“Tacos are dinner food,” Lesley Tellez says. Tortas, on the other hand, are a lunch food, made to eat on the go (you’ll rarely see seats at a torta stand, she points out), hard to find before noon, and often shutting down before sunset. Tellez, who runs Eat Mexico, a street food tour company in Mexico City, and has written a forthcoming book on Mexican food, says that a torta is essentially a “big, fat, messy Mexican sandwich.” It boasts an array of salty, sour, spicy, and even sweet flavors. “Con todo,” (with everything) is the way to order a torta, says Tellez, meaning that the diner would like whatever toppings (lettuce, tomatoes, onions, spicy pickled peppers) are available. Santibañez concurs, offering his theory that “the torta took all the foods people already loved and made them portable.”
The Mexican palate, Tellez explains, finds the stuff of American sandwiches (turkey, tomato, and cheese, for example) too boring. “[Mexicans] want a different experience, more intense, more in your face,” she says, though she follows up by pointing out that now Mexican street food is growing in popularity in the US. As people want to learn more about other cultures, Tellez says, eating the big, layered, complex sandwiches are an affordable way to explore.
