Tag: tacos

New Mexico #4: Reading a Menu

I drove around in the middle of nowhere for quite some time: Chama, Tierra Amarilla, Cimarron, Clayton, Springer, Wagon Mound.

In those places, menus say “Eggs” and “Steak” and “Side of bacon.” It’s pretty straightforward.

So by the time I rolled back into fancy-pants New Mexico, where they use figurative speech and throw their adjectives all over the place, I felt like my critical-reading skills had withered away to nothing.

At a great cafe near the Pecos (La Risa), I read the whole menu and fixated on the “Grilled cheese with pinon pesto.” Ooh, clever! I thought–what a great adaptation to local ingredients.

Only much later, after my grilled cheese with perfectly normal pesto, did I remember that, uh, yeah, pesto always has pine nuts in it.

The next day, I was reading the menu at La Casa Sena. Oooh, halibut ceviche! I thought. I ordered it, and gagged. Murky, dirt-y fish. The guy next to me asked, “How is that, anyway?”

I said, “Honestly, it’s nasty–it’s got that dirt taste.”

“Yeah, I thought that was a weird choice for ceviche, halibut being a bottom-feeder and all.”

Argh! I knew that! It had just been erased from my brain by driving a thousand miles through landlocked country. The guy got up and waltzed away, looking smug.

Later that same day, after my nasty ceviche, I wandered over to the Rooftop Cantina, the place upstairs from the Coyote Cafe. I already knew the Coyote Cafe was a total disaster. But I’d heard the cantina had less ambitious food that hit the mark more often.

I flipped open the menu, gave it a quick glance, and ordered the vegetarian tacos, because I’d been eating a lot of “Steak” and “Eggs” and needed some greenery. I saw something about “olive-oil-macerated tomatoes,” which really makes no sense at all, but ignored it. (Maceration usually implies making a texture change by soaking something, and really, there’s no way you can change a tomato’s texture by soaking it in oil.)

My plate came, and it was hideous.

Terrible Dinner

I swear it had been beamed straight from Wolfgang Puck circa 1988. Not only were those “oil-macerated tomatoes” really sun-dried tomatoes, but they were swimming in pesto dressing. There was some kind of deep-fried something on top of all the lettuce, and two slabs of mozzarella on either side. My god–how many food cliches can they pile on one plate?! Oh, and there was some squishy flatbread stuff, which I guess was supposed to be the tortilla part of my “taco.”

I felt dumb for falling for ridiculous menu-speak, and letting my craving for vegetables get in the way of sensible ordering. After that, believe you me, I eyeballed my menus very carefully, mentally combining all the described ingredients to ensure they added up to something that would not be the festering fever dream of a 1980s chef-to-the-stars.

After that, the eating got much better. More on that in the next post…

New Mexico #1: Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn
New Mexico #2: A Tale of Two Stews
New Mexico #3: B Is for Bizarre
Flickr sets here and here

Calexico with The Wandering Foodie

Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of my Thailand trip, let me just get you up to speed on the past week. So, I roll back into town, and it’s the middle of winter. That’s bad, but what’s even worse is that I have no appetite: American food seems pallid, bland and joyless. Peter and I hole up in our house and make spicy noodles to console ourselves.

A few days after this rough transition, I finally go outside to meet Hagan Blount, aka the Wandering Foodie, at the Calexico cart in SoHo. I go because 1) Hagan seems like a maniac in the best way: He has voluntarily scheduled an entire month of NYC restaurant eating, breakfast, lunch and dinner, which comes out to 93 plates. It sounds exactly like one of my guidebook research trips, except a little longer.

Also, 2) I’m curious about Calexico, because I want there to be more Mexican food everywhere in New York City. If we can’t have giant Thai food courts, we can at least foster our neighbors to the south, who make almost as amazing colorful and tasty fresh food. (Whenever I come back from Mexico, I feel color and flavor withdrawal–like post-Thailand, but a little more mild.) My major complaint with Mexican food in NYC is that the tacos are too gigantic. A taco should be a snack, not a meal.

Calexico sets up shop right where I used to work (back when I had a job! Like, in the last century!), at Prince and Wooster, next to the Camper store. Great location. Uh. If it weren’t pouring rain, that is. It was raining so hard that our basement flooded, which made me late to meet Hagan. But, as if the gods were smiling on our foolhardy lunch, the sky was dry by the time we got there.

