex-Mex and Mexican foods, which is as often as I can manage, we come down to the same thing. It’s the tortilla. And it’s got to be corn. 

By corn, he and anyone who cares mean cob corn, mielies, not wheat or oats crops riffling gently in the breeze. Mielies, as we South Africans know, never do that anyway.

The corn tortilla is the principle way of telling real Mexican food, though not the only one. It’s the true basis of a lot of dishes stemming from the real people of Mexico and damn difficult to make fresh. It looks different to a wheat tortilla and it tastes different. The latter is what counts.

A week ago, I tasted a wheat tortilla, just by itself. Generally, these are piled with a Tex-Mex slather of juicy, creamy, cheesy items, something like an over-the-top burger. So it was quite a shock to find that, on its own, it tasted like a Marie biscuit. It was fine-textured, a bit sweet and bland.

Now, a corn tortilla is a very tasty thing, if a schlep to create. It has great texture, some puffiness and could never be described as bland, especially given smokiness from the grand fire at the newer Baha Taco. 

Dave smiles gratefully when he hears that it is something inherently delicious, not merely a carrier for other foods. “Exactly!”

Six months ago he and Kat, his wife moved Baha Taco down Grant Avenue in Norwood, into new and larger premises with an enviable, sunny courtyard shared with the Baker Brothers and Ba-Pita.

I hang out there snacking on real tortilla chips with the freshest tasting vegetables, crema and watching a freshly met couple get to know each other over what look like giant margaritas (not Mexican). Another woman with incredibly encrusted and very long-pointed nails is on the Ba-Pita side of the quad. She battles with the buttons on her cell phone, using the pads of her fingers but has to do it sideways because of their nail length.

The quesadilla of a corn tortilla enclosing mushrooms, green pepper, jalapeno and molten white cheese. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

There’s even some service now at Baha Taco. Next, I have an exemplary corn tortilla enclosing mushrooms, green pepper, jalapeno and some molten white cheese as a quesadilla. There’s still a blackboard for ordering the food but it is served at the table. Laurice Taitz (of Johannesburg in Your Pocket) and I were astonished when Dave told a couple who asked, at the previous place, that they order their food at the counter and that they could take it wherever they wanted after that, “even to the tables over there”. We followed surprised suit and so had our first tastes of real Mexican street food in Jozi. 

As at the old Baha Taco, there’s still a blackboard for ordering the food. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

The waitress brings my quesadilla to the courtyard table, explains the filling elements with interest and impressive nous. 

“Service might be becoming something as we progress,” Dave says half proudly, half caught-outedly.

He’s proud of his rebellious streak. Dave’s one of those people who learn fast, understand completely and then do it their own way anyway, albeit meticulously in his case. When he does things, not necessarily all Mexican things, he flings himself into them wholeheartedly. It’s a great trait. I like fanatics, especially food ones and Dave is certainly one. 

The new Baha Tacos is not meticulous in terms of décor. Dave doesn’t do décor. “The place evolves,” he says. However, there’s a collection of Frida Kahlo portraits on one wall. There’s an enormous, bright pumpkin on one of the inside dark wooden tables. That could pass for décor until it is slow-smoked overnight in the old pizza oven that Dave seems to have inherited from previous owners.

Dave Smale, a real gringo, from South Africa. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

It is supposed to be Mexican street food that he and Kat sell, after all. 

After all: they met in London, worked high-end food places, moved to more casual Brighton, hooked up with a person running a B&B, where they added a greasy spoon sort of eatery to his offering. 

Dave began making his own spice mixtures, finding chillies and fresh dhania for both Indian and Tex-Mex type food, harking to his Californian research. Adventures included taking over a Jewish restaurant in nearby Hove where he “screwed up the roasts royally, ” he says though I doubt that he was really clueless about that food. I believe he was meticulous about drinking the cellar dry as the clients left in droves, leaving him with a place to start over in his own way. In 2008 the crash left him and Kat financially able to pick up the devalued restaurant and build it up yet again their own way. Restlessness took them to Dresden, Kat’s home town, whereafter he was keen for them to move on to Berlin, while she was keen to go to South Africa.

