My dining companion, Jay Francis, is married to a Mexican woman and has just returned from a family wedding in Mexico City. I ask Jay to read the menu and tell me which dishes he would consider authentically Mexican. The first two items on the appetizer menu, seviche Costeño and ostiones diabla (oysters au gratin), pass Jay's authenticity test. The remaining six appetizers -- crab cakes, a spinach artichoke dip, fried calamari, queso fundido with flour tortillas, nachos, and shrimp stuffed with cream cheese -- do not.
The tacos, enchiladas, soups and salads are all Mexican enough (with a few exceptions). There are three purely Tex-Mex entrées: fajitas de camarón, fajitas de pollo and fajita prime sliced. But we puzzle over some of the others: huachinango Pontchartrain with brown butter sauce and lump crab meat? Pollo Cuernavaca, "chicken breast topped with artichoke hearts in a mustard pepper sauce"? Filete forest, "mesquite grilled prime tenderloin smothered in a pepper mustard garlic wine sauce"? Is this Lou-Mex or French-Mex?
If you have eaten in an upscale restaurant in Mexico City, you know what's happening here. This is exactly the kind of Europeanized food that elite Mexicans favor. For diners in Mexico City, authenticity is hardly a concern, but in Texas, this kind of European-style Mexican food is simply ludicrous. Who wants to go to a Mexican restaurant and eat a bad imitation of French food?
Let's give the place a chance, Jay suggests. So we order the two most Mexican-sounding dishes we can find. I get the huachinango Azteca, a red snapper fillet with cuitlachoche (the Mexican gourmet corn fungus), and Jay gets carne asada tampiquena. The snapper is a little dry, and the cuitlachoche is mixed with artichoke hearts. I'm not sure if artichoke hearts are an authentic Mexican ingredient, but the dish is so boring, I don't really care. Jay's dinner, on the other hand, is very interesting, and I help myself to a "little taste."
"There was a restaurant in Mexico City in the 1930s called Club Tampico," Jay tells me. "It was like the Brown Derby of Mexico City. The owner was from Tampico, and he served this dish, carne asada tampiquena. It became famous all over Mexico." On Jay's plate, which is now sitting in front of me, there is a grilled steak, an enchilada with a little chile sauce, rice and refried beans. The steak is tender and juicy, and the enchilada and chile sauce make a perfect complement. It is a robust, if somewhat familiar, combination. "My theory is that carne asada tampiquena worked its way up to Texas in the 1930s, where it became known in Tex-Mex restaurants as the combination dinner," says Jay.
According to scholars of Mexican-American studies, Houston's "Immigrant Era" ended in the 1930s. But in some American cities, the "Immigrant Era" is just beginning. That's why, right now, the most authentic Mexican food in the United States is probably in Chicago. There are more than a million Mexicans in Chicago, more than in Houston or San Antonio, and most of them are newly arrived. The Mexican restaurants I have visited in Chicago's Pilsen district are unconsciously authentic; the owners serve the same stewed goat and pork in chile sauce as they did in Mexico, simply because they have no other frame of reference. Rick Bayless, the chef and owner of Frontera Grill in Chicago and probably America's foremost authority on Mexican food, discussed the phenomenon with me one day over lunch.
"When somebody from Mexico moves to Texas or California, the Chicano community is there to teach them how things are done," says Bayless. "But that doesn't happen in Chicago. The Mexicans here are almost all first-generation, and they still cook the way they did in Mexico. There's nobody here to show them what Americanized Mexican food is supposed to be like."
In Houston, newly arrived immigrants play a different role.
At Matamoros Meat Market No. 4 on Washington Avenue, I stand before a glass case filled with glistening pieces of roasted buche (pork stomach), deep-fried chicharrones (crunchy fat) and several choices of stewed meats in long trays. There is a sign that says, "barbacoa $5.50, barbacoa de cachete $5.99." I know that Tejano barbacoa is made from a long-cooked cow's head, but I ask the guy in front of me what "cachete" means. He says it means cheek meat.
We strike up a conversation. His name is Marcello Martinez, and he says he works in an office off Highway 290. He has driven all the way to Matamoros Meat Market to buy his lunch. "It's that good," he says with a smile. Today he is ordering the pork and green chile stew. "It's kind of like pozole, but with potatoes," he says. "And it's very spicy." I ask him what are the brown things that look like prunes in the carne deshebrada (shredded beef brisket). "They are big pieces of chipotle peppers," he says. "And they are unbelievably hot." Some restaurants offer things like barbacoa and carnitas on the weekends, but at Matamoros, you can buy them every day, which makes the place a favorite among local Mexican-Americans, and especially among recent immigrants from Mexico.
