Brunch at Acitrón Mexican Bistro in Arlington Center

I first spotted Acitrón Mexican Bistro in Arlington Center about a month ago, where the Rio Brazilian BBQ used to be. Ever hopeful, I dragged my husband to their weekend brunch today in celebration of his birthday.

The brunch menu has a fun and eclectic selection including some Mexican twists on traditional brunch fare such as Huevos Benedictinos, which serves the poached eggs and Canadian bacon in corn tortilla shells along with refried beans, avocado, and chipotle hollandaise sauce, and Crepas de Fresas con Crema (crepes with strawberries topped with cream sauce). It also has a decent kids' menu, offering chocolate chip pancakes, grilled cheese sandwich, and kids' quesadillas.

Predictably, my four-year-old opted for the chocolate chip pancakes, while my seven-year-old ordered adult-sized french toast. My husband's curiosity was peaked by the Huevos con Nopales (cactus) y Chorizo, and I chose the Tortitas de Zucchini con Huevos.

The three chocolate chip pancakes, served with butter and syrup, also came with a small dipping bowl of chocolate sauce, which delighted my seven-year-old. She cheerfully traded all her blackberries and part of her watermelon to my four-year-old for the sauce, which she then poured all over her Texas-style french toast. The pancakes were thin but light, flavorful, and not overpowered by the chocolate chips. Similarly, the french toast (before the chocolate sauce) was light and tasty, not overly heavy with egg batter. Aside from the berries and watermelon, the french toast (also topped with syrup) was accompanied by a slice each of papaya and cantalope. My seven-year-old inhaled the entire dish, except the berries and papaya, which is quite a complement coming from someone with such a picky palate.

My husband's scrambled eggs with nopales and chorizo was quite good: firmly cooked with the right proportion of chorizo to present flavor without overpowering the eggs. Unfortunately, the flavor of the cactus was rather lost in the eggs and chorizo. If you fished out just a bite of nopales, the mild, slightly fruity flavor became more apparent. This dish, like the Tortitas de Zucchini, was served with homefries drizzled lightly with chipotle mayonnaise.

By far the best dish was the Tortitas. Rather like zucchini griddle cakes with kernels of corn, the tortitas were light, not at all greasy as such cakes often are, and quite delicious. The eggs were poached perfectly and topped with salsa verde, made primarily of pureed tomatillos but with a very pleasant kick. The combination of flavors was outstanding. I'd order this dish again in a hot minute and may have to try making those tortitas at home.

This brunch was good enough that I'm now seriously intrigued by their dinner menu. The Queso Fundido con Chorizo sounds wonderful, and I'm encouraged by their wide array of stuffed green chiles: traditional chiles rellenos using poblanos, Crepas de Rajas Poblanas, a nice reversal that stuffs crepes with chiles, and especially, Chiles en Nogada, "Fire roasted poblano peppers stuffed with seasoned ground beef and topped with a sweet white creamy sauce made of nuts, spices and cream cheese." 

That last dish sounds custom made for my husband. Personally, I think I have to try the Pechugas Poblana, "A legendary blend of spices, chilies, nuts and Mexican chocolate made into a rich and flavorful sauce, in the traditional Puebla style, served over chicken." I can't wait.

Zócalo Cocina Mexicana

At Arlington Town Day, as I was standing in line to buy my five-year-old General Gau's chicken, I spotted a stand for Zócalo Cocina Mexicana that displayed a very authentic-looking ristra. So I had my husband go back for open-face burritos. To my delight, the skinny squirt of red stuff turned out to be excellent chile sauce! Their online menu looks promising, too. They may make their tamales with mole and banana leaves instead of red chile and corn husks, but their pozole looks a lot like the posole I grew up with, and their chiles rellenos with "rojo sauce" has raised my hopes a good deal.

As soon as possible, I'm going to have to try these folks out.

Ixtapa Mexican Restaurant and Cantina in Woburn, MA: Ketchup Would Have Been Better

I haven't posted to this blog in ages, and that's because I rarely go to Mexican restaurants in New England. They consistently disappoint me, and I can generally make far better New Mexican cuisine at home. However, when my favorite lunch place near work closed (Adios, Au Bon Pain! How I miss your salads!), I found myself at loose ends last Wednesday and finally wandered in to Ixtapa Mexican Restaurant and Cantina in Woburn, MA.

I knew better than to try the enchiladas. No one in New England gets enchiladas right, with the possible exception of Jose's in North Cambridge. Instead, I got a combo lunch with two things that are pretty hard to mess up: a chile relleno and a tamale. I ordered it to go and took it back to work with me. To my surprise, they gave me a small bag of tortilla chips and a small tub of salsa along with my lunch combo.

