- So, we filmed most of this episode
at the beginning of this year,
prior to when COVID had us pause production,
due to it being COVID.
(laughing)
- So, we weren't able to finish the episode
the way that we normally do.
So you'll notice scenes like this, filmed in the Highlander.
We're practicing social distancing.
- Quesadilla.
Are you excited for quesadillas?
- I am excited for quesadillas.
I think quesadillas are an all time great food.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Before you get into your disposition
on quesadillas' greatness.
♪ Is it worth it ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Make it worth it ♪
♪ Worth it, worth it ♪
- Today on "Worth It",
we're going to be trying three quesadillas
at three drastically different price points
to find out which one is the most worth it at its price.
So, Andrew, when you hear the word quesadilla,
what happens in your brain?
- Melty cheese in my mouth, unrelenting deliciousness.
- Very poignant.
Unrelenting deliciousness.
I don't know what other foods fall in that category.
Where's our first stop?
- We're going to Tacos 1986.
Joy and Victor are gonna show us
their quesadilla Otto Bata.
Spoiler alert, it's on a corn tortilla,
which I've never had before.
(upbeat music)
- Tacos 1986, what kind of taco shop are you guys?
- We're a Tijuana-based tacoria.
I think we're representing Carne Asada and Adobada
from Tijuana.
Every tacoria down there has those two tacos.
- Where does 1986 come from?
- That was the year we were born.
I moved here about 10 years ago.
I was missing that style of taco, that style of execution.
And that's pretty much what sparked the whole thing.
- My dream is to see five, 10 year olds
eating our quesadillas and being like;
This is authentic, this is real a quesadilla.
- You said a real quesadilla.
I think I know what a quesadilla is, but I probably don't.
- My brother, have you had our quesadilla?
- I have not.
- I'm about to change your life.
It all starts in the handmade tortilla.
We got the finest tortilla lady, Leticia.
We'll start off with that.
- We completely stay away from drizzling cheese on top.
We like to melt the cheese first on the griddle,
so it's nice and crispy.
Then we slap the tortilla on top,
and then we flip it over.
You have a nice layer of crispy cheese.
- And the marinade?
- In the Northern region of Mexico,
we call it Adobada.
Down south, it's known as Al Pastor.
It's a rub that is used in the streets of Tijuana
to kind of preserve meat
that we make with chilies, garlic.
We put strawberries in ours.
- [Victor] Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Wow.
- [Joy] My goal was to make the most delicious one ever.
I think we accomplished.
- I think so.
(laughing)
- People walk in here all the time and they're like;
Is this the Al Pastor?
I'll get an Al Pastor.
And we're like, yeah, it's basically the same concept.
It's just a different flavor.
In our house, a taco is a handmade tortilla
with your choice of protein,
which can be beef, chicken, mushroom, or pork.
You want cheese on your taco?
That's a quesadilla.
- [Victor] It's not a taco anymore.
- [Joy] So we get that a lot.
And they all come with onion, cilantro, salsa, guacamole,
unless you specify otherwise.
(ringing)
- Two quesadillas right here.
- Thank you so much.
- Please enjoy.
- Cheers.
(upbeat jazz music)
- Oh, my God, whoa.
- Not what I expected at all.
I mean, I guess I've been eating
quesadillas wrong my entire life.
- I for sure have.
- I think my expectation was
I'm gonna bite and just taste a layer of oozing cheese.
- [Andrew] Right.
- However, in this quesadilla, it's oozing meat.
- Pork is so delicious.
It's very rich and meaty.
- Smoky.
- With the cheese and everything else.
And the tortilla is just the right subtleness,
but togetherness.
- Right.
- To hold all this together.
- Wow, you ate yours very quickly.
- I think we should get more.
- Really?
Yeah, let's do it.
What is the perfect order here?
- [Joy] Taco, and a quesadilla,
- And then a mulita,
and then a secret item that you don't know of yet.
- [Andrew] What?
- It's a flour quesadilla.
- [Victor] Flour tortilla with melted cheese,
a choice of meat.
My preference is a cardio Sada.
I want everything on it.
I used to love to walk on Molly salsa.
We top it up with a little bit of beans.
- [Andrew] Beans.
(laughing)
- Okay. - Okay.
- Beans, baby!
Fairs.
- Hmm.
- Call it, call it, game over.
- First of all, that meat is delicious.
- Yes. - Second of all,
this whole thing is smacking.
I don't know how else to say it.
