Making tapas with friends at ArtEpicure

We spent Saturday night cooking and eating with friends. It's not something we do very often. Eating, yes, but at-home entertaining happens less than we'd like, in part because our place isn't really set up for many hands in the kitchen.

So it was a special treat to have a private class at ArtEpicure in Somerville, where Mark DesLauriers has a fab and funky kitchen that he opens up to for people who want to make food and be social.



Jars!



Cookbooks!



Sink with cat head!



Mark offers a variety of classes, from classic French to knife skills to working with octopus. We decided on the tapas workshop, so after a short introduction and a chance to open some wine, Mark set us to work.

Prepping watermelon and citrus:



Mixing meatballs:



Chopping peppers:



Displaying newly learned knife skeelz on the parsley:



Peeling asparagus for roasting:



The pace was easy and the work was fun. Mark was a great host, giving instruction where needed and keeping things moving without pressure. He was a quiet force in the background, keeping track of the steps needed for each dish and assigning tasks accordingly, so that the meal started to come together almost imperceptibly: First there was eggplant, sliced and salted, and then there were tomatoes, roasted, out of the oven, and suddenly there was a soft, scented eggplant ragout.



The parsley starred in a light cucumber salad with sherry vinaigrette dressing:



The fruit became a refreshing and delicious watermelon gazpacho (with baked prosciutto garnish):



The meatballs were paired with huge broad beans spiced with ras el-hanout:



There was also a fabulous traditional paella, for which I chopped the chorizo but missed the construction of the rest:



Once the food was ready, we gathered around the table to talk and eat (of course) until late in the evening.



As well as private group events, Mark holds open cooking classes (but they fill up quickly, so plan ahead). You should go.

Meanwhile, Mark gave us the recipes for everything we made. I expect the gazpacho to be a mainstay this summer.

Who moved my pork cakes?

Consider this a eulogy of sorts.

Last night we went to Tu y Yo, the bestest Mexican restaurant in Somerville (and beyond).

We know the menu pretty well at this point, so it didn't take us long to order.

The Boy chose the cochinita pibil and I asked for the tortitas de puerco, which are fist-sized patties of shredded pork in a sauce of xoconostle, a sweet-sour cactus fruit. This has become one of my favorite dishes, a perfectly balanced blend of flavors and textures.

When my parents were visiting, we brought them to Tu y Yo and my mom had them. She loved them too.

"I'm so sorry," our lovely waiter said. "I don't think we have any more."

Okay, I figured, they're out. Not surprising; we're coming up on a holiday weekend, and—

"We're changing the menu," he continued, "and that's one of the dishes we've discontinued."

What??

Okay, must recover. Let's go with the usual Plan B: the Pollo Yunkaax.

"Yes, that we have," our waiter said, looking strangely apologetic. "But ... um ... we'll be taking that off the menu soon as well."

And so, we come together to remember the loveliness of Pollo Yunkaax.



Kind of startling if you haven't encountered it before. So green! So vibrant! (That's the spinach and cream sauce, by the way).

Inside, its secret weapon: cuitlocoche.



The menu at Tu y Yo describes cuitlocoche as "corn's black mushroom," which is a polite way of saying "a disease of maize caused by a pathogenic plant fungus." (Which would you rather eat?)

The flavor is neither mushroomy nor moldy; it has a light, fresh, subtle earthiness. Together with the moist chicken and the creamy sauce, it makes—um, made—for a perfect summer meal.

I ate extra-slowly, realizing this was probably the last time I'd get to taste this particular dish.

The Boy consoled me with forkfuls of his fabulous pibil.



As usual, the beans were divine.



So, Tu y Yo, I have just two questions:

1) Can I get the recipe for the tortitas de puerco (and a source for xoconostle)?

2) Do you need someone to taste-test the new menu??

Belgian sugar waffle @ Mr Crepe

When I posted about the deep-fried cupcake from Kickass recently, I compared it to the Belgian sugar waffle from Mr. Crepe.

A confession: I had no idea what I was talking about.

