I’m curious, what exactly is terrible about it? Something like a taco is best when it’s kept simple. I’d think it’d be difficult to fuck up. Are they using bad ingredients, poor seasoning, or are they doing the “more is better” thing and just piling mountains of random shit on it?
Small portions. Burrito’s largely riceittos, no spices. Certainly no chilli sauce. High priced for it’s small portions.
Let me say, having had a Taco Bell open in Nottingham, somewhere which seemed to largely be out in the retail shopping areas in the US, I had previously not had, I tried one. On the more tasty end of the UK Mexican servings.
For restaurants not helped by god awful tequilla, good tequilla is rare over here, but exists now (as opposed to ten years ago).
There’s now plenty of good mexican’s in the UK, but you need to avoid the chains or anything that’s been open more than five years. The scene is changing fast.
Guiltily agreed. I’ve yet to find a decent Mexican or even TexMex place in Paris. PARIS ! We have gourmet Tibetan cuisine here ! And we’ve got great tapas bars, fantastic Argentinian meat places too. But nobody who can whip up a decent taco that doesn’t taste like the plate it was served on it seems. Shameful shit.
That’s a very provincial comment, and assuming that I’m only mentioning chains.
There might be plenty of good mexicans in SOME parts of the UK. It might be good to tell me where you think that is. They are certainly not plentiful or good yet across the country.
I hope you’re not talking about yet another burrito stall (relentlessly flour tortilla, or even just your usual wrap with loaded with rice).
For instance Tripadvisor has the top mexican restaurant in Birmingham rated as Wrapchic. This is a chain, where they put indian food in a wrap. Not mexican food.
Las Iguana’s is second, another chain, a big one too, and I’m not even sure what this really is. Claims to be Latin america, and I suspect that’s just an excuse to do a bunch of different food. And not very good cocktails, mainly.
I was kind of wondering the same thing.
Along those lines: let’s say you could teleport the 10 best Mexican/Tex-Mex** restaurants in, say, Texas & California over to Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Warsaw, Moscow, etc. All the employees, chefs, etc. also teleport over. Those restaurants also have some kind of magical teleportation thingie that allows them to source their ingredients from wherever in the world they are best procured.
Now then. Would those amazing Mexican restaurants go out of business in those European cities because the Europeans … just wouldn’t like that kind of food enough? Is it almost a chicken-&-egg thing? No cultural underpinning for Mexican cuisine in place >>> No Mexican place can get a foothold >>> No cultural underpinning >>> no foothold >>> … and round and round it goes. Is it like that?
** I realize they are different … for this thought experiment, it doesn’t much matter.
Thought experiment #2:
I make ground beef tacos at home for the family all the time. Sometimes I use a prepackaged spice mix to season the meat. Other times, I’ll throw in the onion, garlic, cumin, etc. myself to taste. They’re different, spicing it the two different ways, but both good and satisfying. Plenty of flour tortillas (don’t do crunchy corn shells a lot), sour cream, lettuce, tomato, and shredded cheese on hand. Sometimes we’ll make our own pico de gallo and use that in lieu of other toppings. Sometimes we’ll be super-lazy about it, dispense with chopping veggies, and just stuff it with seasoned ground meat and shredded cheese.
Anyway. I find myself living in Paris. Or London. Or any other European capital. And I want to make home tacos pretty much the way I describe above. I’ve got a pocketful of Euros or pounds or whatever local currency I need. I know where the major grocery stores are, and I am prepared to ask around for the locations of specialty grocers if necessary.
Given those conditions – what is it that prevents me from making home tacos very similar to what I made back in the U.S.? Assume that ingredient prices aren’t an issue – it’s OK if the ground beef costs triple what it costs in the U.S., or if cumin is priced like saffron or something. Would I likely have to make my own tortillas by hand, as opposed to finding decent ones for sale at the grocery?
Thought experiment #3: so I’m in Paris (or European capital of your choice), and I have persevered and done my best with what’s available locally, and gone ahead and made some home tacos. I invite a bunch of my local European friends to partake. Would they pretty much universally dislike the tacos because that kind of food is just not familiar to them?
