The waiter left, never glancing back over her shoulder. If she did, she might have caught my annoyed look.
Not at her, but at myself.
I began rotating the plate, slowly, as if changing my viewing angle might magically alter what sat before me. It didn’t. It still looked like Doritos and ketchup.
Not exactly what I anticipated when ordering chips and salsa.
But sitting under the sidewalk canopy of a Buenos Aires restaurant, I should have expected as much. Yet it didn’t change the fact the hail mary I threw to the local chef in hopes of satisfying my Mexican food craving failed to connect.
Tracking down decent tacos would prove more difficult than I imagined.
In the Beginning
Midwestern tacos are a travesty. A crime against humanity. A slap in the face of one of the world’s great culinary styles. And, as a kid, I loved every minute of it.
Of course, as a kid, I didn’t realize just how much of a blaspheme ground beef, taco seasoning, hard corn shells, and a slathering of sour cream was to traditional tacos. I didn’t like soft flour tortillas growing up in Michigan because they like biting into latex gloves packed with wet flour.
For most of my life, these were the tacos I feasted on. Thankfully, moving to Tucson and living in one of the great Mexican food cities in the United States helped straighten me out. As one of only two UNICEF “Cities of Gastronomy” in the U.S. (the other being San Antonio), I received the abrupt, slap in the fast taco education everyone should go through.
I discovered flour tortillas didn’t need to taste like I was swallowing down powder-filled condoms to mull narcotics across international borders. I also discovered the magic of freshly made flour tortillas. Chopped steak and shredded chicken and shrimp and tripe and fish replaced the ground beef and taco seasoning packages. House-made chipotle and guacamole salsas kicked plastic drums of sour cream and the family-sized Chi-Chi’s jugs of salsa to the curb. Chi-Chi’s just so happens to be the first “Mexican” restaurant I remember going to as a kid.
In Tucson, Chi-Chi’s, or restaurants like it, are weeded out. While the city itself has, in all reality, an overabundance of Mexican food, it has a way of protecting itself from truly inferior restaurants. It has a built-in floor. The tacos I ate as a child would have been shown the door out of the city and asked never to return.
For five years I consumed some of the best tacos in the country. Tucson generally steers clear from the Tex-Mex fusion found in the Lone Star state, and it doesn’t lean into the tribal offerings of New Mexican cuisine. And while there are plenty of seafood Mexican restaurants found in Tucson, these are mostly Sinola and Oaxaca influenced, rather than the Cal-Mex servings of lighter proteins popular in SoCal. Of all the states specializing in variations of Mexican food, Arizona, and Tucson specifically, stands out with its traditional-rich culinary offerings.
After five years in the Old Pueblo, I had a taste for authentic tacos, and like any drug, cravings for it eventually started crawling at my skin. It twisted inside of me, and while there were days I could put it out of mind, eventually the cravings would return.
And the only way to satisfy the craving is to give in.
You Don’t Like it? Go To Mexico!
The Doritos and ketchup incident left me frustrated. Yes, salsa in Spanish means “sauce,” but I couldn’t understand why a restaurant marketing “Mexican chips and salsa” would pair the condiment with Doritos. It’s a standard dish. A half-second Google search would instantly point out the issue. In a way, it felt like the restaurant owners were either knowingly playing dumb, or enjoyed being ignorant. It’s the equivalent of ordering “Italian spaghetti with meatballs” and receiving angel hair pasta with a hand-mashed ball of bologna.
I decided to take a step back and search the Argentina culinary scene from a bird’s eye view. And yet searching for authentic Mexican restaurants or locations specializing in tacos produced limited results. Provided images further disqualified additional, taking an already sparse list down to endangered. Whoever coined the phrase don’t judge a book by its cover obviously never looked at tacos with more neon colors than a 1990 MTV promo video.
Lost without many viable answers, I turned to a prominent Buenos Aires Facebook group of expats and asked for advice. Many responders echoed my desire for authentic Mexican tacos, while others told me I’d never locate what I desired. Because when Mexicans migrated, they didn’t travel south. They traveled north, so fewer authentic recipes and individuals familiar with the cooking style made their way to Argentina.
One individual posted a photograph, taken from a small, upscale market. The photo centered on one jar of actual, honest to god salsa, and of several hot sauces, including El Yucateco and Tapatío.
My heart skipped a beat at the Tapatío sighting, as it had, long ago, become my go-to hot sauce. I also hadn’t tasted it in over a year. Others chimed in on their desire for spice, as the local Argentina palette leaves much to be desired concerning seasoning and spices. One poster said they liked to refer to the local food as “natural,” to avoid upsetting locals.
It didn’t work.
For whatever reason, many locals had infiltrated the closed expat Facebook group and lambasted the entire conversation. Foods didn’t need spice for enhancements. Hot sauces mask flavors. They prefer the taste of their foods and not spices. My personal favorite response, something echoed more than once, was, “if you don’t like it, go to Mexico.”
Food in any culture is a touchy subject. Criticizing the food is akin to criticizing culture, history, and, in many ways, it’s a direct, personal attack on someone’s family, and the generational recipes they were raised with.
I thought any critiques given in the posts, if they could be considered critiques more than personal preferences, were tame at best, but locals didn’t think so. One woman insisted that outside flavors should not “contaminate” the local cuisine. A line I found ironic coming from a Latin American country specializing in Italian food. And Italian food, which is now heavily tomato-based, and tomatoes were introduced to Italy by, yes, Mexico. Before the introduction of Mexican tomatoes, Italian food consisted primarily of pasta, olive oils, and garlic.
So, yes, external flavors can enhance local cuisines.
The Search Continues
After the strangely aggressive Facebook conversation regarding hot sauces and tacos, I headed to the grocery store and bought up sauces and the salsa. In many ways, it was an inferior salsa. Mostly a tomato puree with some spices and salt, but even the dirtiest water quenches a desert wanderer’s thirst.
What it didn’t do, however, was satisfy my craving for tacos. In concept, tacos are simple. And yet, often the simplest of foods are the easiest to mess up.
For me, a great taco requires a house-made tortilla, fresh salsa, and tender meat. Now, there are always other ingredients involved, and the quality level of these three is critical. The same can be said with many other kinds of food. A great pizza starts with house-made dough, freshly made marinara, and quality cheese. When one side of a triangle doesn’t measure up, it falls apart. The same is true with a taco. If the tortilla is processed and pumped with preservatives so it will last longer, crumbles apart when folded, or if the fat source used in creating the tortilla (for flour tortillas lard is absolutely the way to go), the rest of the taco suffers. If the salsa comes from a jar, or the restaurant half-assed it, the taco suffers. And, well, dried-out and inferior meat speaks for itself.
The taco-slinging restaurants thus far in Buenos Aires have no problem with the meat. They know what they are doing in this aspect. Tortillas are hit and miss, with far too many locations opting for the preservative-laced options sold in plastic bags with a stamped expiration date for sometime next year. But above everything else, it’s the salsa that suffers. Many produce the sauce in a similar way as the local chimichurri sauce, which is olive oil based, and has an almost complete lack of any spice. Sadly, I’ve had milkshakes in the United States spicier than most “Mexican” salsas in Argentina.
For now, the search for tacos continues, and I will exhaust the restaurant offerings until there are no more stones left unturned. Although, I’ve placed an order for a tortilla press, because sometimes when it’s impossible to find what you want, you just have to roll up your sleeves and make it yourself.