Fellow Doper Darth Nader is from Weslaco. He was surprised when I knew where it was (given my extremely English accent). I worked in McAllen last year.
Yeah, well I’m trying to be vague, too since I’m now in a much smaller town. Let me just ask you Red does the term Taco Palenque mean anything to you? 
Just a little anecdote to further explain how people in Michigan don’t understand Mexican food: I worked in a restaurant for a while. Basic food - burgers, sandwiches, really excellent breakfast. Sometimes, however, they would branch out for their daily specials. One day they decided to make burritos. Two of the regulars came in and looked at the special board. One asked, “What’s a burrito?”
The reply was “It’s like a Mexican pasty.”
Ah, Michigan.
(For the uninitiated, a pasty is like a Polish burrito.)
Smaller chains, especially those originally from border states, are okay.
I’m a nearly life-long Houstonian. Here are my views. A beef fajita, done right, is perhaps the most exquisite food known to man. When I am out of town for longer than a few weeks, this is what I crave. This doesn’t diminish from the beauty of enchiladas or cabrito or any other Tex-Mex food, but the beef fajita and its cousin the taco al carbon will always have a special place in my heart.
After sampling “Tex-Mex” in places like Baltimore and Northern California (yeeurrrrrrgh), here are my 3 reasons why Tex-Mex sucks everywhere else:
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Fresh, good, homemade salsa. I have never found a store-bought salsa that compares to anything close. This applies as well to the guacamole and the pico de gallo. Fresh is especially crucial in key ingredients like the cilantro and the jalapenos.
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Fresh homemade lardy tortillas. If a perspective restaurant is not making their own tortillas with a prominently displayed tortilla maker in the back, find a new restaurant. This is especially key in making top-notch chips which are of course complimentary and brought to your table with your water and cutlery.
#1 and #2 are the sole reason why so many of us down here swear by Taco Cabana. Their meat sucks, they are kind of expensive for fast food, they often have terrible service, and you have to pay for chips, but they make excellent salsa and tortillas 24 hours a day. One can subside on that alone (with a bit of queso to break up the monotony).
- Beef fajitas need to be made with real skirt steak. I’m not sure how available this is in the rest of the country – it is the diaphragm of the cow IIRC. People try too hard with the beef cut, the marinade, and the preparation. Marinate it with a bit of salt, perhaps pineapple juice for tenderization, and a few other seasonings, and grill it. Then carve and serve in fresh tortillas. Bit of heaven, that.
There are many other smaller factors. Rice and beans are screwed up more often than one would appreciate. Real Mexican cheese (not Velveeta crap or even regular Cheddar) is probably difficult to find farther from the border. Perhaps there is some avoidance of using lard or beef tallow in preparation – other oils probably don’t fry hot enough, though, and thus perversely make the food seem greasier and more mushy. Especially with enchiladas and flautas and so forth. Of course, specialty ingredients like the aforementioned cabrito and mole perhaps are difficult to find. In short, if a restaurant is buying Sysco tortillas and salsa, then you will never have good Tex-Mex. If a restaurant is advertising fajitas made out of Angus prime rib, then they have the wrong idea. And if there is any hint of the word “heart healthy” or “light” or “low fat” on the menu, pick a new place. This is the food of truncal obesity and gallstones.
And my anecdote on barbacoa. I like barbacoa as much as the next white guy, and I know it is made from head, etc. There is a chain restaurant now expanding in Houston – Taqueria Arandas – where you get an enormous burrito, torta, or taco for around $4 with your selection of meat. On the menu are the standards – beef, chicken, pork, barbacoa, IIRC in some neighborhoods heart, but there is also “cabeza” listed, translated plainly as “head.” My first time there, I asked the waiter “What exactly is cabeza?” – I knew it wasn’t barbacoa because that was listed below it. He looked at me and said “I’ll be honest with you, man, I have no idea.” I stayed away from it…
If you are ever in Houston, there is a place called 100% Taquitos that makes Tacos al Pastor. They are very adamant that they are not Tex-Mex. Their taquitos are not the standard deep-fried Taco Bell bastardization; rather they are small soft flour tortilla based tacos as sold from food carts in Mexico City. It is a great, cheap restaurant in a convenient location (right on US-59 inside the Loop 610). And you can’t throw a brick in Houston (at least in my neighborhood) without hitting two places which make reasonable tortas.
http://www.b4-u-eat.com/houston/restaurants/reviews/rsv1483.asp
I live in El Paso Texas, upon the banks of the Río Grande (currently an irregular patch of mud in these parts) so I don’t have a hard time finding good Mexican and Tex-Mex…though even along this border there are many places that are rather uninspired in their offerings. The “real stuff” is mostly served across the border.
One factor is that to many Mexican and Central American people, the popular cuisine is often seen as “home cooking” and if its sold, its usually in sold street stalls and small taquerías, and not often considered proper “restaurant” food. The best food on this side I know of come from old ladies who spend their weekends in the kitchen, not take out places. I think thats why even in places with a lot of Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadorian immigrants - it often takes a while for authentic full service restaurants to develop.
I wouldn’t consider this typical. My wife didn’t know what a pasty was until my parents introduced them to her. Pretty much everyone I know knows what a burrito is, I just don’t think they know what a GOOD burrito is.