That is, I hadn't tried the Belgian sugar waffle from Mr. Crepe. And I assumed I probably wouldn't have the chance to do so, given that the Chowhound thread on the subject suggested they were rare (delicious) birds.

This morning, feeling both pancakey and lazy, we went into Davis Square for breakfast. Mr. Crepe was open and quiet for a change. I was about to order something chocolate-and-banana-related when I saw a chalkboard that had a drawing of a happy waffle sporting a jaunty green scarf and the words "Belgian sugar waffles are now available!"

"Um ... are Belgian sugar waffles available?" I asked.

"Not right now," said the guy behind the counter. My heart sank.

"I need to defrost and cook some; it'll take about a half-hour."

Only thirty minutes between me and the legendary waffle? I could wait.

So we ordered coffee and smoothies, and The Boy got a ham-egg-Brie crepe, and we sat in the window and watched Davis Square wake up.

And then it came.



Fresh from the iron.



Glistening with sugar.



It was steaming and caramel-fragrant.

It was like warm, sweet bread.

It was like a freshly frosted, dense donut.

It was heavenly.

But aaagh! Who knows when I'll get another? What are the chances of being near Mr. Crepe when the Belgian sugar waffles are ready (or when I'm just hungry enough to wait)?

I guess I could always make my own ...

Deep fried cupcake. Deep. Fried. CUPCAKE!

On Friday afternoon, office buddy Dawn alerted me to the existence of the deep-fried cupcake from Kickass Cupcakes in Davis Square (a place I'd visited only once before, despite its relative proximity to home).

On Saturday morning, we were so there.

For future reference, this is what you need to make a deep-fried cupcake:



You got yer regular standard deep-fat fryer; yer necessary cupcake, of course; there's yer squeezy cream; and tucked in the corner would be yer bottle of chocolate sauce. Not shown is the bowl of light batter in which the cupcake is doused before frying.

Commence to drooling and/or dialing 9 and 1 and getting ready to dial 1 again.

While we waited for nature to take its course, we checked out the other cupcake options, which included pretty sparkles:



The Green Monster:



The S'mores:



And the, um, "Cheesy Catnip Kittycake," which I assume was not for human consumption.



And then our deep-fried cupcake was ready! Oops, no it wasn't; our server had switched on the fryer and thrown the cake in without giving the oil a chance to heat. I didn't even want to know what the result looked like.

She was very apologetic ("We don't usually start deep frying until the afternoon," she said), and soon had a second cupcake in and sizzling.

While we waited some more, we watched one of the bakers unwrap several three-pound blocks of butter—and when I say butter, I mean Plugra—top them off with a couple of wholesale-sized bricks of cream cheese, and set the whole thing to churning in a serious industrial mixer. That, my friend, is how you make frosting.

And then our server took a paper cone (genius, and the only possible way to present a deep-fried cupcake), swirled chocolate sauce into its base, placed the cake inside, added more chocolate sauce, and finished it off with a generous dollop of cream.

There's actually a deep-fried cupcake under here.



See?



In truth, it could have done without quite so much smothering; save for one small corner that had missed the chocolate-and-cream deluge, and was therefore still crisp and crunchy, the rest was a big, soggy fistful.

Not that it was bad, mind you. As things that are deep fried and loaded with fat and sugar go, it was a fine example of the form: sweet and warm and completely indulgent, halfway between hot doughnut and deep-fried Twinkie.





We ate it walking down the street, our faces smeared with chocolate syrup and cream. It's not something one can consume delicately or with any pretense of sophistication. It's also something best shared; a whole one may just finish off a healthy person of average size.

And then it was gone, and we were left with a slightly heavy taste of cooking oil on the tongue. I'm not sure whether the solution would be to change to a lighter oil, or to allow the cake to drain a little before serving, or just to crank the heat up higher to make the cooking time as short as possible; that might be something to work on.

Davis Square has few options for state-fair-like indulgence, with the exception of the Belgian sugar waffle at Mr. Crepe or a scoop of maple-walnut from J.P. Licks (and even there you can almost legitimately claim there are healthy choices; hey, strawberry ice cream has fruit!).

