If you want the best food in Baja, find a street taco vendor and hand him a $20. Tell him to keep the Carta Blanca and fish tacos coming until that is used up. I guarantee a meal you will remember fondly in your dotage.
I fear you are confused. Taco Bell is the Mexican telephone company.
With such a huge Mexican cultural influence in the southwestern states, I’d be very surprised if it was harder to find authentic Mexican food in Arizona than it is to find authentic Italian food in New York.
In Tucson, AZ where I grew up, we were more Mexican than what most of you probably think of as “American”. There were Mexican cooks making Mexican food in a resteraunt owned by a Mexican, serving Mexican (and a few non-Mexican) customers. There were more Mexicans than all other minorities combined, and they had a strong culture that survived the “melting pot”. I’m positive that authentic Mexican food isn’t hard to find in the American southwest.
It’s not hard, most places. You just have to be willing to go someplace other than the chains. Any city with a sizable (or not so sizable, really) Mexican population will have a few “authentic” restaurants somewhere. They might be easier to navigate if you speak Spanish, of course. Calvin Trillan is convinced that the Chinese in NYC are hiding the really good dishes by only advertising them on posters in Chinese, so the round-eyes can’t read them. Same goes for Mexican, I’ll bet. 
I don’t live in the south, I live in Michigan, so ‘‘Mexican food’’ might be different where you’re from.
But I did live in Mexico for a couple months. The most common element in everything I encountered was tortillas. Tortillas and chile. One would generally get a plate of meat (chicken or beef) and an availability of chopped onions, avocado, lime and chile. When I lived in the city (Guadalajara), the most common restaurants were questionably sanitary little holes in the walls, where you would get chopped meats and vegetables and tortillas. But there were amazingly delicious more upscale restaurants where you could have amazing honey BBQ ribs or a caesar salad, really not much different than what you could find in the U.S.
Out in the country, soup-like concoctions were a lot more common. There were lots of things made out of corn (tamales, for instance)… but damned if those tortillas didn’t exist in abundance. 
We also had delicious sandwiches… fresh bread with some very sharp crumbly cheese, chiles and tomatoes… I could eat those sandwiches all day long.
But you know, some days we just had eggs and sausage for breakfast. Or spaghetti for dinner. Or mac and cheese. I won’t forget when I longed for a grilled cheese sandwich, and proudly cooked it by myself, only to have it dawn on me that it’s basically the Mexican equivalent of a quesadilla.
Oh, it’s true! I go to a little place in Windsor called Wah Court Restaurant in Windsor Ontario Canada. They have a barbarian and a Guoren menu. Unfortunately I only audited about two months of a beginning Chinese cour4se and can’t read their “special menu”.
We eat well, but the chinese folks have the choicest.
I live in Memphis and have a lot of Mexican coworkers, they seem to think that there are several restaurants here that have tasty Mexican food. I know that burritos made with tongue was a big hit. Many of us non-Mexicans were making ick faces but the Mexicans were raving.
Also, when we have office potlucks it is fabulous. We have a lady from Thailand and another from India as well as the Mexican crew and some other ethnic backgrounds that I don’t know. I have eaten things I didn’t like so much like the pork skins cooked in a sauce. The tostada like things (shredded meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, raw onions and some sort of jarred creamy stuff) and the tamales were fabulous, as was the pad thai, sping rolls, curry, and lots lots more. They all fit well in the Southen US traditon of potlucks with more food than the whole place can eat. (I made mushrooms stuffed with Italian spinach not that I am Italian but I can never think of good stuff to bring that doesnt’ involve lots of money and way more time than I have on a Thursday night.)
a couple more things, I thoght it was really funny to find out there is a Chili’s restaurant in Mexico City but the Mexican’s don’t think of that as Mexican food so they didn’t understand why I found it funny. To them it is American food.
The workers in the plant bring some combination of rice, beans, and meat and soft tortillas, I rarely see any thing like vegetables but sometimes some fruit. The Asians bring rice and lots of vegetables and the Americans bring typical American food (lots of Wonder bread). We have a guy from Russia but I haven’t been in the same break room with him to see what he eats.
This is a very important point. From the famous seven moles of Oaxaca to the banana-leaf wrapped achiote/sour orangee-rubbed cochinita pibil of the Yucatan to the battered fish tacos kissed with shredded cabbage and lime of the Baja and on and on and on, “Mexican” food is a very diverse and regional cuisine. Most of what you see in generic Mexican restaurants here is some kind of riff on norteno and/or Tex-Mex fare. But Mexican food is so much beyond that. Chicago is actually a great place to discover regional Mexican. You can find restaurants specializing in food from the Yucatan, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Michoacan, Puebla, etc., and discover all the little differences that make one region’s food different than another’s.
