When you see it for the very first time, steaming up from the table in front of you, Mexican food doesn't look like something that was planned. A glop of brownishness sits by itself on this corner of the plate. Something doughy and tubular rests over here, covered with a lumpy, green, glue-like substance. A bowl of fiery red stuff waits off to the side, ready to blister your tonsils. The chips you recognize, but only because the Doritos people buy so much time on MTV. A cheeseburger it isn't. It ain't pizza, navy bean soup or a tuna sandwich, either. Is this something you eat? Or is it something you take a picture of to send to the National Enquirer? "Hideous Industrial Accident Causes Horrible Meltdown of Once-Edible Food Ingredients."
If you are lucky and in the company of an experienced guide, your first encounter with the mysteries of Mexican food will end happily. You'll take that first daunting bite and fall in love for the rest of your life. If, however, you are alone when you meet up with your first relleno, or--worse yet--accompanied by a table full of
jalapenophobes from Minnesota, there is a chance you'll be scared away. Someone at your table will say, "Oooh, Spanish food. Watch yourself, bub," and before you know it, you're asking if someone in the kitchen can do you a grilled-cheese sandwich.
Which, I guess, is where I come in. As a food professional (and, before that, as a regular slug who ate a lot), I've dined in about 175,000 (estimate) different Mexican food restaurants across the continent. It strikes me as terribly sad that there remains among us a considerable number of persons who are not yet enchilada-literate. My goal is to enlighten those sad few, to free them from their bonds of ignorance, to show them the true meaning of the phrase "dos more cervezas por favor, dude!" I will accomplish this goal by guiding the reader (that would be you), course-by-course, through a typical Mexican-restaurant experience. I plan to touch ever so cleverly on various important skills and techniques. I will tell you what--and what not--to order. I will prescribe the proper etiquette to use while gasping for air during a meal. I will fabricate lots of impressive historical information. Of course, my biggest challenge during this trek will be somehow to accomplish my goal without offending every single person of Mexican heritage on Earth, living or dead. Which, of course, is impossible. So, I apologize, in advance.
Sorry, los dudes y duditas. Now, let's get going. A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICAN FOOD
The large area that we now know as Mexico was originally inhabited by many various and wholly different tribes of peoples. Through the years, some very fine Mexico-based civilizations have risen and fallen, including the Aztecs and Mayans and some others, I'm pretty sure. Aside from the occasional mass human sacrifice, these civilizations were collectively pretty bright and somehow managed to form their own languages, governments and calendars. In fact, history tells us that the fall of the Mayan empire came about because of civil unrest caused by the release of the steamy "Girls of Cuernavaca Calendar" in the year 14. That or a big volcanic eruption wiped 'em out, I don't remember. Well, soon enough, along came the Spaniards and their conquering armies. A fellow named 'Nando Cortez was the leader of this invading gang of crusaders, and he really managed to mess things up. Cortez decided that Spanish would be the language of the region, and immediately boated over a couple of thousand Spanish teachers from the Old Country. Aside from the usual declension drills and mandatory language-lab sessions, these linguists brought with them their dreadful intellectual propensity to experiment with native cuisines. Before long, the visiting Spaniards were mixing and matching cooking elements from their homeland--port wine being the principal element imported from Spain--with some of the ingredients that were native to the Mexico region--principally (in order of nutritional importance) lard, beans and corn. And so was born Mexican food as we (some of us) know it.
THE EVOLUTION OF MEXICAN FOOD TO THE PRESENT Everything stayed about the same until roughly the mid-Sixties. A few Mexican food items had made their way into the American mainstream during the late Fifties and early Sixties, but the major influx of Mexi-related influence did not occur until the founding of the Taco Bell chain, in San Mateo, California, on March 23, 1967. The chain, using standardized recipes and clever marketing, grew steadily and introduced millions of Americans to approximately south-of-the-border-type cooking. Not long after the chain's founding, American food snobs (actually, descendants of the Cortez armada of Spanish teachers) began to sniff haughtily in the general direction of every Taco Bell outlet and demand more autentico Mexican cooking. And so the demand grew for small, family-run Mexican eateries, and a boom industry sprang up around the wholesale importation from Mexico of grubby shacks that could be transplanted into cities and become thriving businesses serving tacos. Finally, during the Seventies large multinational corporations such as General Motors, General Dynamics, and General Foods began to invest heavily in the Mexican food industry. Large chains of "upscale" Mexican restaurants were formed, bringing Mexican food to the most remote peoples of the world. Today, it is nothing to see a nacho vendor on Red Square in Moscow, or a margarita machine on the steps outside the Louvre in Paris, or, and this is really outrageous, a Taco Bell in Glendale, Arizona.