They would dislike it the same way they would dislike peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I guess you might succeed if you took all the best ones across and put in the centre of a big city with enough of a custom to fill its restaurants and the good food makes it successful… It will take a while for such versions of the food to bleed out, and in some countries it just won’t (I’d say Italy, which is quite stuck in its ways).
It’s purely hypothetical though. The problem is that this has been kind of tried and failed, I’m not saying with substandard chefs or food, just ones who did not attempt to make authentic versions of it.
Indeed in the UK Chilli con carne is so ubiquitious that old people actually don’t consider it foreign food. My other half’s mother won’t touch chinese food (seriously), and won’t be in the same room as an indian curry, yet is fine with chilli con carne. Because it’s only slightly more seasoned than the onion, minced beef and gravy which makes a cottage pie under the mash. This happened in the 80s, this version of “mexican food”.
There has been 4-5 mexican restaurants around my area we’ve tried, which are long since gone. Not chains, someone’s dream… Each one was just basically slightly spiced fajita’s, soft (flour) tacos, rice filled burritos with meat and lettuce. It tried to attract the mainstream diners, and didn’t even attempt strong flavours. Mainstream diners and adventurous ones saw nothing different from what you could cook at home. I mean, a corn tortilla wasn’t even on the menu anywhere… Chilli sauce not on the table.
Taco bell did open up in the 90s in the centre of london, and went out of business in a couple of years. I don’t think they helped much…
I have thought about this for many years, since my first few visits to Europe in the mid 1990’s, and now after living here for the past 4 years, I still can’t decide.
I used to think there was a vast fortune just waiting to be made by opening Chipolte’s style places in major European cities, using “authentic” Mexican recipies, spices and ingredients, (or at least what to my American born & raised taste buds seem authentic) but now I am not so sure.
Younger people tend to be more adventurous, and in particular here in Eastern Europe will flock to anything that seems vaugely “American”, but I have to think that there must be something that keeps Mexican cuisine from gaining a foothold here, because even in traditional Poland, just right here in Krakow. there are 1000’s of Italian, Chinese, Thai, Indian and Japanese restaurants, many of which are clearly thriving, while the tiny handful of Polish “Mexican” places that put out food that isn’t nearly as good as a frozen Swanson’s “Enchilada Combo” are virtually deserted each night.
Chicken or Egg?
(I am going to dinner tonight at a tiny little Vietnamese place that opened up a few months ago. The food is truly excellent, every bit as good as good as anything I have ever had in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle or San Francisco, and a meal for myself and my wife, with enough leftover for one of us to have it for lunch tomorrow, will cost less than $6.00 U$D. The place doesn’t sell alcohol, so you are free to bring in a cold beer with you. Sadly, if I had to guess, there will likely be less than 3 or 4 other people eating there. You can lead a horse to water…)
Authenticity, really, shouldn’t be an issue in and of itself. There are many, many well-loved and thriving Mexican/Tex-Mex restaurants in the U.S. that aren’t particularly authentic. Same is true of a strong majority of popular ethnic restaurants in the U.S., I would think.
I’ve not tried them, but there has been Chiquito’s at sitting beside most out of town cinema’s in the UK. Claims to be the “Uk’s largest mexican chain” (sounds like a tourist attraction in Texas).
I’ve worked near a few different locations with these recently (Cambridge, Hemel Hempstead, Cardiff, Stevenage), then are invariably empty most days of the week…
There was some sort of mexican chain in Antwerp (where I visit on occasions), and I just went to find out its name, and it’s gone out of business by the looks of things. Indeed, I remember about three of them in Antwerp, two of them non chain, and none of them exist anymore. It’s harsh for Mexican restaurants everywhere.
Thanks Mr Patroniser, but if Tripadvisor is your go-to for restaurant recommendations, then there isn’t much of a conversation to be had here.
Of course there isn’t a great Mexican in every town in the country - I never claimed that. But if you want to find great places, you certainly can (not using Tripadvisor as your guide).
I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that Mexican food is amazing. It’s pretty much as staple for me. Everyone should enjoy it.