This is just all the slapping that's happened today.
- It actually tastes luxurious.
- Yeah. - With the beans.
- Should we eat more?
- What?
- We went from quesadilla to the secret menu.
I say we go back to the beginning just to have some tacos.
- Keep it going.
- The heavens are now bathing my taco in life.
Hm, bury me here.
- Andrew Nicki, 1990 to 1986.
(laughing)
- So "Tacos 1986" was amazing.
- And I appreciate his level of care to those details,
even to plating it in such a unique way.
- It feels like a mic drop,
but it's like a mic drop for every time you serve a dish.
- Quesadilla fact!
I'm just yelling in my bedroom right now.
In Mexico city, it is not uncommon for cheese
to be just an optional
ingredient for a quesadilla, what?
- Cheese optional, how does that?
But it's named after cheese, what?
- You know what it reminds me of?
It reminds me of like those protein style
burgers at "In and Out".
Bun optional.
For those who don't know,
can you explain that to people?
Protein style is when they
give you the burger patty in a lettuce wrap,
but really a burger is kind of defined by the bond.
This is wild. All right.
So next up is an old friend of ours and yes,
I'll call him a friend.
We're going to go see Roy Choy at "Cookie Tuckeria",
to eat their kimchi quesadilla.
- So you might recall we did a takeout episode where we
visited the Kogi truck. And in that episode,
Adam actually ate the kimchi quesadilla.
So the very same quesadilla,
but this time we're getting it from the "Brick and Mortar",
Kogi location.
(slow music)
♪ How'd I wind up back here? ♪
♪ I think I recognize this road ♪
- Kogi is a food truck that started about,
a little over a decade ago.
You know, a lot of people have dubbed it Korean and Mexican,
but it's really L.A.
It's not Korea, the country, or Mexico, the country.
It's us, like weird mutant kids, that were born
from our parents who came from those countries.
So this food is actually from Los Angeles.
We have four different types of tacos and then those all
turned into a burrito.
And then those all turn into a quesadilla.
(laughing)
So we're like a Russian doll of tacos.
The kimchi quesadilla was actually our family meal.
And we were just sitting there, you know,
waiting for people to order food.
And so I just started messing around making stuff.
We take the kimchi, we caramelize the kimchi,
almost like a jam.
We crisp the whole quesadilla up,
kind of like a pizza, and we take that,
we cut that in four slices, shingle them down.
And then we make a salsa Roja,
very similar to like a Neapolitan pizza. Right?
Very simple ingredients, very simple construction.
But there's like an alchemy and a moment in those 90 seconds
that you pull it out, right?
So it seems as though sometimes people
don't treat quesadillas with the same love
as they do a taco.
And I feel like you gotta treat a quesadilla
as if it was a taco.
So you have to make sure that every single bite is a
cohesive bite and you gotta treat it right
with a really good salsa.
- First stop, kimchi quesadilla.
- It smells very, when you get home,
and your mom's cooking,
and you're just like trying to guess what that is,
but then it's like three different dishes at once.
- Yeah. - That smell.
And it's like the kimchi and the cheese.
- We have our slices shingles here.
Would you like the first shingle?
- I would.
You know one thing I noticed about the interview with Roy?
He kind of talked about the food
as if it was like a living being.
I understand why.
- This is melting in my hand,
cheers, Steven.
- That was really great, and my first instinct was,
Andrew's gonna love this.
- I do love it.
It's interesting, it does have
the consistency of a Neapolitan pizza.
You've sensed the crispiness,
but it still has this like moist drip to it.
There's something about the creation of this quesadilla
that is a little intangible.
I don't know what it is.
I think it's that pizza moment magic
- Mm. - That we're always
talking about, when the quesadilla is just crispy
and melty enough.
- It is also the dichotomy of,
I'm using big words today.
It's the dichotomy of the two weird characters,
cheese and kimchi meat.
Like the unlikely duo in a buddy cartoon.
- Yeah.
Adam, unfortunately,
couldn't join us for this particular shoot.
So we're going to have our stand-in sound operator
take a bite of this last quesadilla.
Mike, come on in here.
(jazz music)
- Yeah, that was amazing.
I think we've pointed this out before the show,
but I just love how there are cities that have given birth
to combinations of foods that you would not expect to see
- Really surprising and delicious.
- So for our final stop
in our quesadilla journey.
- We're seeing chef Ocho
at "All Flavor, No Grease" for the triple threat.
Very excited.