HOW TO PICK A MEXICAN FOOD RESTAURANT All of the guidebooks that deal with the topic of eating in Mexico say you should be careful not to eat in places frequented heavily by tourists. Tourist restaurants likely are not dependent on repeat business and care little for details such as hygiene. If locals aren't eating in a joint, this line of reasoning goes, then it's probably an unclean or dangerous kitchen in some way, and the food it serves will probably A) kill you, if you're lucky, or B) make you so sick you pay off your college loan in a fit of hallucinatory responsibility. These places, the books say, are to be avoided.
The theory, with a slight twist, holds true here, although there's a much smaller chance that you'll eat something and die in an American-side Mexican restaurant. For the most part, the places in which you want to eat Mexican food here--and this is a gross generality that summarizes nothing more than personal preference on my part--are places in which real Mexicans eat. Sure, there are some places that offer the Mexican food equivalent of colorized movies, but I'm saying here that you need to eat in places in which real Mexicans--or people of Mexican descent who have not become too Martinized by watching American game shows and listening to religious radio stations--pay to eat. Do I need to say it again? HOW TO ENTER A MEXICAN FOOD RESTAURANT
Stumbling and squinting, if possible. I prefer the interior of a Mexican-food restaurant to be as dark as a cave. You are not going to have any fun if you walk in the door of a Mexican restaurant from the bright outdoor sunshine and can immediately see specific details of the interior. That's the rule. You've got to stand inside the door for at least a couple of minutes looking like a geek, or the food's going to be no good. After a couple of minutes, and once your eyes have adjusted to the lack of light, approach the hostess stand and get your name on the list for a table. That is, if the restaurant you are in insists on such formalities. In most of the truly cool Mex spots I know, the concept of "hostess" is about as relevant as the concept of "valet parking." Which is to say, not relevant at all. I always use a pseudonym when leaving my name with a hostess, which usually ensures I'll get extra-attentive service. The names I use are Gosnell, Springsteen or Christ. Despite this clever ruse, sometimes there is a wait for a table. If so, this is a perfect time to slink off to the bar and dive into a shallow, icy pool of lime juice, triple sec and tequila. HOW TO BEHAVE IN A BAR IN A MEXICAN FOOD RESTAURANT
Behave just as you would behave at home. The difference here is some nice person will bring you drinks and corn chips in exchange for cash or a credit card. In this type of bar, the two most popular beverages are the margarita and the bottled Mexican beer. Studies show that the ingredients of the typical margarita, served in the proper proportions, can drastically increase a test subject's tolerance to live mariachi music. And despite the recent unfavorable association between bottled Mexican beer and American Yuppie scum, it's still okay stuff in my book as long as you look grungy while drinking it. So, men, if you pay more than $10 for a haircut, you probably should only drink Mexican beer when you're out for a night on the town with your fellow weenies.
"Gosnell, party of six! Gosnell, party of six!"
HOW TO ORDER SOME FOOD IN A MEXICAN RESTAURANT Once your party is seated and looking at menus, it's time to consider your food selections. For reasons of protocol and continued harmonious relations with our neighbor to the south, it is important to order at least one appetizer per diner before settling on an entree. See, most Mexican restaurants employ an appetizer specialist. Usually, this person has been trained in Mexico in the fine arts of cutting chips, grating cheese and crushing avocado. It's not widely known outside the Mexican-kitchen community, but the trade name this artisan carries is quesadero. Not to order a dish of guacamole dip, a cheese crisp or a big platter of nachos (each) would be an insult to this person's skills as a professional, and, by way of cross-cultural linkage, an insult to all Mexican citizens. Unless you want the powerful quesadero union coming down on you--hard--order up. Once you order several appetizers, be sure to take advantage of the chips and salsa that most restaurants provide free. Many places serve both salsa (chunky, not so hot) and hot sauce (runny, hot-as-hell). Careful! Some of that stuff can be mighty hot.