Calexico touts its carne asada–spiced grilled beef. So we ordered some of that in a quesadilla, which came with “crack” chipotle sauce. Oy. This treads dangerously close to Mexi restos with giant sombreros for decor. But anyway. Also loaded up on a chicken taco and a pork taco. And a side of guac.

starbuxThen we retired to the nearest Starbucks to eat. I love how, since Starbucks has saturated the landscape, they’ve basically been forced into becoming quasi-public spaces. This Starbucks, at the corner of West Broadway and Houston, was inhabited by a crew of older Italian gentlemen in cardigan sweaters, who weren’t really drinking anything, just shooting the shit. It reminded me of the Greek guys in the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner in my nabe. It’s kind of like how the spot on which a temple used to exist continues to be holy, even if it’s occupied by an office park.

After ordering token teas, we shamelessly spread out our lunch and proceeded to sample.

Chicken taco: Totally meh. Soggy. I’m trying to cut back on factory-farmed meat, and this taco made it very easy for me. I had a couple bites and left it. And as usual, tacos are gigantic and bursting out of their corn tortillas. Mess.

Pork taco: Better. Nice grilled flavor. Drier, too, so everything holds together better.

Carne asada quesadilla: Total rainy day pleasure. I probably wouldn’t have gone to town on it in the same way on a sunny day, but in the gray and damp, the oozy melted cheese hit the spot. And the carne asada had some nice herbalicious treatment that the other meats lacked. This basically said, “Dude, we told you we specialized in carne asada–why did you even order those other things?”

“Crack” chipotle sauce, in case you’re wondering, is just chipotle mayo. Or maybe chipotle sour cream. Anyway, chipotle in something gooey. Also a good rainy-day pleasure, but not life-wreckingly addicting. No turning tricks in alleys for this stuff, that’s for sure. Oh, and the guac–forgettable. I honestly can’t remember what I thought about it.

Overall, Calexico made me a little depressed about the state of Mexican food in NYC. When I saw David Chang speak at B&N a little while ago, he was really putting his money on Mexican food as the next thing to get hip and super-flavorized. Calexico is, at least at this cart, impossibly far from anything Chang’s imagining. But if Calexico had been there back in 1999, when I worked right on the corner, I probably would’ve eaten lunch there a lot.

And it was a pleasure to eat with Hagan. He’s so energetic and enthusiastic about eating restaurant food for a month straight that I felt like I’d better step up and appreciate my job a lot more (I get serious restaurant burnout within a week on a research trip, and complain about it to everyone in earshot). He’s also basically living in Starbucks this month (I left him at the one where we ate, to kill time till his dinner date), and has not yet lost his shit after hearing the same songs a million times. Guidebook editors: Snap this guy up, and fast!

Queens Walkabout: Tortilleria Nixtamal, Timmy O’s, Pollo Campero

On Sunday, Peter and I took a long walk in Queens. It happened to be our anniversary (cue: awwww!); otherwise, we would’ve just lounged around the house like slugs, as usual.

Ordinarily, we would’ve ridden our bikes, but since our Spain trip, walking seems more enjoyable. (And deep down, I know biking is the lazy option–I like it because it’s one of the few sports where you can sit on your ass.) Walking also makes it seem more like traveling. I may ride a bike at home, but hoofing it is standard whenever I go to another country.

Our destination, loosely, was Tortilleria Nixtamal (104-05 47th Ave.), in Corona. Peter happened to buzz by there a couple of weeks ago on his bike, saw the tortilla press in the window and remembered my chronic lament: Corn tortillas in this city suck. The only kind you can get are the ones made with preservatives. My dad still gets the pure corn, lime and water ones in Santa Cruz; Peter picked up the simple goods in Chicago a few weeks back; but New York, where Mexican culture is still relatively new, is a tortilla wasteland.

And ThingsSo, we set off a-walkin’. A little dull at first, since it’s just our same ol’ neighborhood. But we noticed that the Thai restaurant on 30th Ave. near Steinway (south side) has all-new miniature Thai food-stall dioramas in its window. Adorable–and for sale! And we noticed the newish Bistro Les Minots, where genuine French was being spoken, on the other side of Steinway. And we saw that a deli was having a special on “things.”

Spirograph String ArtWe trekked through Jackson Heights, where I happened to see a woman wearing a gauzy outfit in the exact same colors I just painted the dining room, so I felt like my Bollywood vision was based on something real. And we saw more odd art for sale–just $30 for the small ones! And that’s real black velvet as the background.

Jackson 123On 82nd Street, we got a shaved ice flavored with something mysterious and orange and creamy. We passed a movie theater I didn’t know existed, where all the Hollywood hits are subtitled in Spanish, and all shows before 5pm are $5. Maybe I’ll go next week, to practice up before my Mexico trip.

We were momentarily lost, as the street numbers suddenly skewed all wrong–and then we hit Broadway in Elmhurst, and walked past the Taiwanese place we like, with the duck tongues. Tempting–but we had a different goal.

