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I think its embarrassing that Americans squabble with one another one whether or not a restaurant serves authentic Mexican food.

I am delighted that people are concerned about getting the real deal–not some imposture food prepared by the kitchens of chain restaurants. Part of our insecurity comes from our fear that other countries judge American cuisine by our most famous ambassadors: Burger King and McDonalds. It’s natural that we would look across the street at Taco Bell and know that they’re not doing the Mexican thing right. To be clear, America is a better place because it’s citizens are concerned about authentic cuisine. Bravo.

Now the problem: we’re so damn obsessed with authentic cuisine that we can’t think straight. Consider our decades-long obsession with authentic Mexican food. This is of particular interest to me because I live in the Southwest, and everyone who comes into town wants to know where to get authentic Mexican food. Before I can even open my mouth, they usually go on to clarify what qualifies authentic Mexican food:

1. Avocados come from California, not Mexico.
2. Rice is an American addition to the burrito.
3. The burrito is an American addition to Mexican cuisine. (Well, which one is it? Did we add the rice or did we add the whole burrito?)
4. Mexicans don’t use tomatoes because they require too much water, which they don’t have a lot of.
5. Tex-Mex is not authentic Mexican food.

Each of these sounds like reasonable qualifiers for what constitutes authentic Mexican food. True or not, I’ve patched these together in an attempt to shore up my understanding of authentic Mexican food. Before we try to check Yes or No next to each sentence, let’s consider this whole conversation from the outside.

Mexico is a big country.

How naive do you have to be to assume that the entire country eats the same way? I mean in America, you have different cuisine in every region of the country. Isn’t it reasonable that that Mexico is the same way?

Mexico has thousands of miles of coastline, and I guarantee that the ocean-side cooks in Mexico have a different authentic food from the inlanders. There are more fisherman in Baja Mexico than there are cowboys, and you can’t try to convince me they eat the same thing. So this whole pursuit of authentic Mexican food is a waste of time. But let’s keep thinking about this.

Texas was part of Mexico.

When you consider the lands of Texas used to be a part of Mexico, Tex-Mex food should have as much of a stake in the claim to authentic Mexican food as anywhere south of the border. It’s arrogant to dismiss their 120 yr-old Tex-Mex food today as anything less than authentic.

Here’s another point to consider: what if authentic Mexican food sucks? Maybe the reason Tex-Mex food has stuck around for over a century because the authentic Mexican Indians were tired of the same old stuff. What if they were amped that the Spaniards brought in good stuff that made their blah dinner taste better? And there’s no convincing them to do it any other way. Those first Tex-Mexers fixed this new food for their kids. Those kids did it for their kids.

I know I’ve just lost people here. This sounds implausible to a lot of Americans because it’s fashionable nowadays to disown the ocean-hopping Europeans that settled/took over North America. It’s popular to think that everything they brought (religion, culture, gun powder) was nothing but trouble. I’ll let someone more knowledgeable than me pick up that debate–I’m here to talk about food. All I’m suggesting is that you have to respect Tex-Mex, the Spanish-Mexican fusion that they still love in South Texas today. It’s here for a reason, and it’s here to stay.

Who cares?

I guess I’ve gone off for the last 45 minutes about this whole issue because I’m tired of being caught in the crossfires of the Authenticity Debate. I’m tired of being judged by people who think they know more than me. As a white man, I always defer to my close Mexican friends, only to realize that they were confused too. The only differnce between us is that they just quit caring.

There are better things to do than to cause all of this needlessly complicated, racially-contentious drama over very simple food. There’s no use wasting time trying to decifer authentic ingredients. Shut up and eat your taco.

When my out-of-town friends ask me where to go for authentic Mexican, I spare them the debate and get right to it: you’re in Arizona and you want authentic Mexican food? Go to Filibertos. It might be a low-budget chain restaurant. Every Filibertos looks like it was built in a building that once sold burgers and fries. But their menu doesn’t explain their numbered “value meals.” They don’t have sales or specials, they don’t introduce new food. Their salsa bar is poorly lit and looks unappealing to me. But regardless of how formidable the restaurants may be, they are everywhere. Mexicans work there and Mexicans eat there. What can be more authentically Mexican than that?

For my money, I’d rather eat at the sanitized chains like Rubio’s or Baja Fresh, but I’ll never try to convince you it’s authentic Mexican. It just tastes better and that’s all I need.

After hiking almost 50 miles in Yosemite National Forest last week, I’ve learned to doubt all advice from hikers when you are out on the trail.

Some people are genuinely trying to help you, but they just don’t have their facts straight. They get confused about how far it is between here and there. Trails bend, wind, go up and down. You pass by 100s of rocks, trees, and it all becomes a blur. They get caught in conversation and can tuned-out a mile of the trail during a debate over authentic Mexican food.

