I don't speak Spanish, but that translates to 'Mexican food in New York City is bad'.
So very bad. Terrible with a capital Awful, bad.
I’m not going to pretend that’s super important. Considering it's been years since I had a job that paid me enough so that I could afford to eat in restaurants, it doesn't affect me that much. But it's baffling. And a little embarrassing.
Like most native New Yorkers, especially those of us old enough to recall the glory days of the '70's and '80's, I feel a great sense of pride in my city. It is a love/ hate thing. Most of us endure a positively pitifully low quality of life in order to live here. We get a lot back for that though.
New York is everything. It's alive. You can feel it. You leave you apartment and it's palpable, all there waiting for you, right in your face.
Despite being so collectively devoid of a sense of historical pride that we allow our precious irreplaceable structures to be torn down without protest, there remains stunning remnants of Manhattan from centuries past.
And where else in the country could a non-driver such as myself, walk everywhere they need to go, get everything they need to get and see a thousand different things every single day? No where.
I'm not saying I plan on living here forever, but it is the most extraordinarily horrible-wonderful place.
In many ways, we have the best culture and the best food our nation has to offer. Being a proud sybarite, food is a big deal for me. I love to cook. I love to eat. I've mastered both.
I'm a self-taught chef, but there are times I'd swear my kick-ass culinary skills are more in my blood, than learned. NYC is a multicultural bonanza. Each of my grandparents were a different nationality. I wonder if that has something to do with why I'm especially partial to ethnic food.
I don't recall any Mexican restaurants when I was a kid. There were tons of other ethnic eateries, - French, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern, Polish, Chinese, Japanese. But the first time I had Mexican food was in an East Village Mexican restaurant in 1984.
It was o.k. Seeing as my favorite item quickly became their spinach fetticini with white clam sauce, and I had to stop patronizing the place once I became a vegetarian because there wasn't another good dish on the menu; I think that says it all. I figured Mexican food just wasn’t my thing.
Then I went to San Francisco in 1986. Mexican food in San Francisco is divine. There are Mexican places everywhere. They range from good to "I've died and gone to heaven".
I also went to Los Angeles for the first time that year, and if anything Mexican food in LA is even more amazing than in SF.
Over the last 2 decades I've eaten in many different Mexican places in SF and LA. They were all fantastic. And cheap. I chalked it up to geography. If New York were closer to Mexico the food would be better?
Several Mexican spots popped up in Manhattan in the '80's and '90's. There was one that was kind of, sort of, pretty good, -ish. The others, despite long wait times and significantly higher prices than anywhere in SF or LA, were bad. B-A-D.
At that point I wondered, why after all these years are Mexican restaurants in New York City still so terrible?
I know there a million higher priorities, but aren’t Mexican-Americans pissed off their cuisine is so poorly represented in NY? I know I’d be. As a long time vegetarian, bad vegan fare evokes a swell of disappointed/ annoyed/ 'how dare they pass this off as vegan' feelings in me.
I've worked in several restaurants in NY. Regardless of the type of food they served, they all had predominantly Mexican kitchen staffs. Cajun food, Italian food, Vegetarian food ... they all had Mexican cooks. So it's not as if Mexican cooks lose their food-mojo when they move to a colder climate. If Mexican-American chefs in NY can conjure up great non-Mexican food, why can’t they make great Mexican food?
Compared to complex, fancy kitchenware-dependent cuisine, Mexican food is relatively simple to make. Fresh ingredients and adept recipes are the core.
My theory is that none of NYC's Mexican establishments are owned by Mexican-Americans. Non-Mexicans must be penning these taste-bud travesties thinking New Yorkers are too unwitting to know the difference.
Regardless, I have no idea why we tolerate the bad food. I can't understand how these palate insulting restaurants manage to stay in business for more than a month.
The single best Mexican food I've ever in my life was a few years ago in Montreal, dispelling my 'it's geographical' hypothesis. It was a small, family owned place called Taqueria Mexicaine. The food was absolutely party-in-my-mouth scrumptious. It sounds silly, but I could taste that it was made by someone who loved the food, who loved to cook, and who knew their recipe was perfected.
I'd like to invite skilled Mexican-American cooks and restaurateurs to relocate to NYC and save us from our humiliating Mexican restaurant misery. I have a strong feeling the line for a table will be out the door.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Plain Sight Misogyny?
March 8th is International Women's Day. I haven’t always been a big proponent of such 'celebrations'. My feeling was “So and So Day” was often commerce-based. And I really don’t like being bombarded with the message that I need to buy more stuff.
However some designated days are motivated to celebrate accomplishments, as well as to spotlight the hardships of certain groups, in the hope of ushering in change.
It seemed fitting to me that the Huffington Post posted an article about one of the darkest, cruelest, least talked about hardship that women in the 3rd World nations face, referred to as female genital mutilation.