Some differences I’ll notice between the more standard Mexican places and the more authentic places is simply the ingredients. The authentic places might have hand-made tortillas made from fresh masa, a stronger and more varied use of herbs such as cilantro, epazote (stinkweed), hoja santa, etc. More use of Mexican vegetables like jicama, chayote, yuca, tomatillo, nopales (cactus paddles), plantains, etc. Tamales will come wrapped in corn husks or banana leaves, depending on what region of Mexico. And it’s not just jalapeno peppers. Lots of poblanos, serranos, arbols, anchos, guajillos, pasillas, habanero, etc., once again, depending on what region the dishes are from.
For anyone interested in learning about the cuisine, I would heartily recommend Zarela Martinez’s “Food from My Heart” as well as any of Rick Bayless’s cookbooks.
adhemar writes:
> They all fit well in the Southen US traditon of potlucks with more food than the
> whole place can eat.
It’s not particularly a southern tradition. I’ve been at those in the north many times. Possibly it’s originally derived from church suppers.
WTF? :dubious:
Chili’s does not have anything on the menu that could be remotely considered Mexican food by anyone. Compared to Chili’s, Taco Bell is the most Mexican Mexican food place on the planet.
You might as well ask them if they think Denny’s is a good place to get Mexican food.
I came in here to suggest looking at cookbooks, too. Rick Bayless is an excellent suggestion. Diana Kennedy has some highly-regarded cookbooks as well.
My mother grew up in an upper middle-class Mexico City family. Young ladies learned to cook in the European style (so that it could be cooked for them when they grew up, got married, and had cooks and other servants to do the actual work for them, I guess). But even so, there were corn tortillas on the table at nearly every meal.
When we go out to eat in Mexico City, we sometimes go out to restaurants that offer traditional Mexican fare, but we’re just as likely to go to an Italian or French or Austrian restaurant. None of these are there for tourists and, while they’re not holes in the wall, they’re mostly reasonably-priced, fairly modest establishments.
We cook more Mexican fusion at home than anything else these days (typical Mexican ingredients, European preparation).
And Christopher, while cheese may not be native, it is very widely used in Mexican dishes, although not typically in the quantities that you see in the States and comes in more varieties than you’d typically find here. It’s been part of the cuisine since the 16th century. Here’s a pretty decent overview of typical Mexican cheeses. It is, however, likely to be among the first things to go if you’re strapped for cash because it’s not essential in most dishes.
GT
Ours has Chicken Club Tacos, regular Chicken tacos and margarita grilled chicken as well as horrible smelling fajitas, so for some of the most white bread folk you can think of Chili’s might qualify as Mexican.
I live in Dallas, and you can find authentic Mexican food here, but most restaurants serve Tex-Mex, which doesn’t have much at all to do with real Mexican cuisine. Most Tex-Mex copies El Fenix, which came up with Americanized versions of Mexican dishes about 100 years ago, almost all the standards of Tex-Mex were created for the El Fenix menu.
No. That would be stupid. I am not stupid.
You, and almost everyone above, failed to read the question.
Allow me to repeat my main question
"Do middle class Mexicans in Mexico go to restaurants and order steaks, chops, whole chicken breast and drumstick, for example? Or is it all still chopped and shredded?"
From the answers above, it seems that yes, everything is still chopped and shredded. Exceptions noted were European foods and honey ribs.
Any others?
The Chili Queens of Old San Antonio helped invent Tex-Mex. Tex-Mex is based on Mexican street food–not “cuisine.” But it’s one of the earliest “fusion” styles. Even our Tex-Mex chains usually offer seafood (popular in Mexico–& we’re only a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico down here.) And meat loving Texans enjoy the fajitas & cabrito as cooked in Northern Mexico–just across the Border. We’ve got places specializing in regional Mexican food–from the upscale Hugo’s & my favorite Pico’s to the spots serving recent immigrants–including our taco trucks!
In Mexico, different regions have specialties–from “street food” to elaborate concoctions invented in Colonial days. But there are also places serving Italian food, “Continental” food, etc. Here in Houston, a couple of places serve the elaborate & creative Mexico City style sushi!
Mexico City style sushi? What’s that like?
Robb Walsh is food writer for The Houston Press–& he’s written a couple of books on Tex-Mex/Nuevo Tex-Mex. From his story on a Houston sushi spot:
…I’m getting hungry.
I would say some stuff is, some stuff isn’t. Just off the top of my head, I can’t think of any Mexican seafood that’s chopped and shredded, for instance, (edit: just thought of one, ceviche) and there’s a whole lot of seafood cuisine, given Mexico’s large coast line. Plenty of chicken dishes (pollo pibil, chicken mole, etc) come served on the bone. You’ve also got various grilled chicken preparations, served whole, not shredded. Carne asada, usually skirt steak, can be served whole as well as chopped. And so on and so forth.
So, no, it’s hardly all chopped and shredded.
The meats (fish, chicken, beef, pork, etc) aren’t always chopped and shredded in Mexican restaurants in the U.S. either, I’d say, since I frequently have them in standare whole forms in Mexican restaurants here.