The best Mexican meal I ever had was at a restaurant whose name I can't even remember. Other than the chips that arrived as soon as my wife and I sat down, and the small cup of red salsa that was sweet and sharp, like licking honey off a razor, I can't recall anything I ate. I don't know the day of the week or the time of day, other than that it was late. I can't remember the street the restaurant was on, only that it was in Albuquerque.
Peter Mumford
The Mex-addicted mantra: Find tacos, then breathe.
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What I remember was hunger—the desperate, near-tears kind. What I remember was the way this little taqueria was the only thing lit on an otherwise dark street, gleaming bright and hot and bleeding neon into the night like a wound. What I remember is only the circumstance: Laura and I heading west in an undependable used car, making a half-frantic midnight run from New York, headed for the warm sun and palm trees of Southern California. Albuquerque was where the car broke down. We decided to stay the night—and ended up staying for two years.
This nameless Mexican restaurant was the first place we ate in the city—huddled together in a window seat, crouched low over a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa. I remember looking out over the nighttime view of a city that was soon to become home to us, contrary to all our best-laid plans.
Even though I can barely remember it, I'll never forget that restaurant.
The best Mexican food I ever had was served in a place that was barely a restaurant at all—just a rattletrap kitchen and a few picnic tables scattered around a dusty front yard in upstate New York. I found the place only because a friend of a friend of a friend had told me about it—this joint in the back of beyond where the migrant peach-pickers went when they were looking for work, company, or lunch. I had posole, rich with chicken stock and green chiles' vegetable heat, and thick with cracked kernels of hominy. Because I don't much care for cilantro, I'd asked for mine without. The guy working the counter had stared at me as he added a big fistful of it to the top of my bowl. I didn't argue, just ate. It was the first posole I'd ever tasted, and to this day stands as the best.
When I discovered sopapillas (Albuquerque, again), I made an entire meal of them and swore that, now that I knew what I'd been missing all my life, I'd never again be able to live without them. In Juarez, years later and just a few days before Christmas, I thought I'd found my true home at a bar far outside the American quarter, down an alley lined with takeout chicken joints and roofed with a thousand piñatas. I remember staring at Laura over a picket fence of beer bottles, my head on the bar, and being in love with everything—the girl, the place, the city, the air. I was waiting for a basket of tacos to come from the kitchen and swimming in the metallic, refrigerated breeze from the air conditioner that the bartender would only turn on if you paid him one American dollar, same as the price of a beer, for 10 minutes of cool bliss.
Mexican is my soul food, my comfort, my consolation. It is my fallback cuisine and first among my priorities: find tacos, then breathe. Mexican food speaks to me in a language that transcends food and cuts straight to the lizard-brain pleasure centers. There is no taco that doesn't recall other tacos to me. There is no sope or enchilada that does not remind me of all the sopes and enchiladas I have eaten before. And even at a distance, the sound of an accordion or a fat-bodied guitar will always make me hungry.
Saturday night on Broadway, I could hear the music before the door to El Mestizo even opened.
"How many for dinner?" said the hostess.
"Four, please," I replied.
"Of course," she beamed, and put us right by the window—our two friends by the wall, Laura and I across from each other, staring out at another night in another new hometown.
There were no fresh-from-the-fryer chips this time, no little pot of razor-blade salsa, but there were tablecloths and glassware and silver that all matched. El Mestizo is new, barely three months old, and there is a sense of lightness to it—of a place which has not yet completely found itself or the reach of its space. It is a simple shotgun-shack of a room, long and narrow, with a nice bar running down the right-hand side and a spray of tables clothed in virginal white on the left. The ceiling is unfinished, the walls sparsely decorated, the floor maybe half-committed on a night when it should be booming. It operates as though crouching in the middle of a room that's too big for it—too afraid yet to spread and work to the corners. And the manager, dressed in a chef's coat the color of old mustard, spends all of Saturday night standing sentinel by the front door, looking out into the night as though by will alone he could draw in the numbers he'd need to fill his floor to capacity. When he ducks out to answer a text on his phone, the entire place seems unguarded and emptier for the missing weight of his concentration.