It’s a hideous secret assault where girls, usually between the ages of 6 and 14 are forcibly taken and held down as their clitoris and often part or all of their labia, are hacked off. It's labeled as a 'Rite of Passage', yet afterwards they’re threatened not to warn or inform other girls of their impending fate.
The practice is culturally condoned in impoverished patriarchal societies where women exist without civil rights and few if any politicians speak out against it, despite it being universally condemned by the UN's World Health Organization as a practice having “no health benefits and harms girls and women in many ways" .... "causes severe pain and has several immediate and long-term health consequences, including difficulties in childbirth."
Female journalists who speak out against the practice in their respective nations live in fear of threats, beatings and rape. The H.P. article centered around an amazing and brave woman named Ms. Turay who started a group called the Amazonian Initiative Movement in her native Sierra Leone.
I get the whole ‘It’s cultural’ argument. I do. It took time, but I came to reject most of the culturally advocated things I was indoctrinated with. I rejected Catholicism despite or perhaps partly due, to 12 years of Catholic school. Although there is an inherent beauty to a blind leap of faith, eventually I deemed all religion as too illogical. I also rejected the notion that eating meat from factory farms is anything other than the agriculture business making billions of dollars every year at the expense of our compassion, our ethics and our health. I rejected the wasteful “disposable is better” “throw everything away” way of life that was universal in the decades I grew up.
I'm very aware that I was only able to reject those belief systems because I get to live in a free nation. I was able to research and develop my own philosophical ideologies.
Even though my Atheist/ Vegetarian/ "Down with Planned Obsolescence" way of life has never been lockstep with most of America, I'm safe in the knowledge that no one's going to show up at my front door waving torches and pick-forks demanding that I follow their ways. Independent thought rocks. If I lived in North Korea I’d undoubtedly be thanking Kim Jong-il for the air I breathe.
It’s an amazing privilege. We get to chose our beliefs. We get to teach our children to believe what we believe in rather than what the state dictates. And our children get to chose whether or not they want to embrace what their parents believe.
I read the posts under the Huffington Post article about FGM. And I have to admit I was struck by the second one out:
“Millions of male children are abused yearly and no one cries "genital mutilation." It's called circumcision, DOUBLE STANDARD!”
I figured he had to be a lone moron to compare the two.
For the two practices to be similar, male circumcision would have to entail cutting off the entire glans on pre-adolecent boys, with no anesthesia, regardless of what the child’s parent or guardian wanted.
If rather than slicing off everything, FGM was truly equivalent to male circumcision, whereas the female physical results would be similar to that of a Labiaplasty ... a cosmetic surgery procedure where women have part of their labia trimmed for aesthetic reasons, Lone Moron would have an argument.
I have absolutely nothing against cosmetic surgery. However I do find it a sad statement on us, permitting our beauty obsession to mutate to the savage extent where young women hold their genitals up to a standard so high that they're willing to have a doctor cut them.
But FGM is not a 'trimming' procedure similar to male circumcision. Male circumcision is an unnecessary throwback to a time when it had a hygienic benefit. It should be ended given it is cutting off a part of the body for no reason, not to mention the pain it causes the infants. Male circumcision is performed on babies, with sterile instruments. And the most stark inequity is the fact that circumcised men are completely capable of having orgasms. Victims of FGM are not.
Entire cultures condemn half of their population to existing as a carcass, to serve and service, forever denied sexual pleasure.
Imagine: never, ever being able to experience an orgasm. If that were the result of male circumcision I have little doubt it would not be practiced anywhere, third world nations included.
Over the next couple of days I read the posts under the H.P. article. Most were penned by women. To my surprise the few replies from American men implied there was an intrinsic hypocrisy in concerted efforts to bring light to/ end the practice of FGM. Some men rejected the notion that it was a human rights issue. Others sounded angry that anyone cared what happened to these girls.
At that point I asked the question: How many men feel this way? How many American men truly feel that the circumcisions of baby boys is the same as pre-teen girls being kidnapped and having their genitals hacked off with crude instruments, resulting in severe physical, psychological, emotional trauma, and the permanent inability to have an orgasm? Are they that ignorant? Do they lack empathy? Or are they misogynists?
My faith in humanity continues to be on the fence. I've had ambiguous feelings about my species for as long as I can recall. On the one hand I’ve been emotionally overwhelmed by some of the wondrous accomplishments we’ve created. On the other hand, I’ve been emotionally devastated with some of the horrific, boggles-the-mind acts of utter sadism we perpetrate.
The hatefulness in some of the posts unnerved me. I hoped we were better than that. But I guess America needs the enlightenment of International Women's Day as much as the rest of the world.
However some designated days are motivated to celebrate accomplishments, as well as to spotlight the hardships of certain groups, in the hope of ushering in change.
