There are a lot of Mexican dishes I miss when I’m living the other half of my double life in Canada. But none more than tacos al pastor. In my opinion, there is no taste so simple yet so complicated anywhere else in Mexican cuisine.

The term al pastor can be defined as in “the style of the shepherd”. Which seemed very strange to me when I first arrived in San Miguel de Allende. You see, I was summoned to Sunday school as a child (and sometimes actually went there instead of the Dairy Queen) and, at a tender age, I already knew that, when shepherds watched their flocks by night, they were sheep not pigs. So why do tacos al pastor contain pork not lamb? There is, of course, a simple explanation.

Though they’d been around since, at least, the late fifties, tacos al pastor became very popular in central Mexico in the late seventies when there was a large emigration from Lebanon to escape their civil war. The Lebanese brought with them their style of grilling lamb on a horizontal, rotating spit, a style called shawarma. Due to pork being much cheaper than lamb, the one meat slowly replaced the other. The word pastor however stuck (maybe because there’s no term for “in the style of the swineherd”?).

I don’t know what it’s called in Lebanon but, in Mexico, the rotating spit is appropriately called el trompo. It shares its name with those wooden tops that you spin by wrapping and pulling a string that you’ll see for sale in San Miguel’s Mercado de Artesanias (though I can’t remember ever seeing a kid playing with one). On top of the trompo’s prong is usually placed a pineapple and sometimes an onion so that their juices drizzle down over the meat.

Now on most of the occasions when I see a trompo it’s after dark and, on most of those occasions, I’ve usually just finished dinner but, recently, one…actually, make that two…trompos caught my attention in broad daylight as I walked up Salida a Celaya. There was a sign that also intrigued me: “Tacos Arabes y Orientale”. Back in those days when I was skipping Sunday school, my mother told me I was not allowed to use the word arab anymore; about 20 years later I was chided for including the word oriental in something I wrote. I had to find out about those tacos.

Last Tuesday, my fellow double-life Canadian friend Richard met me there for lunch. The place is called Taqueria Los Originales and it’s run by a charming guy called Jenaro Arroyo. Jenaro came to San Miguel de Allende six years ago to work at Zibu Allende in Hotel Live Aqua. After one more stop at one more, now closed restaurant, Jenaro and his wife proudly opened Los Originales.

We checked out the two trompos, one with some very pallid pork, the other in the process of being topped with more rosy red cerdo al pastor.

We checked out the menu. It was long. It was busy. It was confusing. I hailed Jenaro. He told us that the árabe tacos were wrapped in a large flour tortilla similar to pita bread, the orientale were the more conventional, smaller sized tacos on corn tortillas.

“And the two trompos, what’s the difference with the meats?”, I asked.

“Well the red one’s pretty regular pastor”, said Jenaro. “We marinate the pork with guajillo and morita chiles, achiote and pineapple for 24 hours. The second trompo is pork as well, but done with garlic, onion, parsley and oregano. You should try them both.”

We did. And ordered them both árabe style, the al pastor with cheese, the other without.

Now you don’t just slice and serve the pork from el trompo. It then goes on to a grill where it is tossed and turned, chopped and flopped by people who bring back memories of those plate spinners who came on to The Ed Sullivan Show right about the time you needed a bathroom break.

As it seems all occupations that require special talents have in Mexico, the juggler manning the spit has a title. He is a pastorero. I went over to watch him.

He flipped and flopped. The meat sizzled and frizzled. The pastorero continued to add to those peaks of porcine pleasure. The smell was intoxicating.

Now, apart from being inquisitive, the reason we ordered the árabe style tacos was greed. When you order a conventional taco al pastor, there’s never quite enough of that juicy meat inside. My local taco stand charges eleven pesos for one taco al pastor. We were now paying about three times that. There better be three times as much as meat. There was. And more.

The tacos arrived with a wow tray of sauces. What a carousel of colors I thought.

“My wife Claudia gets all the credit”, said Jenaro. “She makes all of them”, before he went on to reciting every single ingredient in every single bowl.

There were two that were the most memorable. One was a hot sauce “of guajillo and chile de arbol” that was, like Jenaro predicted, “far too hot for anyone that’s not Mexican”. The other was a creamy mixture of “garlic, lime juice, salt and vinegar” that went wonderfully with the “white” meat from the second trompo.

When I opened the taco and caught the smell as I spread the sauce liberally over the pork, I had memories of another dish.

During that civil war in Lebanon that I mentioned, many of the refugees chose Puebla in Mexico and, hence, tacos al pastor were popularized. But a few of them hadn’t heard about the weather and emigrated to Nova Scotia in Canada and a dish called the donair was created. Now if you add Claudia’s garlic sauce to Los Originales’ white meat taco árabe you have something that replicates (but doesn’t quite duplicate) the donair. If you’re sorrowfully missing the ever present rain in Halifax, you might want to brighten your life by comparing it to the east coast original.

Before we left Los Originales, Jenaro Arroyo took me for a guided tour. Up on the second floor was an unexpected and very attractive terrace. I told Jenaro that I’d be back to explore more of his long and complicated menu. I intend on keeping that promise. Soon.

Los Originales is located at Salida a Celaya 69 in SannMiguel de Allende, Mexico. The taqueria is open from Tuesday to Sunday, Noon to Midnight.