The Seven Deadly Sins of a Bad Mexican Restaurant

Let me begin with an important distinction: “Mexican food” comes in two varieties.  There is the food of Mexico, which is one of the world’s great cuisines, and then, there is what too many American “Mexican” restaurants serve, which is the same six ingredients rearranged into forty-seven allegedly different entrées, each of which, someone will inevitably claim, has a name that is Spanish slang for a penis.

Let us also make one thing completely clear: if you do not serve beer, you are not really a Mexican restaurant.  As everyone who lives on the border knows, “La comida mexicana sin cerveza es como el sexo sin besos.”  For the gringos out there, that translates as, “Would you bring more tortilla chips?”

The indispensable ingredients are ground beef, chopped lettuce, chopped tomatoes, refried beans, a soggy tortilla, and a little melted cheese that is apparently descended from dried Elmer’s glue.  These materials are moved around the plate in different configurations and given different Spanish names, rather like rearranging the furniture and claiming you have built a new house.  Occasionally, there is also a green slime pretending to be guacamole, even though it contains only one avocado per gallon.

Put the beef inside a folded tortilla, and it is a taco.  Roll it inside the tortilla, and it is a burrito.  Roll it tightly and fry it, and it is a taquito.  Cover it with sauce, and it becomes an enchilada.  Fold the tortilla over and flatten it, and you have a quesadilla.  Deep-fry the burrito, and it becomes a chimichanga.  Leave the tortilla open and pile everything on top, and it is a tostada.  Break the tortilla into a pile of pieces, scatter the ingredients over the top, and you have nachos.

The menu may occupy twelve laminated pages, but the kitchen requires approximately one shelf.

This is the first sin of the bad Mexican restaurant: the illusion of choice.  The waiter gives you ten minutes to study the menu as though you were examining the wine list at Versailles.  In reality, you are deciding whether you want your ground beef wrapped, folded, rolled, fried, buried, or dropped from a modest height onto a tortilla chip.

The second sin is structural failure.  The taco arrives crisp, upright, and confident.  You pick it up, take one bite, and it immediately disintegrates along the bottom seam.  Ground beef falls into your lap.  Lettuce scatters across the table.  A tomato cube rolls under the saltshaker.  The shell splits into three pieces, each sharp enough to require a tetanus shot.

The burrito has the opposite problem.  It possesses the tensile strength of a fire hose.  The tortilla is thick, damp, and elastic, and it has been wrapped so tightly around its contents that opening it may violate federal regulations governing pressurized vessels.  When finally punctured, it releases a beige substance that may once have been beans.

The third sin is cheese abuse.  Cheese should have flavor, texture, and some identifiable connection to an animal.  Bad Mexican-restaurant cheese is a yellow industrial sealant.  It arrives molten but begins hardening when immediately upon contact with oxygen.  Within thirty seconds, it has formed a protective coating over the enchilada.  Within two minutes, it can be peeled off in a single sheet.  Within five minutes, it could be used to repair drywall.

The restaurant calls it queso.  Elmer’s would call it product development.

The fourth sin is the combination plate, although “combination” suggests greater variety than actually exists.  The waiter sets down a dangerously hot platter containing two enchiladas, one taco, one burrito, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes, and enough melted cheese to immobilize the entire arrangement.

“Careful,” he says.  “The plate is hot.”

The plate is always hot.  Nobody knows why.  The food is tepid, but the ceramic has recently reentered Earth’s atmosphere.  You must sit with your hands in your lap while everything congeals, because touching the plate would remove your fingerprints…from your fingers!

The rice is orange, dry, and abundant.  A note to the chef: food coloring does not count as a flavor ingredient.  The refried beans are the color and consistency of wet cement.  The rice is deposited in a perfectly rounded mound, while the beans spread across the plate in a dirty puddle.  Somewhere in the kitchen, there must be a man whose entire career consists of constructing rice domes.  He is probably the restaurant’s most highly trained employee.

The fifth sin is the salsa deception.  The waiter brings two bowls.