If the salsa is particularly incendiary, and if you have guests visiting from the Midwest, I suggest you teach them about our local custom of saluting the server with a salsa "toast" every time he or she comes to the table. Insist that your visitors gulp heaping mounds of the stuff, then sit back and watch them sweat. "Sure, it's hot," you tell them. "But it's a dry heat."
HOW TO ORDER SOME MORE FOOD IN A MEXICAN RESTAURANT Having satisfied the quesadero, it is time to move on to the rest of the menu. In this genre, most menus read remarkably alike. This unspoken standardization is done so that honkies, while lost in a margarita-fueled daze, won't mistakenly try to order Swedish meatballs or Peking duck. Top to bottom, left to right, most of your Mexican-food menus start out with appetizers. Then it's on to soups and salads, if such upscale preliminaries are served at all. Usually at the bottom of the left-hand page sits a section titled Para los Weeneros. It is here you will find a few examples of your simple (pitiful) Anglo food, such as hamburgers, spaghetti, a steak and maybe a chicken dish. If someone in my party orders something from this section, I usually can't help but pour the salsa dish into his or her lap. Continuing on, there usually exists a section of combination plates. Here you will find a wide variety of mix 'n' match items taken from your usual Mexican food categories, about which more in a minute. Beyond the combos sometimes lie (lay? lee? low? lew?) a few specialties of the house. These often are high-ticket items that include exotic ingredients such as seafood and pork. My advice to you, re specialties, is this: If it's a special occasion, and you're feeling particularly continental, I say, go for it. You may discover a hidden taste treasure, something so new and unique that it will change forever the way you think about Mexican food. For example, many restaurants list their fajitas plates here, and I think fajitas plates are pretty tasty, don't you? On the other hand, you might find something so terrifying you'll be scared straight back to eating fried chicken and ground round. This happened to me once, when I by mistake ordered my first bowl of menudo. WHAT IS MENUDO AND WHY WOULD PEOPLE EAT SUCH A THING? Menudo is easily one of the more mysterious foods available. We know that it is a soup made of pieces of animals, and that among menudo's many magical properties is its alleged power as a hangover cure, but I'm not so sure. If this were true, menudo would be served in every bowling alley in town, and they would have little microwave-ready cans of it in the vending machines onboard all Exxon supertankers. I'm suggesting here that you are not a man until you have tried a slurp of menudo, and this goes for all you women, too. SO WHAT'S ON THE REST OF THE MENU?
Down near the bottom of the right-hand page are the sections with desserts and beverages. I always drink beer with Mexican food, so that section always seems kind of superfluous. And I'm always too full to eat any dessert, so I don't know much about that either. I know that some popular Mexican desserts are things called flan, sopapillas and fried ice cream. Flan is a custard-like slab of sweetness that always strikes me as not being dazzling enough to waste calories on. Sopapillas are little pillows of fried dough onto which you can pour honey or powdered sugar and which always strike me as ultimately too heavy to eat after having chips, a cheese crisp, a chimichanga, two margaritas and four beers. Fried ice cream is pretty good, but I'm on doctor's orders not to look at this dish even if it's served on another table. WHICH COMBINATION PLATE SHOULD YOU ORDER?
