The culinary lies I tell myself

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My wife and I live in Portland, Oregon. It rains once a year in Portland. That once-a-year rain lasts from mid-November until the first of April. In January, to protect our sanity, we go to Mexico.

It is warm in Mexico.

When we first went to Mexico, we wanted to see the sights, experience the culture, and embrace adventure. We did that — took pictures, posted to Facebook, bought a hat — and got it out of our system. After a couple of trips, we’d had enough of that. These days we find a nice place in Mexico to sit in the sun reading novels until it is nap time.

I’m a foodie. I spend far more time thinking about food than is technically legal, so when I went to Mexico, I wanted to try everything culinary. Mexican restaurants. Mexican street food. Mexican anything having to do with food. I ate everywhere. I took a Mexican cooking class, and when I wasn’t eating Mexican food in a restaurant or on the street, I was cooking it in our apartment. I wanted the authentic Mexican food experience, and I was willing to suffer through bland and poorly prepared food to get it.

This is because I am a moron.

Mexicans don’t eat like that. Only obsessed foodie tourists — like me.

I noticed when I was in Mexico City a couple of years ago that most of the restaurants close to where I stayed were “ethnic” restaurants. By that I mean they did not serve Mexican food. I was legitimately disappointed. Instead of authentic Mexican cuisine, the restaurateurs wanted to sell me hamburgers, pizza, kung pao chicken, and sushi. And it wasn’t just me. Those hamburger, pizza, and sushi places were filled with Mexicans gobbling it up.

If I’d been paying attention, I might have noticed that Mexico City, like Mazatlán — where I am now — is an international city. If anything, even more international than Portland. The people of Mexico, like people in Portland and probably everywhere else, like tacos, hamburgers, kung pao chicken, pizza, and sushi.

And whether it’s tacos or sushi, authentic or not, it is not always good.

There are a few more hamburger joints near my home in Portland than there are near my place here in Mazatlán, and there are a few more taco places close to my place here in Mazatlán than near my home in Portland. But not many. Mexican food is ubiquitous in Portland (because it is good), and here in Mazatlán, where it is native, the natives don’t want to eat it all the time. Sometimes they want a good burger.

So I find myself sitting at a sushi restaurant in Mexico, feeling guilty that by eating sushi I am wasting an opportunity to eat authentic Mexican food. Predictably, the sushi is not all that great — at least not when compared to the real authentic sushi I can get back home at the strip mall next to Walmart near my house.

My faulty reasoning becomes clear, and my head explodes.

The thing I would not admit was that Mexican food in Mexico is not always good. Just like in the United States, the food can be authentic and still be crap. Food made by underpaid, poorly trained cooks using cheap ingredients is going to be bad, no matter where it is made and how authentic it is.

So here’s my new deal.

I can eat Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and American food — or cook it — no matter where I am. Sometimes it will be good and sometimes it won’t. There may be “authentic” when it comes to certain dishes, but I no longer care. I will eat what I want and what tastes good.

So I’m going to put down my novel and put on a shirt so my wife and I can go to a place I know in Mazatlán where they prepare a perfect medium-rare Argentinian vacio steak served over a base of puréed cauliflower with arugula and grilled onion. I do not know where the dish came from, whether it is authentic, or what nationality the chef is.

I only know that it’s delicious.

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Eating Sushi in Mexico