Why I Rarely Eat in Restaurants in Mexico (Neither Do My Mexican Friends)
One Saturday night in Mexico I’d invited a friend over for dinner and a movie. I’d shaved my time too close to cook but fortunately, my place happened to be next door to the city’s most popular restaurant chain.
Spaghetti Bolognaise, which I love, featured on the menu so ordered for two. Tucking in front of a nature program I’d raved about, the spaghetti was delicious at first, with a flavor I didn’t recognize, and rich. Then suddenly too rich, reminding me immediately of another ingredient used in Mexico to give menudo or pozole their authentic flavor - pig’s head.
Probably all cultures eat things a foreigner might find disgusting. In my cookbook I talk about my Vietnamese friend who eats the whole fish, brains, eyeballs and all, leaving nothing but the tail. The Chinese will look at any plant or animal part and their first thought is how it might taste and how to cook it. They waste nothing and I commend them for it. Mexico, God love her, is one of those countries.
Being a 3,000-+year old culture, typical Mexican dishes have had a lot of time to evolve. Like in Spain, each region has evolved its own versions of the same dish. In Mexico, sopes, tamales, tacos and practically every other traditional dish may be wildly different in Puerto Vallarta from what you first tried in Mérida.
There’s enormous flexibility in what a chef can put in a dish. If you study recipes of the most famous Mexican cuisine, you'll usually see the terms, “you also might find….” or “sometimes xxx is included.” They never let you pin them down. That’s wonderful news for the culinary adventurer, not so for gustatory Chicken Littles (like me).
Go into any Mexican market and you’ll find all parts on display, meaning people are cooking with them. Many are cheap so likely restaurants are cooking with them too, adding what I’ve heard termed as “that special flavor.” Not that you should flee from exotic offerings. They might be delicious. They might be healthy. Just understand they might also be chicken feet. If you can follow the advice of Anthony Bordain (who said “Good food is about risk”) that shouldn’t worry you.
Unfamiliarity with the language plays a part. Most people assume escabeche to mean fish. It doesn’t refer to fish. It means marinade. If you’re from California, you probably think a machaca burrito means beef because every machaca burrito you’ve ever ordered from a drive through (likely hung-over) was shredded beef. Actually, machaca refers to the preparation (drying the meat), and can be fish, pork or even turtle.
I’ve found the average Mexican generally less on board with restaurant adventures as well. My friend Estela, the healthiest eater I know and a knowledgeable native cook, almost never eats in restaurants or buys prepared foods, telling me, “You have no idea what they're going to put in it”. (Actually she said, “no tienes ni idea….”). Only the expats I know eat out a lot.
From my first blogs, I’ve always written that if you see a Mexican doing or not doing something that seems odd to you, there’s a damn good reason for it. Mexicans tend to be well-wired into the reality that surrounds them. They exercise little ambivalence, more caution in daily operations and have lower expectations of strangers, including those who want to feed them.
Every trip I take to the U.S. I spend the first few days gaping in wonder at the variety of healthy prepared foods in the Publix, Whole Foods, Elwood Thompsons and Fresh Market grocery store cases in Richmond, Virginia. Conversely, I’ve found few prepared in Mexican grocery stores that I can clearly identify as healthy, and those only because they clearly were nothing more than chunks of lean meat in a sauce.
This is not to say Mexico doesn’t have excellent food! I’m not suggesting that you never leave the Reservation and a few days of indulgence on a vacation never hurt anyone. Certain Mexican dishes are easy to figure out. But in the long term, the only way to control your diet anywhere is to know what you’re eating.
To keep a varied diet in Mexico, one that includes enough protein, fruits and vegetables, you’ll need to cook. Fortunately, the basics for a healthy diet by traditional standards are all available. You just have to learn how to use what’s available in a variety of ways.
The easiest ways I’ve found to do keep a balance is with salads, soups (which allow you to load up vegetables in a healthy broth) and pasta-vegetable casseroles with a low pasta to vegetable ratio (these have the side advantage of reheating well). Mexico offers lovely fruit making smoothies a quick option.
Like most tourists, before I moved to Mazatlán, I hadn’t given a single thought to feeding myself. Once there, every day turned into a dietary struggle. For a variety of reasons, healthy meals took far more time to plan than I cared to invest.
Finally, I decided to develop a large slate of versatile recipes that would ensure that all the healthy ingredients were consistently worked into the menu with the maximum of flavor for the least effort. That turned into a cookbook, The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico.
If you’re going to Mexico for an extended enough period to care about your diet, you should take a look at it. After 7 years, I still use it almost every day.
About the Author:
Kerry Baker is author of three books. Her second book, If Only I Had a Place is an insider’s guide (way in) to renting well in Mexico in a way that will set you up for the best possible expat life.
The third book is The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, time, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico is her most recent book. The most entertaining instruction manual you will ever find on Mexico. Most recently she released The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico, a cookbook for travelers, expats and snowbirds.