So now there's something else to add to the list of heart-stopping goodies, though note that Kickass only does deep-fried cupcakes Friday through Sunday. Maybe it's for the best.

Sabur, Somerville: it's all a blur

This week I had a complaint (a complaint, I tells ya!) that I hadn't posted any pictures of food in more than a week.

My excuse? I keep eating in dark places.

I'm not a professional photographer (as you may have noticed), and even though I try to take photos of as many dishes as possible, it's hard to get good shots in restaurants with ambiances that are romantic, moody or just cheap and underlit.

Take last night, for example, when we braved the 85-degree humidity to go to Sabur, the Mediterranean restaurant halfway between Davis and Teele Squares in Somerville.

(How humid was it? So humid that we elected to sit in the air-conditioned interior instead of on the intimate outdoor patio. That humid.)

The decor at Sabur is simple and rustic: highbacked wooden chairs, an open brick grill, beaten copper tables. The lighting, while pretty, is similarly low-key:



Which means I had two choices, snapshot-wise. I could sit the camera on the table, which produced shots like this:



(Doesn't that tomato-cucumber-feta salad look lovely?)

Or I could hold the camera and balance my elbows on the table, which produced shots with a less-than-appetizing blur. This photo does nothing for the grilled Balkan sausages, which are tender and juicy and spicy:



Likewise, Sabur does zucchini and feta fritters that have a light crunch on the outside and a soft, yielding center. They're sitting in ajvar, a roasted red pepper and eggplant spread that's both fresh and complex. But you wouldn't know it from this shaky shot:



The round pastry in back is burek, which is close enough to a Cornish pasty that it satisfies my occasional cravings.

I should point out that any shakiness is purely the result of the slightly irregular surface of the beaten copper table, and has nothing to do with this:



Mine was the one on the left, a cocktail of house-made fig-infused vodka and pomegranate that was both refreshingly light and earthily complex. The dark fruit lurking in the bottom of the glass is an entire vodka-soaked fig: a potent little bomb.

So I asks you: which would you prefer? Clear, well-lit images that appear only occasionally, or a regular cavalcade of blurry, dark, confusing shots?

'Cause let me tell you, I got plenty of those.

Walking to Mexico

I know, I know. I've already waxed rhapsodic about Somerville Mexican restaurant Tu y Yo on many occasions. Oh, their frogs' legs! Oh, their annual Festival of Gastronomy! Blah blah blah.

Usually, our visits there begin and end with an entree; the servings aren't ridiculously huge, but for me they're generous enough that I often just eat the main dish (pork in a garlic-orange sauce; chicken in red mole; the always-fabulous pibil) and take the rice and beans home for breakfast. Which gives the added benefit of starting the day with this:



Last night, however, I walked from my office to the Central Square T stop—a good two-mile walk—and by the time I arrived in Davis, I was ravenous. I called The Boy, who was just getting home, and we organized a rendezvouz at what we refer to as "the Mexican place."

He ordered the nopales en salsa verde.



How much more green could it be? (The answer, of course, is none more green.) The sauce is bright, with a vinegary edge; the sesame seeds add a note of nutty sweetness.

I had tinga poblana, a dish of shredded chicken stewed with sweet onions, peppers and tomatoes:



(Hmm ... it looked much better than that. Apologies for my weak PhotoShop abilities.)

I ate the whole thing, reflecting only briefly that it meant we'd be having cereal for breakfast.

And then, still hungry, we ordered (gasp!) dessert.

The Boy had flan. Why? Because he always has flan if there's flan to be had. It was light and delicate and sat in a cinnamon cream sauce. He was happy.

I'd hoped to try the avocado napoleon, because I'd always cast envious glances when other diners ordered it: layers of mille-feuille stacked with vibrant green sauce. But when you're not up to date on the latest dessert news, you fall victim to the ancient adage regarding somnolence and associated loss.

(You snooze, you lose.)