The beauty of wandering aimlessly in Queens is that, except for a few awkward spots where the grid gets bent, you basically know where you are at all times, thanks to the genius numbering scheme known (among urban engineering cognoscenti, anyway) as “the Philadelphia system.” That’s the system that makes most non-Queens-residents have nervous breakdowns when they’re looking for an address like 30-30 30th Avenue. Duh–we know that’s 30th Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets. So, since we were going to 104-05 47th Avenue, we knew we had to go south-ish to 47th Ave, and east-ish as far as 104th Street, and it didn’t matter much how we got there.

Timmy O's Frozen CustardDue to our wandering approach, we wound up having dessert first. We first strolled past Timmy O’s (49-07 104th Street) without batting an eye, but the phrase “frozen custard” lodged in my brain. Half a block later, I said, “That might be good! Frozen custard is rare here.” Peter said, “And any place that sells just one thing is usually pretty good at that one thing.” I’d even seen the word “concrete” on the menu inside, indicating St. Louis-style thick shakes.

U-turn. Back to Timmy O’s, and whoa, we are glad we did! They’ve been open about a year, making just vanilla and chocolate fresh every day, plus an additional one or two special flavors. When we visited, they also had cannoli cream (with the wee chocolate chips) and really good strawberry. All rich and eggy, and served just a little soft, so you can really taste the flavors. Timmy even studied in St. Louis, and told us about an ice-cream-hut crawl he did with his class. He thinks the winner there is Fritz’s, not Ted Drewe’s. (I didn’t say it! He did! But now I’m curious…)

So when we got to Tortilleria Nixtamal, just a couple of blocks later, we were pretty full. Kids were playing out front, and invited us in, but we said we’d have to walk around the block first, to work up an appetite. We just managed it–passing Leo’s Latticini, one of those Queens food landmarks I’ve always heard about and have not quite been compelled to go to because it doesn’t involve anything really spicy. Fortunately it was closed, or we might’ve ruined our appetites again.

Tortilleria NixtamalSo, back to the tortilleria. They have an honest-to-God tortilla press, visible from the outside, so you could watch it like a Krispy Kreme production line. (Love that it’s made by Manufacturas Lenin!) Inside, the decor consists largely of empty Coca-Cola bottles. Mexican Coke, of course–the good stuff.

Fish Tacos at Tortilleria NixtamalWe got guacamole, and it is probably the finest I have had in a restaurant–it tasted like there were bits of roasted poblano in there, and the fresh-fried chips didn’t hurt either. A rajas tamale was super-tasty, even though the masa was dense. And a round of crispy-fried fish tacos, using the fresh tortillas…perfect. We took two pounds of tortillas to go (the machine runs every day at 11am–a little early for us, but the tortillas stay warm in coolers all day). They may not be as good as you can get in Mexico, but until they install a grandmother, patting each one out by hand and cooking them on a wood fire–well, these will certainly do.

While we were there, we read some of their press coverage on the walls–turns out our random wander actually covered a well-trod chowhound trail before us–Columbus we ain’t.

We were fairly full, but seeing how our route home was headed right past El Pollo Campero, the Guatemalan chicken franchise, we couldn’t not stop. I know it’s fried fast food, but it’s fried fast food in Spanish–right down to the trash bins that say ‘Gracias’ on them. Plus, it was Fourth of July weekend, and it seemed like we should eat fried chicken at some point.

Digging InI get strangely patriotic and a little teary-eyed in places like El Pollo Campero. This is what the future of the US is–having our weird plastic-fast-cheap culture spread out in the world, then brought back to us and made a thousand times better by immigrants. Of course you want a salsa bar in your fast-food joint! And damn, the salsa was good–all smoky-hot with little burnt flecks in it. And the chicken wasn’t bad either–crispy, spicy, and almost certainly involving a dash of MSG, but nothin’ wrong with that.

Corona SkylineAfter our chicken break, it was just a long trek home in the dying light. Peter’s feet began to hurt–the knockoff 99-cent-store “Band-Ages” we’d bought hadn’t really helped. We passed a random street fight, involving the cops and a girl in a pink dress who was stuck holding the family groceries. We survived the long, dreary stretch of car dealerships on Northern Boulevard. We maximized the diagonal of Newtown Avenue, and it was still a good 10 miles all told.

But we felt like we’d been a whole lot further. And this has always been why I’ve lived in Queens in the first place–the travel-without-a-passport effect. In fact, it’s nearly my anniversary with Queens too (11 years–I moved in on the very first date!). Recently, I’ve been having the occasional twinge of longing for Brooklyn food culture and all its chumminess and farm-ness and we’re-making-stuff!-ness. But after the Sunday walkabout…I’m renewing my vows to Queens.

And to Peter too, of course–the only man I know who would enjoy a day like this as much as I did. Happy anniversary, sweets.

(A few other good photos from the walk are at this Flickr set.)

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