“This one is mild,” he explains, “and this one is hot.”

The mild salsa is chopped tomatoes floating in pink water.  The hot salsa is also chopped tomatoes floating in pink water, but someone has waved a jalapeño over it.  Both are served with tortilla chips possessing two remarkable characteristics: they are simultaneously stale and greasy.

Nevertheless, you eat three baskets of them while waiting for dinner, thereby consuming the caloric equivalent of a replacement meal.  When your entrée arrives, you announce that you are already full and then proceed to eat it anyway, because surrendering before the cheese solidifies would be cowardice.

The sixth sin is compulsory festivity.  A Mexican restaurant cannot merely feed you, it must persuade you that you are attending a fiesta.  The walls are painted in colors normally visible only from orbit.  Sombreros hang from the ceiling.  A ceramic burro stands near the cash register.  The chairs look as though they were decorated by a man who was paid according to the number of colors he used.

Suddenly…Somewhere…a trumpet starts playing “La Cucaracha.”

Why is a Mexican restaurant the only place where it is considered festive to sing a song about a cockroach?  Nobody enters an Italian restaurant expecting the staff to sing about silverfish.  At a French restaurant, the inevitable accordion player rarely performs a jaunty number about bedbugs.  Yet in a Mexican restaurant, a jaunty song about a crippled cockroach is apparently essential to the atmosphere.

And then we reach the seventh and gravest sin: the mariachis.

I realize that I am supposed to insert a diplomatic qualification here.  I am expected to say that I admire authentic mariachi music when it is performed well, at the proper time, by skilled musicians.

Nope.  I don’t.  I hate mariachis.

Before anyone accuses me of cultural insensitivity, I should present my credentials.  I live on the Mexican border.  I have traveled extensively throughout Mexico and Central America.  I regularly teach the history of the region.  I even possess a degree in Latin American Studies.  I have spent a substantial portion of my life studying, visiting, discussing, defending, and explaining Latin America.

But cultural appreciation is not a suicide pact.  You cannot be required to like everything produced by a civilization merely because you admire much of it.  The Italians produced Michelangelo, Dante, and the Renaissance, but that does not obligate us to admire Mussolini driving a Fiat.  Mexico gave the world extraordinary art, architecture, literature, history, and food.  It also gave us overweight men in embroidered trousers firing trumpets directly into the human nervous system.

Restaurant mariachis do not perform at a distance ordinarily associated with musical entertainment.  They surround your table.  The trumpeter stands eighteen inches from your left ear.  The guitarist is close enough to perform minor surgery.  Conversation becomes impossible unless conducted through written notes, semaphore, or artillery signals.

The musicians proceed from table to table, leaving stunned diners and overturned water glasses in their wake.  Everyone smiles because no one wants to be identified as the gringo who does not appreciate the culture.  Meanwhile, fillings loosen, hearing aids squeal, and elderly patrons attempt to remember whether Medicare covers trumpet-related injuries.

Tom Lehrer understood the problem.  In his song “In Old Mexico,” he observed that the mariachis “would not shut up till they were paid.”

I once tested this theory.  An especially off-key group was circulating through a restaurant, destroying conversation one table at a time.  When they approached me, I offered them twenty dollars to go outside and play in the parking lot.  Everyone within earshot pretended to be insulted while privately hoping the musicians would accept the offer.

This created a brief ethical crisis.  They had presumably never before been paid specifically to increase their distance from an audience.  Nevertheless, capitalism prevailed.  They accepted the money and departed.

It was the best twenty dollars I ever spent on music I did not hear.

And yet, despite all seven sins, we return.

We return for the chips.  We return for the cold beer.  We return for the margaritas (which contain enough fluorescent syrup to illuminate the table).  We return because the portions are enormous, because the prices are usually reasonable, and because even a mediocre enchilada buried beneath industrial cheese possesses a certain comforting appeal.

Most of all, we return because there are at least forty-seven things on the menu.

Admittedly, they are all made from the same six familiar, comfortable ingredients.  But tonight I may be adventurous.

I may have mine folded.