Napoleon had been exiled from the menu. Instead, there was an avocado cheesecake and a cactus-nut bread. After much prolonged weighing of the pros and cons, I went with the former.



It was creamy but not too dense; the avocado gave it a light, fresh flavor. It was much like a desserty guacamole, which probably makes sense. The crushed pistachios on top added a nice crunch, and the drizzle of condensed-milk sauce added a boost of sweetness. The Boy said it reminded him of a Vietnamese avocado milkshake.

Next, time, I'll try the cactus bread. Just have to go for a good long walk first.

An evening with Dr. Katz

On Thursday, we went to the Somerville Theater to see Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, live. Given that the original eponymous TV show was animated, this may seem like an exceptional challenge.



However, as the show consisted largely of conversations like the above, it translated quite easily to a stage setting. As with the TV version, there were a couple of loose storylines, involving Katz and his son, Ben (H. Jon Benjamin), and Katz and his therapist, played by show co-creator Tom Snyder:



The rest of the action (as it were) consisted of local comedians sitting in the patient's chair: Matt Siegel, Bill Braudis, Will LeBow and Eugene Mirman (here on Snyder's lap):



The format was perfect for standup comedians to do their thing sitting down. The Boy was pleased to hear his all-time favorite moment from Dr. Katz, when Bill Braudis talked about his father's attempts to quit smoking: "He's tried gum, he's tried ... what do you call that thing with the needles? Heroin! He loves that stuff!"

There was also inspired improv banter between seasoned comics, including a few lovely old chestnuts, some revamped (the joke about Pia Zadora's stage turn as Anne Frank, in which the audience yells to the Nazis, "She's in the attic!" has now been updated to Paris Hilton), and some classic ("I meant to ask my father to pass the salt, and instead I said, 'You ruined my life, you son of a bitch'").

And there was discussion of Katz's life since his 1997 diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. As in this Boston Globe interview, he moved so quickly between humor and raw honesty that it was something hard to tell whether a punchline was coming or not.

''My first neurologist was very holistic. He said no alcohol, no red meat, no salt. I said, 'What about sex?' He said, 'I'm seeing someone.' "

Meat and vegetables

On Wednesday, I had a post-work hair appointment on Newbury Street, so The Boy decided to meet me afterward for dinner. When I mentioned to my lovely and talented stylist, Kristen Lee, that we were thinking of eating across the street at Tapeo, she reached into her purse and pulled out a coupon for a free tapa. I emerged from Emerge with fantastically shiny hair, found The Boy, and we went to eat.

We always over-order at Tapeo. It's unavoidable. First, there are the must-haves:

• Boquerones, white anchovies marinated in olive oil


• Goat cheese baked with fresh tomato and basil


• The absolutely necessary pork sausage, served in a deep, intense fig reduction

Then we need to try a couple of new items:

• A mini shepherd's pie topped with mashed sweet potato


• Fabada asturiana, a rustic, cassoulet-like stew of beans and sausage, slow-cooked until eveything started to dissolve together

And then, because veggies are important:

• Bunuelos: fluffy, deep-fried battered cauliflower puffs

For dessert, The Boy ordered ubiquitous flan and I had the special: a compote of dried fruit (apricots, plums, dates) in a red wine sauce. The sauce was very similar to one I've used for poached pears a few times, with notes of orange and cinnamon; it made me think of Christmas. It was also slightly more than I could manage, so we brought the remainder home and stirred it into our breakfast oatmeal the next day. Now that was a smart idea.

On Thursday, we did the usual Thursday thing, topped off with overloaded plates of pizza and pasta and parmo (of sorts) at Bertucci's.

On Friday, we met up with Jerry and Heidi and Ethan and managed to snag a table at Redbones, which was loud and lively and crowded, as usual, for pulled pork and rosemary sausage and succotash and corn fritters in maple syrup.

Tonight, we're headed to Café Polonia to celebrate Huge's birthday with traditional Polish food.

All of which explains why today's lunch was grilled vegetable tacos from Anna's Taqueria.