I once was in Stuttgart a couple of summers back, and next to my hotel was a “Tex Mex” type place that was obviously, nakedly, unmistakably modeled on a “Chili’s” (a mediocre American chain franchise bar & grill that has a vaugely SouthWesten themed menu) and they had a special for hotel guests to get 50% off of the check. I decided to get some taquitos and queso with guacamole just to see how bad it was going to be.
Even though the food was, by almost any American Mexican food standards, certainly nothing special, it was SO much better than 99% of other Mexican places I had tried in Europe that I ended up going back there for a little snack every day until I left, even though I felt somehow “guilty”, I guess for either really enjoying it, knowing full well that it actually wasn’t very good or perhaps for not eating some authentic German food for every meal.
Stupid, I know.
I’m using Trip Advisor because I don’t know any of these good restaurants you are referring to. You claim there are plenty of them, yet fail to name any of them, and anywhere they are.
You claimed to know some. In some areas. Please name them, like asked, and stop diverting, I’m the one who doesn’t know, and I’m not the one claiming there’s plenty of these great restaurants and because its a big damn country with plenty of places.
I really don’t give a crap about Tripadvisor, and I don’t use it as a source of very much at all. Type in best mexican restaurants in Birmingham into google, and its what you get.
Over to you, oh patronised person with all these mysterious restaurants you know, but won’t tell of.
Not just restaurants. I went to the Netherlands to visit one of our factories, and half the food in the cafeteria was Indonesian. We went to Amsterdam for dinner, and wanted to eat Dutch food - and found that very difficult to find. We wound up eating in a hotel restaurant.
Most immigrant food comes from influx from countries where there are connections and colonies and shared languages. Thus a lot of north african food in France, lot of turkish food in Germany (large influx post WWII), lots of Indian food in the UK.
I think the Dutch East Indies was related to Indonesia, so in effect a colony.
Sure, but they might not be considered “good” examples of what Insert_ethnic_cuisine_here is. If you take Chinese food as an example (which I know more about than Mexican food), the overwhelming majority of restaurants will serve Chinese dishes that aren’t “adventurous” for the locals, stuff that’s very much like local food but cooked in a wok and so on ; or actually Chinese stuff that generally resembles local food. Here in France for example most every Chinese restaurant will serve what I call “Frenchified Chinese cuisine” : beef & onion, fried chicken, lacquered duck, salt & pepper shrimp or pork, fried rice with egg & ham, wonton soup… Stuff that’s “foreign”, but not *too *foreign. Maybe there’ll be a dish or two with peanuts in it, for the more adventurous connaisseurs :). And if you ask the chefs at these places, they’ll all tell you the same thing : “if I make real Chinese food, I won’t have customers any more - if you call in advance I can make it for you, but I can’t put it on the regular menu”.
That’s not to say they make bad food btw - there’s truly excellent Frenchified Chinese food to be found. It’s just not, yanno, Chinese food :).
If there’s a large enough ethnic community however, then you’ll also find Chinese restaurants that do Chinese food for Chinese people, which is where you’ll find menus featuring duck tongues and chicken feet and lion’s head meatballs and xiaolong baos and a million other dishes you’d never heard of and never seen in any “Chinese restaurant” (and some which you probably shouldn’t have. I tried the tendons once, with ample regrets.)
Most of these places also serve the “Frenchified Chinese” dishes, but don’t Frenchify them at all - and the dishes are often better for it. Same is true for Korean food (“Korean BBQs” are a dime a dozen, but my friends and I found a lone, family-owned Korean restaurant in the heart of the Parisian south west, which is lowkey Koreatown, that does “real” Korean cuisine and it’s to die for), Japanese food (a billion bad trendy sushi places, but around the Opera where the Japanese immigrants live there are Udon joints and even Japanese curry joints that’ll make you believe in Shinto), etc…
So going backwards to the OP, I’d be willing to guess the reason Mexican food is pretty bad all over Europe is that there aren’t really any large South American “enclaves” anywhere that would make serving food “like in the old country” to nostalgic Latinos/as profitable in the short run.
They may already do/have something of the kind, because what you describe is not Mexican food. If I went to a Mexican restaurant in Europe and they served tacos on flour tortillas with lettuce, tomato, and sour cream, I’d have the same poor opinion of Mexican cuisine in Europe as the OP.