It’s kind of cool, and kind of funny. Everyone seems to have a blog now. The one thing this blog doesn’t have yet is a way for people reading my blog to respond. I hope to have that someday when the thing really catches on. In last weeks New York Times food section, Jeffrey Chodorow wrote a letter in the form of a full page ad (reports of the cost of that ad varied from $25,000 to $84,000) in which he rebuts the review of his newest restaurant in Manhattan, The Kobe Club. The Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, gave the Kobe Club no stars, and a rating of Satisfactory. Chodorow was upset about the review, and the reappearance in it of the ghost of Rocco DiSpirito from which he can’t seem to escape. However it did always seem to me that Chodorow manufactured all the occurrences on the infamous TV show “The Restaurant” to get publicity for himself. And a full page ad in the Times to soothe an ego after a negative review seems like the ultimate publicity hounds trick. Most of us do not have the means to go to such extreme ways of rebuttal. And there is more than one person responding on his blog who says he should have licked his wounds in private and given the money spent on the ad to the poor. I can’t disagree with that. He brings up a good and very debatable point; that Frank Bruni has credentials as a journalist but not as a food writer. The previous Times reviewer also admittedly had no formal culinary training. Debaters say restaurant critics don’t necessarily need a culinary degree to review a restaurant, and in fact the public prefers to read a review written by a real person, with the same expectations as any customer. It’s all good food for thought. I don’t know how you can access the actual ad if you didn’t see it. I am sure someone has reproduced it and a google search would turn it up quickly. But if you want to read J. Chodorow’s blog, which is some very entertaining reading for a foodie, make yourself a nice pot of coffee and go here and enjoy. You will be there for a while, just a warning.

Sorry for the long delay in starting this blog. I have actually written tons of stuff for future blogs but wanted to start it out simpler than some of that writing turned out. Right now I think it’s a good idea to start simple. My journey to actually producing Mexican food is a long and winding road. I lived in Texas for about 10 years where there is an abundance of great Mexican food, but with a decided Tex Mex influence. Tex Mex actually is real Mexican food, originally prepared by Mexicans who had settled in Texas and who had to use ingredients available to them instead of the traditional produce they were accustomed to in their Motherland. They found they could sell their food at small cooking stands on the streets of  San Antonio and other places; and people found that they loved this food. It’s not really clear when or where the first Mexican restaurant started, but it was in Texas, probably in San Antonio on the riverwalk, but maybe in Ft. Worth and it was called The Original Mexican Restaurant. The fact is, I loved the Mexican food I found in Texas, the Tex Mex food was wonderful beyond belief, and nothing up here even comes close. It’s not fancy, it’s humble, it’s kitschy in some ways, it’s always fun to go out for, it’s cheap and it’s good. There are exceptions to the rule, and one of my favorite restaurants in the world is Fonda San Miguel in Austin, which serves “authentic” Mexican food, and was the first Mexican restaurant in the US to receive the approval of Diana Kennedy, who is best described as the Jula Child of Mexican cuisine. I tried to model the food here after the food at San Miguel’s, rather than try to do another “Tex Mex” place in the tri state area. Doing that was not easy. I had ideas from the start that certain things were never going to be compromised. One of these is of course our masa which is processed and ground in house. Sauces were all going to be made the way families in Mexico have made them for generations. No cans, no frozen stuff, just fresh good raw ingredients. There is nothing you can’t obtain here today if you want to cook as they do in Mexico. The daunting thing to most American cooks is that Mexican food is complex, and it is very, very labor intensive. Dried chile peppers need to be stemmed, seeded, toasted, reconstituted and ground into pastes and sauces. Our mole Poblano preparation starts 2 days before the finished product is done. Besides the chiles, nuts and seeds need to be assembled, weighed, toasted and ground. Spices in precise amounts need to be ground. Fruits, herbs, and yes a small amount of chocolate are all assembled after their processing and finally added to the pot in stages to be cooked together. Stirring a pot of mole is not for the faint of heart. It takes muscle and perseverance. There is no timer on to say it’s done. You just have to know. I think the work that goes into the food makes it so much more precious and valued. We have lost a lot of that in this country, where home cooking for most of us now is heating things up. Thank goodness those of us who love Mexican food, or Tex Mex, have so many great choices in restaurants where the work is already done. The ones who go to the lengths that we do are scarce but well worth seeking out.