(upbeat music)
- "All Flavor, No Grease" got started
from a dream actually.
I was tired of selling wheat,
I'm not gonna fret, and I'm like, Lord,
I need something else better to do with my life.
A small voice actually came to me and was like,
do what you learned how to do in school.
The only thing I learned how to do in school was sell candy
and make friends, and I was a heavyset guy,
who didn't have all the nice clothes,
but I knew how to be a bubbly person.
So I opened up a candy house in the front of my mom's home.
About three months later, a friend of mine was like,
you should start selling tacos.
That was said one Friday, that Tuesday I tried it,
it was a success, I sold it up.
Just started going crazy after that.
- [Andrew] Man.
I would describe my quesadillas as
a Americanized Mexican dish,
because I'll never take away from the culture, you feel me?
I've been brought up and raised around Hispanics,
basically my whole life.
And the quesadilla was not only a vision that I had,
but it wasn't nobody taken off with the quesadilla.
One day, I'm cooking up my little tacos and stuff.
My friends still came through to support,
but yet still talk to those smack, you know,
still shoot the fat jokes. They were irritated me so much.
I was like, you guys need to shut up.
That was the exact cut look,
everything that I seen in my dream.
So then I thought outside the box, let's start using steak.
We'll keep the chicken,
but now let's get a little bit more fancy.
Let's use some shrimp too.
And we have a cold marinade that we put on here that
actually turns the shrimp a nice, bright orange color.
I'm like, okay,
this would be the triple threat where all three proteins.
We try to use all the regular fats
and the oils from the meats,
so we don't have to add any.
And that's how we stick to the
all flavor, no grease concept.
The triple threat is for a first time customer,
because that's going to be flavors coming
from every different angle.
I'm happy that I do cut it at eight to 10 pieces,
that way, you don't have to pick up
a big hamburger for them,
you can just, just buy one little long rectangular piece.
People ask us all the time, like, why does it taste so good?
'Cause I put love in there.
It's a little salt and pepper,
but you know, a lot of love in it.
I say all the charisma and the whole style
of "All Flavor, No Grease" came from me being me.
And when I was able to finally
come out of that shell like that,
I was embraced by so much love
that I didn't even know I had from people.
- Alright, you guys hungry?
- I'm starved.
- You better be,
'cause we got the triple threat.
- First observation:
The shrimp is, looks like it's from out of this world.
- Yeah. - It's fluorescent red.
- I honestly, I thought it was a tomato at first.
- I thought it was a pepper.
- See the little shrimp tastes.
Cheers.
- Mm. - Mm.
- It looks like a firework of sauce.
Like the different zigs and zags
going in opposite directions.
- [Both] Cheers.
- Ah.
- Wow.
(laughing)
Shrimp and the beef and the chicken.
It makes for like a lot of different flavors,
that happen in one bite.
- You know, that chart, like neutral.
What is it - like neutral, good?
- Like the character creation card?
- Yeah.
- For Dungeons and Dragons?
- So where are you putting this?
I think I would say chaotic is for sure.
- I think it's good.
- Yeah, I agree with you.
I absolutely think it's good.
- It's a very heroic flavor.
You know, because it's chopped up in these slices,
it's kind of more like eating a great plate of nachos.
Every bite is that last cheesiest corner piece,
where everything is loaded in there.
You know, the whole quesadilla is that.
- It has the same tantalizing effect as like French fries.
Like when you have 10 or something, you're like, oh man,
I can't wait to chow down on a box of fries.
- The flavor lives up to the Monica triple threat.
So it's the end of our quesadilla journey.
- So Andrew, which quesadilla
was the most worth it for you guys, given price point?
- I think I'm gonna go with "All Flavor, No Grease".
Neat triple threat is that unrelenting,
deliciousness that I'm after.
- I can't reiterate how amazing
of an episode this was to do in Los Angeles.
I guess I gotta go Kodi Tacoria.
I mean, I can't, I can't believe I'm saying that.
Adam, what's your "Worth-It" winner?
- "Tacos 1986".
- Okay, well that does it for the quesadilla episode.
Thank you for joining us on this delightful trek
into quesadillas.
Next week, we have a very fun episode,
that is something that we've never done before.
- So for our season finale,
we're actually doing two high end restaurants, head to head,
it's gonna be wild.
♪ Worth it ♪
♪ Gonna be worth it ♪
♪ Worth it ♪
♪ Gonna be worth it ♪
♪ Worth it ♪