In 1976, the first Super Taqueria opened on Tenth Street in downtown San Jose. At the time, Janet Gray Hayes was mayor and Super Taq’s phone number was 408-292-6470.
Five years later, in 1981, the Mercury News sent the late restaurant critic Joe Izzo to check out the goods. Izzo led his story with: “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!”
His words still ring true. Along with the phone number, not much on the menu has changed in 40 years.
“Thoreau’s memorable exultation about life at Walden Pond is a lesson Super Taqueria has taken to its heart,” wrote Izzo, adding that Thoreau would be pleased with the simplicity of Super Taqueria’s limited menu and scant accoutrements. “The decor is strictly fast-food linoleum standard, with a few skeletal chairs, formica tables and two colorful hacienda murals cheering the place up like two grinning storybook sunshines,” he wrote.
While the current chairs and tables are different, the phone number from 1976 remains the same.
In those days, there was not much else for budget-conscious university students to do in downtown San Jose. There weren’t very many places to bring visitors who wanted to experience “the real San Jose” anywhere near campus. Super Taq was one of the first such places, especially after more of them began to open up, as San Jose itself began to expand.
Whenever I meet people who escaped downtown decades ago, one of the first things they recall is Super Taqueria. Every single time.
Of course, by now, one can find bigger and maybe even better burritos at numerous other places. Thousands of buffoons argue on Instagram about these things.
Super Taq predates all of this nonsense. Even better, the original one on Tenth Street still fills up with native Spanish-speaking people every day at lunch and evening time.
But I have more to say here, naturally.
I was not yet a Super Taq patron in the ’70s and ’80s, but I know several SJSU professors and staff who were. Especially in the music department, whenever a visiting composer or avant-garde artist from Europe came to do a gig, Professor Allen Strange, himself an amazing chef of Mexican food, would bring the person to Super Taq. If you study up on any history of ’60s art music and beyond—live electronics, new media, electro-acoustic performance, gallery installations, sound poetry and whatnot—you will discover at least a few people that Allen brought to Super Taq at one point or another. The same can be said for now-retired music department technician Larry Wendt, who brought numerous European sound poets to Super Taq.
Take Henri Chopin for example, the legendary French sound artist, pioneer of tape-recorder manipulation and vocalizer of extreme voice-based amplified noise-arts of all sort. To this day, it’s safe to say the loudest gig in the history of the SJSU music department was Henri Chopin in room 150, back in the ’80s. Chopin, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 85, knew everybody. He knew Man Ray. He knew William S. Burroughs. He published post-Dada magazines in the ’60s and ’70s. He was a living connection to the entire lineage of the 20th-century European avant-garde. And he once ate at Super Taq on Tenth Street in downtown San Jose.
Then there were the Swedes, also in the ’70s and ’80s, Sten Hanson and Lars Gunnar-Bodin. Both were pioneers of experimental music and poetry in Sweden, beginning in the ’60s. Both ate at Super Taq on Tenth Street.
Over in Ghent, Belgium, Godfried Willem-Raes and his partner Moniek Darge, the notorious anarcho-nudists, together run the Logos Foundation, sort of like the underground Carnegie Hall of experimental music in Belgium. They build musical robots and they design performance spaces. Together, they came to San Jose more than once. And they ate at Super Taqueria.
I met all these people in Europe, but I never got to dine with any of them at Super Taq, in my own city. But I am not upset about this.
Instead, as I sit with a still-dirt-cheap burrito and the ghost of Joe Izzo, I cannot separate myself from the grand sweep of history. Izzo was right. Simplicity is the key. Long live Super Taqueria!
