Comida Mexican Taqueria in Salem

The most recent Edible Boston included a review of Comida Mexican Taqueria in Salem. Chef Renny Waldron spent four years working at Ole in Cambridge, which peaked my interest. While I found Ole overpriced and not all that good, its takeout business Olecito across the street was pretty good. So my husband and I decided to give it a try.

Comida is a tiny establishment less than a block from the Peabody Essex Museum. It has one slender bar with four chairs and a single couch, no table, for seating. The majority of other customers ordered their food to go or, having ordered by phone or online, picked up their bags and headed back out. Their menu features tacos, burritos, and tortas, the Mexican equivalent of paninis.

We arrived for lunch on a Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, tacos are $2.50 each. So we ordered one of each taco on the menu along with a side of guacamole and chips. The chips were clearly fresh and made in house. The guacamole had a good texture and lots of fresh onion and tomato but needed salt. All of the tacos were served on freshly heated double corn tortillas and made at the counter right in front of us, in a workflow similar to Anna's Taqueria.

The first, Taco de Hortalizas, is Comida's vegetarian offering, consisting of grilled vegetables, lettuce, guacamole, and pepper jack cheese. Our taco had zucchini, black beans, and corn. I found it completely boring. It was like a little mini taco salad with no dressing. My husband liked it rather more and ate the majority of it. Honestly, I think that if you treated it like a side salad and added a little picante sauce for flavor, it would be quite presentable, but this taco really can't stand on its own.

I rather liked the Taco de Pollo. The mango-corn salsa had a zesty flavor that complemented the adobo-marinated chicken. It was the opposite of the Taco de Hortalizas, so full of flavor it almost didn't need picante sauce. Almost. My husband disliked the sweetness of the mango and left me most of the taco. Isn't it lovely when that works out?

It wasn't so easy to divide up the Taco de Carne Asada. The adobo-marinated steak was moist, tender, and served in easy-to-bite cubes. The grilled onions and peppers were nicely balanced by the fresh guacamole. With some good red picante, it was downright yummy. With serious red chile sauce, it would have been delicious.

I gave up the Taco de Carne Asada to my husband only because I actually liked the Taco de Carnitas more. I'm a sucker for pork in Mexican food, and this braised pork was excellent, a nice variation on the stewed pork that is often used in Mexican cooking. The pork was so tender, it shredded in my mouth, and the salsa verde, despite the heavy presence of tomatillo, had a nice zing that refreshingly did not taste like jalapenos. I'm guessing serrano peppers were used. But I still found myself adding on picante sauce.

Comida Mexican Taqueria does a good job of replicating the fresh, yummy offerings at Olecito, but like its Cantabridgian forerunner, it falls short on the spiciness scale. Really, if you can afford fresh tomatillos, you can afford some serious chile. Even so, their prices are quite reasonable, and it's possible to get a good, filling lunch for under $8. The next time we go to the PEM, I'll likely drop by and try their tortas. I'm especially intrigued by their Mole Poblano. They also offer a kid's menu, to my knowledge unique among Boston-area Mexican restaurants, including a taco for which kids get to choose their meat and two toppings.

The Howling Wolf Misses the Mark

Having moved to the North Shore, I've warily begun trying out local Mexican restaurants. The Howling Wolf Taqueria in Salem looked like a decent bet. The owners, after all, had lived in Albuquerque for six years and ought to know what New Mexican cuisine should taste like.

Alas, no. The menu was full of tantalizing, misleading offerings. For example, the Green Chile Cheese Burger that my husband ordered did not actually include any green chile. Okay, sure, technically jalapenos are chiles that are green, but a New Mexican expects something totally different from jalapenos: a nice green pod of the Anaheim or Numex variety, sweet and hot without the characteristic bitterness of the jalapeno. Despite that disappointment, and after scraping off the offending green chile pretenders, my husband rather enjoyed his burger, and we both especially enjoyed  the refried beans, which were redolent with bacon, a rather pleasant surprise. However, I discovered a couple of days later when reheating them that the beans were actually spicy. This is a New Mexican no-no. Beans are meant to be a counterpoint to the heat of the chile. You eat them to cool your tongue a bit between bites of your enchilada. Ditto the spanish rice, which arrived sporting flecks of red chile.

I ordered the Enchiladas Chile Colorado, which the menu claimed were stuffed with pork stewed in red chile sauce. And the actual item made good on the claim. The pork was succulent and slightly spicy, reminiscent of carne adobada. Sadly, the chile was more like ranchero sauce. I could detect no mexican oregano in the sauce, and I strongly suspect that it was diluted with tomato sauce. Note to the wise: if you want a chile sauce to be spicy, don't add tomato sauce. The acidity of the tomato counteracts the alkalinity that contributes to a chile's hotness and flavor. When I peel roasted green chiles, I scrub my hands afterwards with tomato juice to remove the sting.

Finally, the salsa and chips that we ordered were a thorough disappointment. The salsa, heavy on the cilantro, had almost no spice to it at all. It reminded me of watery pico de gallo. And the chips were not fresh and clearly not made onsite.

That said, I'd probably go back there just for the refried beans, which really were wonderful. And I'd like to try the green chile sauce and see whether there's more than tomatillos and jalapenos in it. I'd also like to try the chile con queso. But I'll go again with my expectations firmly adjusted.