There are other hikers who aren’t as innocent. They are high on themselves for mastering their mountain, and they are glad to advise wide-eyed novices on their way down from the summit. Although they speak from recent experience, they are more confident than they are reasonable. If you are hiking with a hot wife (as I did), the males always like boasting of their superior knowledge.  “It’s not that hard” really means, “It’s so steep you might fall over backwards, but I’d prefer that you get worn out and think I’m a legend because it wasn’t hard for me.”

Males Being Males

It’s not always easy trying to separate the two groups: those who try to pass onto you solid, wise guidance, or is those who want to be admired for their knowledge. Let’s be real here: males love authority. It’s in our DNA to take control, survey an enemy, or explore the unknown. (Incidentally, these can also lead us to death.) So even the most discrimination male will help the most pitiful fool find his way from A to B.

It’s also in our DNA to be the hero. If a helpless group of tourists asks for help at a busy intersection, males love to stand apart from our group and put them on their way. It’s a bizarre satisfaction I felt many time in New York City. I won’t deny it. It’s a fantastic feeling to turn back to my group and continue on our way. I don’t have to tell them I saved the day. My guy friends know it, they just wish they could’ve saved the day first.

This complex doesn’t just exist on city streets and mountain trails. It happens in almost every realm where males can take authority. What’s the best bar in town? The best local beer? The coolest car? Males will always, always have an answer for those three questions. This complex isn’t reserved just for local jock straps. Seemingly well-traveled men have given some of the worst advice. Hipsters from New York have sent me to some lame night clubs.

Lessons from Eddie Van Halen

The most glaring examples was from two summers ago when Candyce and I were in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We were on the sandy beach trying to figure out which direction to walk to get to our lunch spot. After turning up empty with folks who didn’t speak English, we found a rugged, roady-type American dude in his 40s. He pointed the way, but then told us we were making a mistake. (Dramatic!)

If we really wanted authentic Mexican food where the locals go, he knew of a sweet spot that was off the beaten path. He delivered his appraisal of the restaurant with confidence. How can you argue with that?

I should’ve doubted him because one, he was standing by himself on the beach. A lone wolf. Two, he was wearing iridescent wrap-around sunglasses, circa 1990. And three, he was also wearing a black golf shirt with Hard Rock Cancun embroidered on the chest pocket. This shirt brings up a lot of questions:

1. Why would you go to the Hard Rock Cafe while you were in Cancun?
2. Why would you buy a golf shirt to commemorate that experience?
3. Why wear said golf shirt on the beach of Cabo?
4. Did I mention it was a black shirt? …under the Mexican summer sun.

But I believed him because he had the deep but shaky voice who’d partied hard and knew a wild time. He looked like he could’ve been in a hair band that I loved when I was in elementary school. For all I know, I was actually talking to Eddie Van Halen. Eddie knows what the hell he’s talking about.

We went to that restaurant the next day, and it was the most outrageous tourist trap in all of Baja Mexico. To get in and out of the restaurant, you had to pass through a gift shop, shelves stocked like an airport gift shop. Before we even got a table, Candyce’s 10-year-old brother announced to the whole family: “This place is dumb.” But I figured there was something in the food that convinced this guy. Wrong! Not only was the food as predictable as a chain restaurant in suburban America, it was irrationally expensive. Prices that you would only expect misguided tourists to pay: $35 for an entree. I mean, they even charged for refills of tap water. Mexican tap water. The tap water that makes your butt explode.

Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let it Begin with Me

I understand that in the end, these are minor problems we inflict upon one another. If the worst thing that happened to me that day was ending up at an over-priced tourist trap, then I am very fortunate. I am just amused about how unreliable the advice is that I receive from other adults. And I don’t want to add to the misinformation out there. So I’m making a habit out of questioning whether or not I have my facts straight. I don’t want to give bad guidance and end up as a case study of stupidity on some other guy’s blog. Yes, beware of he who wields the pen.

We just got back from a 9-day trip to Yosemite National Forest and the Sequoia National Forest with the family.

From the moment you arrive at the park, every tourist is hammered with propaganda about bears. This is part of the appeal of traveling to Yosemite, of course, because we’re not predictable, lazy tourists, but brave souls that are venturing into the wild. Wherever there was a parking lot, there were signs that warned us to hide our food from the hungry hungry bears.

I thought the bear propaganda was excessive and tacky. But while standing in line at Camp Curry to register for the week, a 3-minute video looped on the televisions hanging from the ceiling: bears ripping off car doors, bears jumping into your car, bears dragging food out of your car. These were real bears with unlimited strength and shiny fur that bristled in under the light of the video camera at night. I got the point. No food in the cars. No food in the tent.

Bear Encounter 1

At about two in the morning on our first night in the park, I woke up to a grown man yelling “GET OUT OF HERE BEAR!” at the top of his lungs. I sprung out of bed and shook Dan to wake up. He and I rushed the screen door on the front of the tent. I lifted the flap and looked up and down the sidewalk that separated the rows of tents, barely visible in the dark of the night.