They found themselves in Fourways at a car dealership that also featured a restaurant, which Dave eventually left with a paella pan to his name and some ideas of what to do with it. They travelled around South Africa, doing food at festivals, starting with that paella pan, driving 6,000 kilometres without a drivers licence between them. 

The food became more and more like Mexican street food and more and more meticulously full of integrity and “no-bullshit”. Baha Taco was being created. Dave was finding where to source masa for the real corn tortilla dough and experimenting with tools for their production.

Kat’s and his food ethics and principles were honed. “People don’t do real Mexican food because making the real tortillas with corn is too darn difficult. We did. We do.’’

“Today we make everything from scratch. We even make our own vinegar. We’re anti-waste and utilise everything. Our vegetables are the freshest, grown at a Siyakhana project down the road, helping communities through food. We provide Mexican street food that’s fun and fast and fresh, with integrity.”

I love it that a plate of soft taco, chargrilled ostrich with roasted pepper salsa and queso fresco, also features potato skins as crisps on top. Kat and he used to do “knock-out-well” at markets and at events like Oppi Koppi with their portable kitchen and Mexican food that’s “not crap”.

This old pizza oven in the new place is intrinsic to making a dish of which Baha Taco is particularly proud and which I delight in too much even to share. The fish today is blue marlin and it’s seared on a bed of salt, heated to pizza oven extreme height, swiftly served on a soft blue-corn taco or small tortilla with a puree of tomatillos grown by a friend and bottled by Dave and Kat. 

Blue marlin on a soft corn tortilla to match, salt-seared, with tomatillo puree. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

The wood fire is also key to producing the real, most authentic corn tortillas. Here it burns in an enormous open hearth. I have to smile because I remember the tortilla fire Dave had piled up on the ceramic counter in the previous place. It was almost certainly illegal but he cooked them right there.   

As then, he and Kat toil at pressing and turning out the exceptional corn tortillas. Well, I guess Kat is too little for the actual pressing. I watch Dave launching himself bodily at the artisanal wood press.

For the corn tortilla pressing, I watch Dave launching himself bodily at the artisanal wood press. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

Then the tortillas are flipped casually one by one onto the Mexican comal on the fire in the huge hearth. One by one they are slipped into a tortilla-sized pouch, to keep them soft and warm before serving, so made fresh to order. It’s quite a feat.

The corn tortillas flipped onto the Mexican comal on the fire in the huge hearth. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

I’ve read that cooking real Mexican food is a lot like French cooking, utilising a wide range of time-tested and important ingredients, perfectly cooked in certain best-proven ways. Funny, that.

Dave has a prior food skills history, having picked up much from the highly skilled chefs in the area, when he worked with caterers in Newport, down south in California. His 13 years of food travel around California in particular opened his eyes and all senses to how Americanised Mexican food like neighbouring Tex-Mex evolved from deep and respected, relevant Mayan-Yucatan roots.

When I ask if people really care, Dave says Tex-Mex is what most people have come to know and want, from the influences of the states, after American settlers moved south towards Mexican diets and interspersed them with what they already knew. It can sometimes be a bit of an all-things exercise now. 

If you find your wheat tortilla has yellow cheese in it, like cheddar, that the crema is generally mayo, beef mince is used, along with random beans, cumin is used to spice things up as well as the chillies, you’re eating Tex-Mex. But he says he even includes a few items like beef chilli nachos for those people, at Baha Taco. He says people insist on drinking margaritas so he also supplies those, along with Mexican drinks.

Mexican food, however, uses white cheeses. It doesn’t include beef, instead, some chicken, some pork, mostly fresh vegetables. The spices and herbs are epazote, oregano and cilantro and chilli peppers are a vegetable too. Corn tortillas, be they yellow or blue, are the staple.

So this is the real Mexican street food deal, corn tortilla-led, made in Jozi with fanaticism by a real gringo, from South Africa. DM/TGIFood

Baha Taco, 113 Nellie Rd, off Grant Avenue, Norwood. 076 694 7400