“Fast Food” Mexican Style

posted from Guadalajara

When I was back visiting Omaha in September I spent many enjoyable times eating out with family and friends. One evening I remarked to my Mom”let’s just go someplace easy”. Someplace you can just stop, get your food, have it be great, no hassle with waiting for service or overwhelmed by menu choices and portions – just easy. When I say “Fast Food” Mexican Style I am not talking about McDonalds, KFC or Burger Rey of which there are plenty here in Guadalajara, but what I am talking about are the street vendors. Living in Mexico I have come to enjoy the food and variety offered by what I used to think of as sketchy street vendors. They are fast, the food is great and usually pretty good for you since it’s not that removed from its natural state.

Around 7pm a few nights back there was of course no food of any consequence in the apartment. So we walked outside and hit the streets. My Godparents should they ever visit will be happy to know that there is a McDonalds just three blocks from the apartment. They are huge fans of McDonalds starting everyday there and knowing where every “lovely” McDonalds is located along their travels in the States and Canada. But we didn’t go to McDonalds; in fact I haven’t had that type of fast food for almost a year now. That night we found just a couple of blocks away from the apartment a guy selling tacos – and they were great !!! After awhile you learn that it is not so much the meat that’s in the taco but the salsas that the vendor prepares that sets them apart. Unlike what we are used to with Pace Picante in the States which is tomato based most salsas here are pepper based. Now that doesn’t mean they are 5 alarm hot it just means they have flavor. As we are standing there that night eating our dinner with the traffic whizzing by, not 20 feet away the next taco stand is setting up for the night’s business. Nothing fancy but it was filling, it was easy and it was cheap.

When in Guadalajara many nights on the way home we end up at DOGOS just off the Minerva roundabout. I have never ever been a fan of hot dogs but I have to tell you these are addictive. You get two skinny dogs on a Wonder bun but they are topped with onions, mustard, pickle relish, tomatoes and cream. Yes, cream – who would have thought. They are a mess to eat but like I said they are addictive and the place is always hopping.

Another place in Guadalajara I like to frequent is the “Happy Fish” (the name is in English) which takes up a couple of storefronts and has a prep kitchen on the second floor but they still serve you out on the sidewalk. Every time I’ve been there the “Happy Fish” is busy serving up their fish and shrimp tacos. It was here after trying to order a bottle of water that I ended up having freshly made rice milk for the first time – love it. But it’s the condiment station that really rocks with it’s variety of salsas, peppered onions, cole slaws, cucumber slices, shredded cabbage and more. You order two tacos, 1 fish, 1 shrimp and it’s like getting a free salad bar. You know again it’s fast, it’s easy, it’s great food and it’s so inexpensive.

Beware though; all tacos are not the same. It is a good idea to ask how large they are when ordering. Recently while passing through Tepatitlan the tortillas were maybe 3 inches in diameter with a teaspoon of filling while two days later in Aguascalientes the tortilla for the quesadilla was a good 6 to 7 inches and just packed full. Both places were selling for basically the same price.

The first time I truly embraced food from a street vendor was in Santa Rita. The family I am with has a 96 year old friend and one Sunday we took her back to visit her hometown of Santa Rita, a place she hadn’t been to for over sixty years.
While she was visiting with the daughters of a friend who had passed on we walked to the town square. It was there I ate roasted potatoes with chopped up hot dog and chili sauce out of a baggie and couldn’t get enough. Then there was the shredded vegetable and fruit parfait. Shredded beets, mango, zucchini and cucumber with chili powder sprinkled on top. The fruit and veggies were fresh and flavorful but the juice they made with the chili powder was just as tasty. That trip to Santa Rita changed my whole way of thinking about “street food” and led me to be more adventurous and appreciative.