And yes, most people I know are addicted to Taco Bell. -shudder-
Mmmmm… The only mexican place I’ve ever really liked doesn’t exist anymore and the best thing there was their mexican crab burrito. Plus, they made an excellent salsa.
I happen to live 22 miles from Mexicali. Where do you live?
I think ** Left Hand of Dorkness** meant Mexican/Californian cusine. But if you mean Mexicali, Baja California, then were practically neighbors. I live about 63 miles away in Arizona.
Yep – I live more’n 2,000 miles from Mexicali, here in snowdrenched Appalachia, NC. Mexicali is just what I call burritos with too many vegetables in them.
Daniel
Oh. My mistake. 
Over here, we have a word for burritos with too many vegetables… CRAP!
And IP: It’s cool that there are dopers in the Mohave desert!
You sure y’all aren’t talking about…eggrolls? 
You sure y’all aren’t talking about…eggrolls?
and try Floore’s Store in Helotes next time you’re around San Antonio. They used to be damned good. Haven’t been in awhile so, maybe somebody here can give me an update.
Well, since you lumped Baltimore in with the original post, I’ll defend it a bit. Basically, I’ve found 4 types of “mexican” in this town.
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Taco Bell & Chili’s. These crap-flows won’t enter into the discussion.
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What I call “Tex-Mex”. This is La Hacienda, Holy Frijoles, Listas (maybe). This is also shit food. It’s the same slop in all of them: beans, rice and meat either in burrito form, chimichanga form, enchilada form, etc. The same Tex-Mex that’s everywhere. I’ll chow it from time to time but not really appreciate it.
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“Fancy Tex-Mex”. Loco Hombre, Nacho Mama’s, maybe Joy America. I think these places are mostly just fancy food (differing degrees of quality there) with a Mexican style. At “JA”, they’ll peel an avocado and make guac for you with a mortar and pestle right at your table. Is “banana-tomatillo salsa over chili encrusted salmon” or “crab-chipotle quesadilla” really “mexican” food? I doubt it, but it doesn’t mean its not good. Maybe it’s more like Southwestern cuisine.
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The “real” places. The places in North Fells point where no one speaks english and they’re playing spanish soap operas and they don’t serve things like ‘chimichanga’ but they serve a “pork chop” or “suckling pig” and it’s in their own style and you can get 2 pork chops for $10 and they’re 2 of the best chops you’ll ever eat. If you’d eaten at one of these places, I doubt you’d have many more complaints about Baltimore.
that’s the wrap-up from here.
Sounds more South American.
As a near lifelong border resident, I can’t imagine having to give up my TexMex. Poppasitos and I go way back, not to mention several other local establishments.
As mentioned, the norm I’ve encountered travelling outside Texas is that spice (heat) is often substituted for flavor. Screw that. In addition to a reasonable selection of authentic Mexican brews, gimme me some proper pica de gallo, jalapenos, guacamole, salsa verde and nopalitos anyday. Mmmmm… nopalitos.
Being from Detroit and also being a fan of Mexican food, I’d suggest that perhaps you re-evaluate which Mexicantown restaurants you try. From what I’ve seen, the popularity of Mexicantown restaurants among the general gringo population is inversely proportional to the quality of the food.* El Zocalo and Xochimilco, for instance, seem to garner a lot of the “best Mexican” awards, but I’ve found them pretty ho-hum standard the couple times I’ve eaten there.
There are smaller places that never get any press that are much better. We go to a taqueria a lot (Taqueria Tapatia) that has some really good fish and goat plates. We’re often the only non-Hispanics eating there (and rarely are there more than three or four other non-Hispanics), which seems to be a good indication. There’s probably other places if you want to experiment. Then again, my particular hole-in-the-wall cup of tea may not be your particular hole-in-the-wall cup of tea.
*The exeption to this rule being Evie’s Tamales, which really does have delicious tamales.
HELL YEAH!
I live in Seattle, which has a pretty good selection of decent-to-great Mexican-influenced places. Probably due at least in part to cultural spillover from the migrant population that works in our east-of-the-Cascades agricultural areas.
We’ve got a wonderful hole-in-the-wall place in our neighborhood that specializes not in food from Mexico but Panama/Cuba/Venezuela. Delicious.
But re Mexico, I’m on a lifelong quest to find a place that makes molé as good as the stuff I make myself. (We can get the spices in our larger grocery stores and in specialty shops. Probably part of the same influence as in my first paragraph above.) The perfect molé has to be sweet, but not cloying; it’s got to have a slight undercurrent of chocolate bitterness, but only a small amount; it’s got to have a rich, smoky body; it can’t be too oily; and it’s got to have some kick. Why is this so hard to find?
Trunk reminded me of a place I used to go eat. A little ol mexican lady had converted her living room into a restaurant. She had about a half dozen small tables w/chairs and served from noon until 6. You’d go in and eat whatever she was cooking that day. $5 for plenty of great food and all the sweet iced tea or water you could drink. Damn…that was good, I’d forgotten all about it. (No bullshit, me and a buddy we’d go in grab a table and they’d fill it up w/ food. Good homemade chow too. We’d leave her a $10 and a good tip)
She spoke no English, had a bunch of kids (they all lived in the rest of the house) …one of 'em was always around setting tables and serving.
I guess you didn’t really need to speak. It’s not like she had a menu. A big smile and an empty plate said it all.
She passed on about a dozen years ago.