Today's words of wisdom: avoid eating at one of Davis Square's healthier fast-food restaurants just as the kid-friendly (and apparently hunger-inducing) Dan Zanes show is finishing up at the Somerville theater. Bedlam and guacamole do not mix.

Weekend food roundup: Morocco, Mexico, France

Saturday night
The Boy whipped out his tagine (ooer missus!) and threw together Tagin Djaj Bi Zaytoun Wal Hamid, aka chicken stew with preserved lemons and green olives, from Claudia Roden's cookbook Arabesque.

The recipe calls for some of my favorite aromatic ingredients--saffron, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, cilantro--and even though I was supposed to be doing other stuff, I kept wandering into the kitchen to inhale. And take photographs.



In goes the cilantro:



The Boy discovered preserved lemons at WholeFoods, so every now and then he brings some home. They're marinated simply in salt and lemon juice, and have a bright flavor that combines the best aspects of lemon and salt while minimizing the brash sharpness and intensity of both. Unsuprisingly, they keep pretty well, so over the next few weeks we'll find excuses to chop up a chunk of rind and throw it into anything that needs a lift.

Sunday morning
We'd dined at Tu y Yo on Friday night, and came home with leftover rice, black beans and cochinita pibil--the result of a deliberate act of sacrifice on my part. Even as I ordered the dish, I was already dreaming of the reheated remains on a warm tortilla with grated cheddar and a fried egg.



Sometimes, dreams come true.

Sunday afternoon
You know how you develop certain expectations of a dish, based on repeated encounters? Take apple pie, for instance. You start to define it as a kid, and refine your benchmark at diners and holiday meals. Right now, you can probably conjure up your definition of apple pie: the depth of the dish; the level of cinnamon in the sauce; whether the crust is glazed or sparkling with sugar granules.

And then, one day, you meet a pie that blows all your preconceived notions out of the water.

My awakening came over lunch at Petit Robert Bistro in Kenmore Square. The source of my enlightenment: coq au vin.

I thought I'd had coq au vin before. But apparently that was merely chicken that had shared a pan with red wine.

This was something else entirely: deep and rich, the red wine sauce almost carmelized onto the meat, with a generous fistful of bacon to add a smoky undercurrent.



It was amazing, and it is now my gold standard for the dish, but it was also not my lunch of choice: I had andouille and boudin noir, which was lovely, especially as it came with thinly sliced carrots bathed in garlic butter. (They're vegetables, so it's healthy.) The Boy was lucky, though, that I didn't steal his entire plate of chicken.

It was our first foray into this restaurant; it won't be our last, especially as they also have such interesting options as calf's liver and tripe and sweetbreads. The Boy points out that it's close enough to my office to be a lunch destination, which is a frighteningly tempting fact.

Sunday evening
On the menu tonight: baked haddock with steamed bok choy. It's probably for the best.

It's not easy being (in) green (mole sauce)

Every time we eat at Tu y Yo, I give thanks that we're a five-minute walk from excellent Mexican food. The restaurant makes a concerted, sincere effort to create dishes that are not just damn delicious, but also inventive and unusual.

Their menu includes a special that changes out weekly. February's dishes included chicken breast in a sauce of garlic, guajillo chiles, cumin and melon; and sautéed red snapper, shrimp, crab and octopus in a broth of fish, rice, jalapeño and tomatoes.

(I almost always get the special; it's invariably interesting and saves having to make decisions.)

The standard side dish is rice and beans, the latter having a deep, intense, chocolatey flavor.

A couple of weeks ago, they changed their menu, dropping some dishes and adding others. Thankfully the chicken tinga and the cochinita pibil are still listed--standbys for when the special doesn't appeal. And so, interestingly, are the tacos de chapulines (deep-fried tacos stuffed with crickets and served with avocado sauce); either they're really really popular or they're just too damn curious to be discontinued.

So what's new?

How about "pork cakes in a prehispanic sauce of cactus fruit"?

Or "chopped chayote squash in a pipian of pumpkin seeds, peanuts, cilantro, herbs, ancho and guajillo peppers"?