Unsurprisingly, every aspect of the lunch was a disappointment. The tortilla chips were overcooked and inconsistently salted, so that one would be almost salt free, and the next coated to inedibility. The salsa was so watery, it could not be scooped up by the chips, and it had no spice to it, tasting more like watered-down tomato juice. The tamale was the best part of the dish, with good firm masa stuffed with nice, tender stewed beef. However, though I could see bits of red chile in the meat, I couldn't taste it at all. The chile relleno was not bad, either. They used a smallish ancho pepper, stuffed it with a miniscule amount of cheese (in NM, it's usually stuffed with a good-sized chunk), and its batter was tasty and held up well. The refried beans had the characteristic mushy texture that indicated that they had come from a can, and the spanish rice was nothing more than white rice with a little tomato sauce added, virtually tasteless. Worst of all, everything was smothered in ranchero sauce.

What the heck is ranchero sauce? Who invented this travesty of Mexican cooking? I will never forget the first time I went to a Taco Bell in Boston and ordered a bean burrito with green chile. They looked at me like I was insane and then offered me - you guessed it - ranchero sauce. As far as I can tell, ranchero sauce consists of a thin tomato-based gravy with some chile or chipotle powder and spices tossed in. This online recipe (which can't even spell poblano) confirms it: it's a Texan invention, which makes ranchero sauce Tex-Mex, not true Mexican. Bleh.

One of the quintessential aspects of New Mexican cuisine is chile. And when New Mexicans talk about chile, they generally mean, very specifically, the Hatch variety of the Anaheim pepper named for Hatch, NM, where the very best of these peppers grow. And when ordering a dish with chile, you generally have two options: green or red.

Green chile is made from the unripe chile pepper. This is almost always roasted to remove the outer skin of the pepper and to enhance the flavor. From July through September, the streets of Albuquerque are redolent with the scent of roasting green chile. New Mexicans put green chile on almost everything: hamburgers, pizza, casseroles, stews. It is also finely chopped and cooked with onions, garlic, salt, and spices such as mexican oregano, and served as a sauce on enchiladas, burritos, chimichangas, tacos, flautas, stuffed sopapillas, etc.

Red chile is made from the ripe red pepper. This is almost always dried in ristras, as pictured hanging from the vigas of adobe houses. Sometimes, it is powdered and used as a spice, but in general, either the whole pods or the powder is reconstituted in water and then made into a sauce using cooking oil, garlic, a little flour, salt, and spices such as mexican oregano. New Mexicans use this sauce on - you guessed it again - everything. My family traditionally serves "red gravy" with our Thanksgiving turkey. We use it in all the New Mexican dishes listed above plus soups like posole, and we marinate pork in it and then slow roast it until it falls apart, a dish called "carne adobada."

Chile is as essential to New Mexican cuisine as tomato sauce is to Italian, and substituting ranchero sauce for it is like putting ketchup on a pizza. In fact, I think ketchup might have been better on the chile relleno than the ranchero sauce; at least then, I'd have had no illusions that this was Mexican food.

I don't understand why Mexican restaurants in New England don't get this basic truth. Other ethnic foods in the area have the same spiciness as they do in their places of origin: Indian, Thai, Ethiopian. And in Chicago, where there's a large population of Mexican immigrants, there are plenty of quite decent Mexican restaurants. My husband and I used to love the chorizo flambado at Lindo Mexico in Evanston. While it's true that red chile does not keep well in New England (I had to throw out my ristras, which became infested with mold and now keep powdered red chile double-bagged in my freezer), the throughput at a restaurant should use up the chile before it goes bad. And supply is no excuse either: I found Hatch green chiles at Whole Foods this summer!

My guess is that Mexican restaurants in the area take advantage of the ignorance of their customers to make the cheapest possible dishes. I'd wager that the ranchero sauce used on my lunch came in a big can marked "Old El Paso." And this is what galls me the most: I paid $9 for this lunch. NINE DOLLARS. Mexican food is really inexpensive to make: beans, rice, corn meal for the masa, inexpensive cuts of meat. The biggest expense is the cheese, which was quite scanty in my dish. So unless they're paying their staff way, way, way too much, that was the most overpriced Mexican food I've ever eaten.

Now, it wasn't the worst Mexican food I've ever eaten (that dubious honor I reserve for Garcia's Restaurant of Idaho Falls, ID), and there's some glimmer of hope that I might get something halfway decent there: the menu mentions a carnitas dish with pork that sounds surprisingly like carne adobada. If I can ever bring myself to eat there again, I'll try that. But I won't get my hopes up.