Vendors come in all varieties and it seems you can find almost anything to eat. The part I really like is that the food is all fresh. Outside the apartment in Guadalajara there is a vendor that sets up shop every afternoon selling fruit parfaits with chunked fruit. Everywhere you go there is an ice cream vendor and the ice cream is always homemade. On a recent visit to Talaquepaque we had to search out the ice cream store after seeing a family walk by with their cones. Now it was a Saturday afternoon and it was time for a michelada (red beer with lime and salsa) but we opted for ice cream instead, that’s how inviting it looked. Anyway while they were dishing up our cones we were watching the guy behind the counter mixing up the ice cream by hand with a large paddle. There are the fried banana vendors and the potato chip vendors. Many times while visiting the paint store we would see the chip vendor leaving for the day pushing his cart loaded with fresh homemade chips out onto the street to start selling.
Shaved ice is another option with a wide variety of fresh toppings like pecan, mango, raspberry, kiwi, coffee an eggnog like concoction and at least a dozen total.

On the plazas of Guadalajara Centro there are the vendors that sell steamed veggies where you can get cups or plates of steamed corn, broccoli, beets and cactus. You can either get a variety or tell them what you want like more corn and less beets. Then its topped with crumbled cheese and of course salsa. On a chilly evening it’s a treat to eat the warm veggies and then slurp down the juices.

Then of course there is chicharon – which I will surely never, ever be a fan of. Chicharon comes in two basic forms from what I can tell. Fried with the texture of styrofoam or pickled with the texture of slimy rubber. It seems that everyone I meet loves their chicharon and eats it smothered with tomatoes, onions and of course slasa. I did sample the chicharon ice cream in Dolores Hidalgo thinking that it would have the flavor but not the texture – the face I made and the gagging that followed had everyone laughing for days. The flavor is not so bad it’s the texture that gets to me and the ice cream had actual chicharon ground up in it. And in case you didn’t know chicharon is pig skin. Mmmmmm.

Ears of corn roasted or steamed and then brushed with cream and sprinkled with chili powder – WOW. At the height of the corn season there was a truck that would cruise around San Diego de Alejandria with loud speakers mounted to the roof announcing he had elote for sale. Selling fresh steamed corn out of the back of his truck this guy was driving around town for weeks.

Now the neatest vendor set up I just encountered last weekend while writing this story – the sweet potato man. He pushes a cart with a wood fire oven burning, roasting the sweet potatoes in their own natural sugars till they are soft and golden brown, slightly crisped from the oven. What makes the whole thing so cool is that when the steam builds up enough in the oven the exhaust chimney on the cart will go off like a train whistle. This is how the sweet potato man announces that he is on your street corner.

Now I spent my working life dealing with food, owning restaurants, a wholesale bakery, catering service and completing my career in a hospital food service. Hospital foodservice is a place where sanitation standards are greatly enforced because like a wise man once told me – these people are already sick, you don’t want to be responsible for making them worse. There are a lot of rules for safe food handling in the States but what I see with all these vendors is that they, with their buckets of clean water just use common sense and do what’s right. I once had this crazy business partner and one night he found a container of moldy mushrooms on the cooks’ line. At which point he started to pull everything from the coolers throwing the contents on the floor. At the end of his tirade he was sitting on the floor crying that we were going to poison our guests. Now no one in their right mind would have served those mushrooms and I relate this story to the street vendors and how they do what’s best to keep their business alive. In all my travels to Mexico I have only had food poisoning once and that was after eating in a restaurant, and we decided that it was from the manufactured, bottled salsa. There were three of us eating that day, we all had the same thing to eat, and each of us was sick and was sick to the amount of salsa we had used.

“Fast Food” isn’t limited to the streets though, for more of a restaurant, sit down service type atmosphere in Guadalajara there is Karne Girbaldi. Karne Girbaldi is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as having the fastest service in the world. And seriously within five minutes of sitting down we had our entrees before us. As we approached our table the waiters were already converging with tortilla chips and a refried bean dip that you can’t stop eating. Its refried beans, hominy, chili’s and it’s all cooked up with bacon grease – what could be better. You know it might have taken us longer, just by a second, to get our drinks than it did our food.

So be adventurous, there is a lot of good food out there to be enjoyed.