In between shouts from the bear-chaser, I heard shuffling of feet and popping of cots as other campers woke up to the commotion. But everyone remained silent, listening to see if the bear would come running through our stretch of tents. I could still hear his yells, except they went further and further away from the tents and into the forest. It was almost like a police siren fading as it disappears down the highway. I laid back down in bed and waited for an hour before I could go back to sleep.

Bear Encounter 2

On the third day in the park, Josh and I were riding our mountain bikes on a trail that passed by a campground. I was just cruising down the hill, listening to my gears click beneath me when Josh calmly said, “There’s a bear behind us.” My head spun back to see a young black bear trotting through the campground 100 yards away from the trail.

I cursed out of fear and we sped up and got out of there. I’ve never seen a black bear walk like that. It was just scooting along through the campground looking for a snack.

Bear Encounter 3

Near the end of our stay at Yosemite, we decided to join other campers around a fire in the forest for some smores. We hopped out of the SUV just after sunset and hit the trail for the short hike to the event. Even though there was plenty of light in the sky, the forest got dark with every step.

After 100 yards, it was as dark as midnight. We stood at a fork in the trail, and John and I disagreed which path would take us to the campfire circle. I knew that it was right, John insisted it was left because he could see the fire. The fire he saw was actually a light hanging on a post near a bathroom. It had that palish yellow-white light that hums. Campfires don’t hover 10 feet of the ground on a tree without branches.

John started walking left anyway. At this point, I knew things could only get worse and I should probably just join John. But what good would it be to follow him to the wrong place? Soon the darkness of the forest swallowed Dan and John and it was just our group walking right: Me, Rhonda, Josh, Matt, Carolyne, Lauryn, and Candyce. I could sense the girls getting nervous after a few minutes, so I comforted them by telling jokes and recalling the familiarity of the path that we were on. How could they not recognize this, we hiked it two days before? In a few seconds of silence between my jokes, Rhonda and Candyce snapped and said they got a bad feeling, that it was time to turn around.

I didn’t want to argue with the mother, so I nodded and said it was time to go back. My defeat was short lived, because seconds later, Carolyne screamed when a big black shadow walked across our path 15 feet ahead of us. Sh!t it was a bear.

I told them to stay close together, grabbed the whistle from Rhonda, and stepped forward blowin’ the whistle and throwing rocks. Candyce was right behind me yelling like a mad woman. The clan started praying out loud. Fifteen-year-old Josh let go of his mom and stooped to the ground to pick up an rock and chucked it towards where the black shadow disappeared into the trees.

Back at the trail head, Danny came charging out of the woods and began reprimanding us before he caught his breath. “Why were you guys making such a scene! Blowing that whistle like that? You were freaking out the campers down there!” I explained that we ran into a bear in the woods, he was jealous that he chose the left. They ended up next to a campground bathroom.

(For the record, I rode my bike on that same trail a day later, and we were less than 100 yards away from the campfire. But by that time, the smores were gone and so were the campers. They knew that they had to get out of the woods before the bears came out.)

This Sounds Familiar

Last summer we spent a night in San Antonio after a week at Mustang Island off the coast of Texas. We were walking in a slightly sketchy block between the riverwalk and our 5-star hotel, and Lauryn began freaking out, crying out of fear. This launched a big debate on the sidewalk about whether or not we were in a safe part of town. Yeah, it was dark and we were walking next to a boarded-up storefront. That might seem scarey for people who watch too much TV, but I refused to believe that that alone meant we’d get mugged. Fifty paces behind us was a tourist wonderland, and fifty paces forward was a plush hotel. I could see gleaming Mercedes pulling into the hotel’s valet entrance.

The next morning I come to find out that someone was stabbed outside a bar 20 feet from the sidewalk where we had our debate about safety on the streets of San Antonio. Now, my guess is that that dude got stabbed because he and knife-boy were both drunk and brawling inside the bar. I doubt he’d keep rolling down the street looking for someone else to stab, perhaps a family of 11, 4 of which were grown men. I dismissed Lauryn’s episode as coincidental, and I haven’t thought about it much sense.

Back in Yosemite, I doubt that black bear in the woods would’ve attacked us. I later learned that it’s rare that a black bear will ever attack a human. Grizzly bears, polar bears, Kodiak bears–they’ll mess you up. But black bears are less aggressive. So we weren’t facing any real danger, but I can’t dismiss the girls freaking out as just girls freaking out. They were right.

Bear Encounter 4

I’ll write about this later. I’m tired of writing.

