On the Menu: Yuca stacks and seasonal salsas make this fare to remember

I have written it before, and I will write it again right here: fried yuca beats fried potatoes almost any day.

At the recently opened A Taco Affair, a signature side is the yuca stack, offered as both a single portion ($7.50) and a shareable platter ($15). At $7.50, this side might seem more like a splurge, but the helping is heaping and will leave you with room for maybe one taco. The shareable can be an accompaniment for two diners or is easily split among four before your tacos come to the table.

Another special starter is the seasonal salsa, served with thin and crispy chips ($6.25). For A Taco Affair’s first few months in business, las frutas de temporada were peaches, which made for a superbly singular pico. Until the state’s eponymous fruit is back in season, pineapple will admirably take its place.

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Stacked in flavor

Opened on July 24, this taqueria-bar brand was brought to the 912 by chef-GM Mike Johnson and fellow co-owners Jason Fizzarotti and Brian Garbrandt, all of whom are friends with A Taco Affair’s founder and executive chef Jess Phillips.

Call it a ‘loose’ franchise - a friendchise, if you will.

“She created this menu. This is her menu, this is her brand,” Johnson said, crediting what Phillips has created. “She built this on her own, and we just took it and put it in a different location.”

At A Taco Affair’s first two locations up in New Jersey, the yuca stack is on the menus, so it was destined to be on the bill here in Savannah.

The bigger sharable portion is the only option up in Little Falls and Denville, so Fizzarotti suggested that their outpost offer a half-sized stack, which can also be done with the tastily tagged Tatchos.

“Honestly, [they’ve] become very very popular,” Johnson said of both loaded platters. “I think people just want that side for themselves.”

One of the very few items that A Taco Affair is not making from scratch are the yuca fries themselves, but if you have ever peeled, boiled, decored and fried cassava at home, you can appreciate these skipped prep steps.

Instead, pre-mashed and formed wedges are frozen, à la a tot, and make for a “light and airy” fry that is far quicker to service.

Pull-apart brisket that has been dry-rubbed and braised for eight hours is generously slathered atop several steak-cut strips of crispy-on-outside pillowy-on-the-inside yuca.

The braising liquid is reserved so that the brisket can go back in for a final bath before being plated, giving it “a deep flavor.”

“It’s not even shredded,” Johnson said of the beef. “You pick it up with the tongs, and it falls apart.”

The stack is drizzled with house-made cheese and barbecue sauces.

SEN-SAL-SATIONAL

“Fortunately and unfortunately, since peaches are seasonal,” Johnson shared when we spoke this past weekend, “we sold our last batch.”

“We’re now onto the pineapple salsa,” he quickly and happily added.

One of the first menu items that he, Fizzarotti and Garbrandt spoke about was having a house-made salsa to serve with tortilla chips as a starter. They asked Phillips to create something special for this Savannah branch, and she developed the peach salsa recipe.

The trio tackled the wintertime quandary by imagining a “rotation” of primary fruit players.

“It’s essentially all the same ingredients, except we swap out the peaches and put pineapple in, which is available all year round,” Johnson said of the salsa recipe.

Red onion joins a trio of peppers ― habaneros, jalapeños, and poblanos ― all of which are roasted with the chosen fruit and then mixed with dried apricots before being processed into a nice dice that is neither chunky nor watery.

Johnson admitted that “the heat is going to vary from batch to batch,” but that is how diners will know that the salsas are homemade.

Not to be overlooked, nearly a full cup comes with an order of chips.

“We’re not messing around,” Johnson pledged of the portion sizes across the menu.

First in food foothold

Located on the ground floor of Skylark, this sparkling new space was not retrofitted to become a restaurant like its A Taco Affair predecessors. The windows stretch from floor to high ceiling on both Montgomery and West Hall streets, and the interior is clean concrete and steel in black and gray.

Garbrandt moved down first, the trio’s “boots on the ground” who sought out locations, even considering the fallow gas station across the street before landing in the luxury apartment building that opened in 2019.

“When he brought me in in October of 2022, this was basically all sand,” Johnson recalled with a laugh. “Just exterior walls and sand, and we really saw the potential for this location.”

Say what you will about the Atlantafication of Montgomery northward of West Park Avenue, but with the ever-increasing number of AirBnBs and LegoLand condos, folks who live and holiday here are going to need places to eat.

North of the mouthwatering Munchie’s, Montgomery’s restauration landscape is bleak until you wend your way up and over to Crystal Beer Parlor. A Taco Affair might just have gained a food foothold and, in time, will be remembered as the first eatery to anchor this area’s next generation.

A Taco Affair (401 West Hall St.) is open Tuesday through Sunday (11 a.m. to 9 p.m.).

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: A Taco Affair anchors next generation of eateries on Montgomery Street