It seemed fitting to me that the Huffington Post posted an article about one of the darkest, cruelest, least talked about hardship that women in the 3rd World nations face, referred to as female genital mutilation.
It’s a hideous secret assault where girls, usually between the ages of 6 and 14 are forcibly taken and held down as their clitoris and often part or all of their labia, are hacked off. It's labeled as a 'Rite of Passage', yet afterwards they’re threatened not to warn or inform other girls of their impending fate.
The practice is culturally condoned in impoverished patriarchal societies where women exist without civil rights and few if any politicians speak out against it, despite it being universally condemned by the UN's World Health Organization as a practice having “no health benefits and harms girls and women in many ways" .... "causes severe pain and has several immediate and long-term health consequences, including difficulties in childbirth."
Female journalists who speak out against the practice in their respective nations live in fear of threats, beatings and rape. The H.P. article centered around an amazing and brave woman named Ms. Turay who started a group called the Amazonian Initiative Movement in her native Sierra Leone.
I get the whole ‘It’s cultural’ argument. I do. It took time, but I came to reject most of the culturally advocated things I was indoctrinated with. I rejected Catholicism despite or perhaps partly due, to 12 years of Catholic school. Although there is an inherent beauty to a blind leap of faith, eventually I deemed all religion as too illogical. I also rejected the notion that eating meat from factory farms is anything other than the agriculture business making billions of dollars every year at the expense of our compassion, our ethics and our health. I rejected the wasteful “disposable is better” “throw everything away” way of life that was universal in the decades I grew up.
I'm very aware that I was only able to reject those belief systems because I get to live in a free nation. I was able to research and develop my own philosophical ideologies.
Even though my Atheist/ Vegetarian/ "Down with Planned Obsolescence" way of life has never been lockstep with most of America, I'm safe in the knowledge that no one's going to show up at my front door waving torches and pick-forks demanding that I follow their ways. Independent thought rocks. If I lived in North Korea I’d undoubtedly be thanking Kim Jong-il for the air I breathe.
It’s an amazing privilege. We get to chose our beliefs. We get to teach our children to believe what we believe in rather than what the state dictates. And our children get to chose whether or not they want to embrace what their parents believe.
I read the posts under the Huffington Post article about FGM. And I have to admit I was struck by the second one out:
“Millions of male children are abused yearly and no one cries "genital mutilation." It's called circumcision, DOUBLE STANDARD!”
I figured he had to be a lone moron to compare the two.
For the two practices to be similar, male circumcision would have to entail cutting off the entire glans on pre-adolecent boys, with no anesthesia, regardless of what the child’s parent or guardian wanted.
If rather than slicing off everything, FGM was truly equivalent to male circumcision, whereas the female physical results would be similar to that of a Labiaplasty ... a cosmetic surgery procedure where women have part of their labia trimmed for aesthetic reasons, Lone Moron would have an argument.
I have absolutely nothing against cosmetic surgery. However I do find it a sad statement on us, permitting our beauty obsession to mutate to the savage extent where young women hold their genitals up to a standard so high that they're willing to have a doctor cut them.
But FGM is not a 'trimming' procedure similar to male circumcision. Male circumcision is an unnecessary throwback to a time when it had a hygienic benefit. It should be ended given it is cutting off a part of the body for no reason, not to mention the pain it causes the infants. Male circumcision is performed on babies, with sterile instruments. And the most stark inequity is the fact that circumcised men are completely capable of having orgasms. Victims of FGM are not.
Entire cultures condemn half of their population to existing as a carcass, to serve and service, forever denied sexual pleasure.
Imagine: never, ever being able to experience an orgasm. If that were the result of male circumcision I have little doubt it would not be practiced anywhere, third world nations included.
Over the next couple of days I read the posts under the H.P. article. Most were penned by women. To my surprise the few replies from American men implied there was an intrinsic hypocrisy in concerted efforts to bring light to/ end the practice of FGM. Some men rejected the notion that it was a human rights issue. Others sounded angry that anyone cared what happened to these girls.
At that point I asked the question: How many men feel this way? How many American men truly feel that the circumcisions of baby boys is the same as pre-teen girls being kidnapped and having their genitals hacked off with crude instruments, resulting in severe physical, psychological, emotional trauma, and the permanent inability to have an orgasm? Are they that ignorant? Do they lack empathy? Or are they misogynists?
My faith in humanity continues to be on the fence. I've had ambiguous feelings about my species for as long as I can recall. On the one hand I’ve been emotionally overwhelmed by some of the wondrous accomplishments we’ve created. On the other hand, I’ve been emotionally devastated with some of the horrific, boggles-the-mind acts of utter sadism we perpetrate.
The hatefulness in some of the posts unnerved me. I hoped we were better than that. But I guess America needs the enlightenment of International Women's Day as much as the rest of the world.
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