In summary, here are other animals that may or may not have tried to eat me:

1. Bobcat – 10 feet away from me and Lauryn. Pretty scary.
2. Coyote – taking a dump beneath a tree where 5 crows heckled him.
3. Mule deer – don’t look like mules, bucks look cool.
4. Squirrels – the real entertainers of the forest, friend to all Asian photographers.

Candyce and I met Franky Bones at Radio Milano, LGO’s newest restaurant at the corner of 40th Street and Campbell in Arcadia. Frank is a 2nd generation Italian who was raised in Arizona. I hadn’t seen him in a while, so was a natural fit to invite him to join me and Candyce at LGO’s “new Italian” restaurant on its first week. I’ve enjoyed LGO’s other restaurants, and was anxious to see what they came up with.

If this were a new restaurant in another part of town by a different restaurateur, I wouldn’t be so critical. But LGO has momentum, so you expect creativity, especially when it comes time to branding the restaurant. Having said that…

The atmosphere disappointed me. It’s one thing to keep a visual theme in all of your restaurants, but it’s another thing to re-use old ideas. The interior is all-too-familiar: lots of hard surfaces, concrete floors, block walls. These surfaces might be hip, but it makes the dining area too loud. Even with a full spread of fabric curtains stretching across the back wall, the voices of the room roared too loud for good conversation.

The only thing that sets this restaurant’s interior apart from the gang that is LGO is the ceiling and the seating. They inherited the unique architecture from the previous owners, and they played up the low, wood arched ceilings from wall to wall. The chairs and tables were wood laminate held up by thin, spidery legs. When compared to the volume of the room and the scale of the arched ceiling, the furniture combined for the busyness of a high school cafeteria.*

There were a couple details that did please me. The front windows look like they’ll swing right open in nice weather, a detail worth carrying over from their other restaurants. The lower portion of the windows is a wide concrete shelf that will serve as a bench for folks inside and outside. It’s a clever way provoke the social life through the restaurant walls. Like Chelsea’s Kitchen, waiting for a table might be as fun as having a table.

The other details I like were at the back of the restaurant. Behind the wide curtain on the back wall were glass doors that will most likely open to the narrow strip of courtyard. The young trees planted in an orderly row will give some organic relief to the industrial vibe inside. If they’re smart, they’ll make friends with their neighbors whose back wall defines the far edge of the courtyard. A whimsical Italian mural could set the tone for the whole restaurant. (And why not? The wall is shielded from the harshest desert sun.)

The food? For the record, the restaurant is a “new Italian” concept. Aside from the fashion capitol the restaurant was named after (Milan), there wasn’t much on the menu that spoke Italian. I didn’t expect numbered pasta dishes, but I expected to read through creative interpretations of Italian classics.

We started with the vegetable plate. It was fresh and tasty, but it was hard to figure out how you can charge $11 for a handful of vegetables with two thin slices of fresh mozzarella. Listen, if you are a “new Italian” restaurant and you are going to anchor a dish with an Italian staple, then make sure to slice like that mozzarella like the hungry Italians do. And I am talking about a handful of vegetables. I could’ve scooped them off the plate and put them in my pants pocket.

Perhaps the waitress was too scared to tell us the truth, but we were under the impression that we got real entrees with descent proportions. The menu seemed to be divided into appetizers and entrees. Come serving time, we were surprised to see we bought appetizers that were priced like entrees. The confusion grew…so this is a new-Italian tapas restaurant?

I understand the concept of a tapas. You get lots of little servings and you share them with friends. You explore the menu and discover different flavors. But that only works when you have dozens of options at reasonable prices. I’ve been to several tapas restaurants and enjoyed every part of the dining experience. But Radio Milano’s menu was short, and every item was stickered between $10 to over $14. It’ll take five orders for a couple on a date to feel full, and all of a sudden you’re inching towards $100 with tax and tip. Where’s the fun in that? For less money than that, you can have the timeless $10,000,000 atmosphere of Sassi up in Pinnacle Peak.

Anyway, I was served my main course. I ordered the meatloaf because I like to see how chefs spin a comfort food classic. It was tasty and moist, but it was just a fraction larger than a biscotti I ate that morning with my espresso. If you can make it bigger and serve it to me at Chelsea’s Kitchen, I’d order it again. Candyce and I didn’t bother ordering anymore when we realized the cost of the night had already run over $50.

After dinner, Candyce and I walked to the car and we both admitted to still being hungry. We flirted with the idea of going to LGO Grocery across the street to buy a salads or a couple sandwiches to go. If our night had ended there, our evening would’ve been a big let down. But we swung by Safeway and got a big massive sub sandwich from then sat by Tempe Town Lake under the night sky. It was the perfect night, almost a little too cool with the breezes coming off the lake. (Could this really be June in Phoenix?) (Could that’ve really been LGO’s newest restaurant?)

*Note 04/07/09: I peaked in the window of Radio Milano and saw that they re-ordered the tables and chairs so that it doesn’t look so cluttered.