The breakfast taco and the taco war.

A flour tortilla, eggs, and one other thing, sold in foil out of a window in the morning. Migas is the version the city is judged on, and it puts fried tortilla chips in with the egg. The Infatuation's line is flat: "The migas taco at Veracruz sets the bar for all other migas tacos." 3

Austin is loud about this dish and the state's own taco editor keeps saying so. José R. Ralat, twice a James Beard winner for the Texas Monthly column, writes that "I regularly half-joke that Austin, in taco terms, is best thought of as a San Antonio suburb". 1 Ali Khan opened Austin Monthly's own taco guide the same way: the city "has long been considered a destination-worthy taco town, much to the chagrin of other Texas cities with respectable scenes of their own (we see you, San Antonio)". 2 Austin says it owns the breakfast taco and the state's taco editor keeps saying it does not. The migas at Veracruz All Natural is still the plate to order.

The interesting decisions are all about texture under a wet egg. Veracruz All Natural fries its own tortilla chips, which is why the crunch survives contact with the scramble. 9 Sour Duck Market goes the other way and puts fries inside: "five dollars, eggs, fries, red chili sauce and queso fresco, on a tortilla made in house". 6 Granny's Tacos leaves the egg out altogether. Nicolai McCrary's build for the chilaquil taco is "crispy corn chips in a fluffy flour tortilla get topped with a spicy and earthy house-made mole", then cotija, onion and pickled jalapeno. 7 A mole carries what a scramble usually carries. At El Primo the migas comes with deli ham by default, and Raphael Brion calls these "some of the best breakfast tacos in Austin". 8 Pueblo Viejo Taco Truck pours five house salsas where the city's usual count is two. 10

Reyna Vazquez put a trailer on East Cesar Chavez in 2006 selling juices and snow cones, and the trade died when summer ended. 4 By 2008 she had brought in her sister Maritza and switched to breakfast tacos, cooked on portable hot plates in a trailer with no proper kitchen. One of them slept on the trailer floor while the other worked the plancha. 4 They had arrived in Austin in 1999, aged 16 and 19, speaking no English, and Reyna's own account of it is worth having straight: "There's a lot that goes into opening a business, especially coming from Mexico, being immigrants and women without papers." 4

Go east or south, and go early. Granny's Tacos works out of a converted ambulance on East 7th, Pueblo Viejo Taco Truck sits on Cesar Chavez, and El Primo has been a trailer on South First for over a decade. 7 8 None of the four best-known windows is near campus or up north. Tacodeli is the sit-down answer, going since 1999 and now across Austin, Dallas, Plano and Houston. 11

The fight has a date and it was started by a headline. "The online taco wars began in 2016, when Eater published an article that christened Austin the home of the breakfast taco." 1 Ralat's piece then hands the microphone to San Antonio, and the line he gets back is not about tacos at all: "It's a collective chip on our shoulder about how other cities are cited for their food but ours isn't." 1 A year after the Eater piece, Alton Brown ate at the Veracruz school bus and called the migas the best breakfast taco I've ever had, which CultureMap reported three years later when the trailer moved to Webberville Road. 5