Most restaurants have already decided what each combination plate comes with. There is zero standardization among the many thousands of eateries, so in most cases you're stuck with taking what they give you. The best I can do is give you a quick run-down on some of the individual items. Tacos
These are hand-sized half moons of meat, cheese and lettuce, a very popular item here and around the world. In Mexico, street vendors distribute tacos to the populace by the millions. Here, tacos will soon be challenging the hamburger as the meat-delivery device of preference among a large section of the population. I personally prefer the hard-shell taco, but the big nuevo trendo among tacophiles is the soft-shell kind. A well-made beef taco is, it goes without saying, one of the very few perfect foods in life. Burritos
A soft bullet of meat, beans or both, the burrito (sometimes called a "burro") was one of the original convenience foods. It's essentially a hand-held item, a large tortilla wrapped around a filling of whatever. Among the more popular fillings are red chili (a hearty stew of meat cubes and red sauce), green chili (a hearty stew of meat cubes and green sauce), shredded beef (sometimes called "machaca"), machaca (sometimes called "shredded beef") or beans. A well-made burrito is one of the few Mexican foods that can be eaten while riding a motorcycle at high speeds. Enchiladas
Essentially, these are smaller, kinder and gentler burritos, ladled with sauce and cooked a little while. Enchilada fillings run somewhat parallel to burrito fillings, but the most popular kind are filled with plain old cheese. Oftentimes, it is impossible to tell where your enchilada lays (lies? etc.) when you get one on a combination plate. Indeed, "Hide the Enchilada" is one of the favorite pastimes among Mexican-food cooks. (Readers: Am I pandering to a base element with a reference such as this? Is it just too crude for words? Would you prefer that I stick to the really classy humor prevalent throughout the rest of the text? Or would you rather I ride the low road? Well, New Times, in conjunction with KTSP NewsCenter 10 in Phoenix, is right this minute conducting a telephone poll on this very topic. If you think I should straighten up and fly right and cut it out with all the stupid stuff, just dial 1-976-GET-REAL. If you'd prefer I remain in the rhetorical gutter with the likes of all those Police Academy movies and other cultural atrocities, then dial 1-976-GET-DOWN. The winner will be announced during tonight's ten o'clock news on Channel 10. Let me remind you that this is a totally unscientific poll, that each of your calls will cost you fifty bucks, and that NewsCenter 10 weekend anchor Diane Ryan has promised to sing Roy Orbison's arrangement of "Mean Woman Blues" on the Sunday night news if the crude side wins.)
Rice and Beans
Most of your combos come with medium-size scoops of these side dishes. They are so popular among restaurant owners because A) they have been a part of the Mexican culinary tradition for many thousands of years, B) they are vitamin-packed, wholesome and a healthful addition to any meal, and C) they cost almost nothing to prepare. Other Things
Today's modern Mexican food kitchen can crank out a dazzling array of different foods. Taquitos, which are smallish tubular tacos, have become all the rage recently, due in part to the $95 million the Jack-in-the-Box company has spent on marketing them. Chili rellenos, a hard-to-describe dish that actually is quite tasty despite the odd-sounding (and hard-to-pronounce) "relleno" word in its title, also are becoming quite popular. Most menus these days also carry a reference or two to a chimichanga, which basically is a deep-fried burro covered with guacamole and sour cream and which is on the American Heart Association's list of Foods to Be Made Illegal by the Year 2000. WHAT SHOULD YOU DO AFTER THE MEAL?
Aside from a lot of moaning and belly-slapping, not much. I do want to advise you to take advantage of a lovely little courtesy provided by most joints, and that would be the free opportunity to suck on one of those red-and-white mints for a few minutes. This is a custom that started many generations ago in the kitchens of the Labadaboola province near Mexico City. The mint was concocted then to counter one of the more ferocious aftereffects of a Mexican food meal, titled, colorfully enough, breatho del muerto. With the invention of the free mint, this disease has been almost eradicated.
CONCLUSION
We are fortunate here in the American Southwest to share many cultural similarities with our Mexican neighbors to the south, and I mean more than corrupt politicians, bad roads and too much drinking at lunch. We share Mexican food, my friends, one of the greatest gifts a country can give. I suggest you honor that gift with a trip sometime soon to your nearest purveyor of such cuisine, be it a dingy neighborhood joint run by Ma and Pa Martinez or a chain store run by a guy with a PC on his desk in St. Paul.
When you go, be sure to raise a sincere salsa toast to the conquering Spaniard Cortez, for without his greed and ego-blinded lust for fame, there would be no chimichanga, no taco salad, no Fajita Pita.
All together now: uno, dos, tres . . . Cheers, dude!
