The Food of Mexico

This tacos are a lifesaver in the middle of the night, after you finish working (like in my case, I work at the show business) or for a more normal person after being partying all night. They are open 10am trough 5am of the next day.

This place sell tacos al pastor and other Mexican delicacy like Carne Asada, Adobada (spicy beef), tongue, cheek, suadero (beef shoulder), tripes, head, etc. They have a good hand with the seasoning and they always have fresh ingredients as they sell a very high volume of tacos each day, so you are sure you aren't getting some leftovers from the previous week like in some fancy restaurants.

The tacos are well priced at 10 pesos a piece (March 2006).

Also, the location is good, they are in a corner in Blvd. Sanchez Taboada right between the downtown area in Av. Revolucion were all the bars and nightclubs are located and the Zona Río where the big malls and nice hotels are located.

The restaurant (is not a stand or cart) is a place with chairs and tall tables in the sidewalk and this is convenient because they are very popular and get crowded around the middle of the night 9-10pm and in the early morning 2-4 am.

Ask any cabbie, they all know the place.

America gave the Old Continent a lot of new ingredients and recipes, but also got back some in return. Prehispanic/Precolumbian real food is still around but is not the norm in big cities. Although some of the dishes are real delicacies that can cost a lot of money depending on the type of restaurant or availability (some ingredients are very scarce especially seasonal ones).

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

The fact that they are close to Coyoacan means that a lot of the customers buy their meat "to-go" and eat at home or maybe a little "party" at the office at lunchtime, so their busiest section is the one in the back of their parking lot. There you can buy by the kilo. The price is not exactly cheap, but their quality backs their fame. If you go on a weekend at lunchtime, it would be a sad experience to return empty-handed, because they may have run out of barbacoa.

A little parenthesis on Barbacoa. In Mexico, it is not synonymous with BBQ by any means; here a barbacoa is a specific dish, normally lamb cooked in an underground earth oven, with the meat wrapped in maguey leaves places in a big pan over hot coals and big slabs of stone, then covered with more maguey leaves and soil. The package is left to slowly cook for many hours, maybe even overnight, and then it's ready to eat. The result is very, very tender meat that will almost melt in your mouth. The juices of the meat were collected on the pan and are served as a consome. You add some lemon, chopped onion, and cilantro, and they are good to enjoy with the company of fresh tortillas. Barbacoa are normally served only on weekends or big holidays, due to the prep they require.

This is really an institution, this restaurant specializes in "Huaraches" which literally means: "sandals". These are elongated tortillas with refried bean paste inside and you put anything on top, like a chicken breast or a couple of sunny eggs, or maybe mole con pollo, or if your budget is low or you hunger is not big enough, then a huarache solo (plain) would be.

This restaurant is located near the Mercado de Jamaica, one of the largest markets devoted to fresh flowers in Mexico City. The place is a breakfast and lunch option only, as they are open only from 7:30am through 3pm from Tuesday to Sunday. If you go early be prepared for a loooooong wait, they are very popular, even though there are three other restaurants selling huaraches.

If you want to avoid the crowds, don't go too early in the morning as all early shoppers are hungry and will fight with elbows and teeth for a seat. Another option is to eat the old style, buy a "to go" order and eat standing on the sidewalk, that will be a more real Mexican experience (but a bit messy, depending on what you have, like mole or lots of salsa).

There are white clothed waiters and you get silverware with your huarache, but the place is still very authentic, they appeared in a TV program that goes around Mexico in search of the most traditional and tasty dishes: "La Ruta del Sabor" from Canal 11 a cultural broadcasting station.

To get there from the Jamaica Market, go to the main avenue of the area Avenida Morelos and locate the parking lot, from there cross the street and walk past three smaller restaurants until you reach the corner, look for the yellow building and a hanging sign of a Huarache (a sandal), this is the real one, the others are just taking advantage of their fame. They are modern enough to have printed laminated menus, and they have a website, unfortunately only in Spanish, but they have an animated map, so take a look there and at their menu, click on any item to get a description with picture.

www.elhuaracheazteca.com/elhuarache/new/localizacion.html

Traditionally the rotisserie would be layered with charcoal brickets, and that heat is responsible for slow-cooking the meat. Nowadays the use of gas and refractory bricks is necessary due to the volume of tacos needed. The meat is usually marinated pork, with the achiote paste one of the main ingredients, which gives the meat an orange-redish look, but it depends solely on the cook preparing the meat. The meat rotates slowly and as each section is cooked the "taquero" will slice a thin portion out of the "trompo" (stack of meat) and put it on the tortilla.

A little bit back in time for the origins of this Mexican specialty. In the end of the 19th century a family from Lebanon came to Mexico and brought their Kebab style tradition, here after many many years and cooks the recipe was transformed from lamb meat to pork, and adding the achiote marinade and topping the transformation with a chunk of fresh pineapple at the top of the rotisserie to add a touch of tropical flavor, another Mexicanization of the long almost-forgotten recipe (if you want the original one, try the Tacos Arabes, no marinade no pineapple).

