The Mexican cravings is not located at the usual place where you find highly rated restaurants. You don't expect a highly rated restaurant at the end of a two lane road, so narrow that you had to wait to let a cyclist go, so empty that you could slow down to watch a plane in landing motion to the nearby cargo airport. But then you expect a quaint location like this if the restaurant is not a restaurant , but a food joint set up in the living room of a pink house.
A six car parking lot, a five table dining room, and a modest kitchen with young kitchen staff doubled up as cashiers is all you see when you open into the small food joint. Once you sit down at one of the corner table, you notice ; the walls are light pink, tv is playing Spanish soap operas full of beautiful women crying and handsome men drinking, an unusual, small, indescribable painting on the wall, a larger , almost life size painting off an early nineteenth century cafe; all in an effort to accentuate the artsy uniqueness of the restaurant. I really didn't care about the decor, it was all about food, good food wins ambience hands down. The menu - posted above the cashier counter- was not in Spanish, but deciding what to order is as hard as it gets if you are unfamiliar with Mexican food, which I'm guilty of.
All sorts of questions popped in my head; what is the difference between sopes and tacos? Will it end up like the colorful, tasteless fried rice from the chinese-japanese take away?
I ordered a chicken sope, and waited at the two person table with my roommate. Faded rain-coat like sheet for table cloth created a peculiar ambience to the dining space, so did the motley crowd assembled in the dining room on that evening. Their reactions gave no indication of what was to come, they were deeply engrossed in either the food or the conversation. I wished it was the former, and I still didn't know anything about sope?
Here is a link to the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sope
For those lazy people, here is a brief:
A sope is a traditional Mexican dish.The base is made from a circle of fried masa of ground maize soaked in lime with pinched sides. This is then topped with refried black beans and crumbled cheese, lettuce, onions, red or green sauce (salsa, made with chiles or tomatillos respectively), and acidified cream. Sometimes other ingredients (mostly meat) are also added to create different tastes and styles of sopes. Sopes are roughly the size of a fist.
Thankfully, my apprehensions were proven wrong with the first bite; the chicken couldn't be any better, the avocado and lettuce made up for the healthy greenery, and a dash of habanero made my tongue sweat like a dog on a summer day, and I liked it. I thought about the times I had to eat bland chicken, so utterly tasteless that I could have chewed on a used chewing gum instead. So why did you buy that bland chicken, you might ask, what if I say the other options were dried up bread and stale saltless french fries?
As they say, it is the worst in everyday life that allows us to appreciate the good things that come our way once in a while. How liberating is knowing that your next bite would be as good as the last one? It is like eating a good Sope.