Pineapple? You would ask, well, yes, its flavor combines very well and its sweetness will balance the fieriness of the hot salsa you will have your taco smeared with. Some skilled taqueros will flip the pineapple on the tortilla with a flip of the wrist making it a show like the Japanese Teriyaki chefs.

One special note: in Mexico we put Limón (lime for you) in almost all of our food, its acid flavor will merge so nicely with the meat that you will wonder why you don´t have this at home daily!!!

Another special note: Salsas. This is a topic not to be missed, in Mexico salsas are usually hot and very spicy no matter what the guy in the next table tells you, or if the cook says it´s mild, NEVER believe them. First you should put A drop in your food to measure the hotness of the salsa. The color has nothing to do, nor the size of the chile peppers, there are some red ones so small that they look like toy chiles, but are really powerful. In a good taqueria you will have at least two different kinds of salsas: roja (red) y verde (green), the color depends on which chiles were used. If you only find one kind of salsa it means that you arrived very late and the favorite of the clientele is gone or you got a so-so taqueria. Some places carry the salsa verde con aguacate (avocado) but don´t think that it will be safe because you like guacamole, it can be as fierce as the other salsas.

Remember, always try a drop of each salsa before putting a spoon full of it in your taco. Buen provecho.

In the state of Oaxaca they have a special tortilla, ingredients are almost the same but they cook the tortillas and then they pile them up and wait for customers. Doesn't sound that different right?

Well, they stack them and have them cool to the point of the tortillas being hard. When a customer wants a tlayuda, they would smear some frijoles refritos, put some recado, col, salsa, cecina (salted pork), and queso blanco, fold it and warm it on the coals. Sounds like a taco, but just look at the pictures for the size. It doesn´t fit on the long plate where they are served. They cost a mere 35 pesos each. Can be the equivalent of four or five tacos.

This week I´m fortunate to have a small Oaxaca fair near my house and they have all kind of food from that state, yesterday I had some enchiladas de mole, mmmmhhh, yummmy.

... but there is a big difference, the tortas can have anything you fancy, from scrambled eggs to shredded chicken, to breaded beef to chorizo (a greasy sausage). The most common would be thinly sliced ham, though.

For making a torta, forget the hamburger bun, we need something more resistant that can hold all the stuff you are going to put inside. We go for a "telera", a fat and short cousin of a baguette, but not as crunchy and stiff. The telera needs to be strong but flexible.

The first torta came to life in 1892 in the hands of a guy named Armando Martinez, who thought it a good idea to use a telera (small baguette) instead of tortillas to pack meals to go, the idea soon sticked and word of mouth made him very popular, there are newspapers from the time with interviews and photos of him and his invention.

Unfortunately it didn't cross his mind to patent the idea, so now there a lot of big torta chain restaurants but he didn't benefit from the invention or the name.

This is a truly native dish, toasted crickets. High in protein and rich in flavor, the crickets are a seasonal dish and very sought after because they are very nutritious and tasty. It may sound gross to "civilized" people of big cities but the flavor is exquisite and the value of the food is unsurpassed.

Normally the chapulines are toasted in a comal over coal and they served right on top of your tortilla and doused with a nice salsa verde or pico de gallo. Is that simple and that tasty.

Buen Provecho.

You may mistake a tostada for an old tortilla that became too hard to eat, sorry but this is not the case. A tostada is made, always. You need to deep fry (or in some cases, bake) a tortilla in order to make a tostada, is just like have a slice of bread toasted, the same idea follows here. Some tostadas have a different mixture (those are the great ones) instead of just grabbing a tortilla and frying it, the flavor is quite different.

A traditional tostada is smeared with some refried beans then you add some shredded chicken and top it with lettuce, cream, shredded white cheese and a bit of chopped tomato or salsa. The special thing of the tostada is that it's a crunchy way to eat and is more fun and challenging than just eating a taco. This is the origin of what in the USA is Taco Bell, as some tostadas have grounded meat or other stews. But real tacos are soft and never have lettuce.

In Guadalajara there is a variety and specialty, it resulted from days old bread, instead of a problem it became a tradition.

When a birote (a piece of bread similar to a French baguette but the size of a hamburger gun) gets too hard and dry in other parts of Mexico is thrown into the garbage or ground to use in breaded beef. In Guadalajara a wise person decided to use the birotes anyway, they were hard to eat so the decision was to literally "drown" them in a hot tomato sauce for a few seconds, thus making them a bit softer and tastier, so the Tortas Ahogadas were born. You can ask them with pork meat or chicken and the tomato sauce can be spicy or not, your call.

Buen Provecho.