Or "chicken breast in a red mole made with chocolate, almonds, peanuts, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and ancho, pasilla, mulato and chipotle peppers"?

Good as they all sound, none of these were our final choices. The Boy opted for nopales con longaniza en salsa verde y amaranto (Mexican sausage and chopped cactus smothered in tomatillo sauce and amaranth seeds). I ordered the ancas de rana.

The frogs' legs tasted, of course, like chicken, but more tender (and requiring extra work to dissect meat from teeny tiny tibiofibular bone).

They came in an appropriately Kermit-green sauce of pumpkin seeds, poblano peppers, tomatillos and amaranth. The sauce was complex, somewhere between sesame and fresh grass--like winter turning into spring. I almost asked for tortillas to mop it up.

The Boy's dish was simpler but still carefully planned, with the vinegar-pickled cactus serving as a bright foil to the pork-fatty goodness of the sausage.

Our waiter said they plan to stay with the menu in its current form for the next two years. Which is good, because I want to try everything on it. And if they keep serving up intruiging specials, it's gonna take a while.

Somerville moves closer to Barcelona

For many foodies, Mecca is located on a mountain about two hours' north of Barcelona. Ferran Adria's restaurant El Bulli is famous as much for the difficulty of scoring a reservation (due to size, not snobbery; they're already booked up for 2007) as for the food. Here's a detailed account of one meal, which illustrates why it's so revered. And here's some background, courtesy of CNN.

The CNN report notes that Chef Adria's "ground-breaking techniques have inspired other chefs throughout the world to experiment." But who would have though such creativity would make it to Somerville?

On Wednesday night, in celebration of my completing the penultimate level of the Citizenship Game, we went to dinner at Gargoyles. (The Boy wanted to take me to Redbones, because you can't get more American than a big ol' plate of pulled pork with vinegar sauce, but I wanted to go somewhere with champagne, not somewhere where the lemonade is served in Mason jars.)

Gargolyes changes the menu seasonally, so we weren't surprised to find that the dishes were not the same as on our last visit. What we didn't expect was how drastically different the options were.

I can't remember the last time I saw so many ingredients I couldn't identify. Kalamansi gel? Bottarga? Escolar? (Umm, maybe I'll stay away from that last one.) And the combinations seemed to have been thought up by a six-year-old mad scientist: foie gras with raspberry streusel, smoked Dr. Pepper, and whipped malted milk. Crayfish bisque with ketchup and maple soda. Paprika suds. Dehydrated clam chowder.

So we started with champagne, or at least a nice hazelnutty prosecco. And then The Boy eased himself in with a green salad with blue cheese and a pumpkin waffle crouton, while I dove headfirst into a lamb cappuccino. You read that right. It came in a cappuccino cup and was topped with a creamy herbed foam (salsify, apparently) dusted with fine powder (fennel, apparently), underneath which were chunks of sweet, fatty lamb in a broth that somehow tasted of both meat and butterscotch. I can't explain it. Just trust me.

And then The Boy went for the hoisin- and honey-glazed duck confit, which came on banana leaves with sweet sticky rice, mango and coconut milk, and I opted for the "Terducken," which earned quote-marks for being a deconstructed take on the bird-in-a-bird-in-a-bird dish. This version was chicken breast and duck, roasted with a spicy turkey sausage, served with the obvious accompaniments of trumpet mushrooms, sunchokes and chocolate gnocchi. Amzingly, it worked; the gnocchi had a softness and darkness that made them seem like foie gras or some kind of truffle (the foraged kind, not the candied kind).

Usually we don't do dessert when we eat out, in large part because I get just ... tooo ... full ...but the creativity extended to the sweet section of the menu. And we couldn't resist the chocolate offering, which included a brandy snifter of dark hot chocolate; a small, velvety pudding; and something called "oil and soil," which turned out to be crumbled cookie and chocolate powder alongside a drizzle of dark sauce, the two textures working as complement and contrast.

It may be a while until we get a reservation at El Bulli. But in the meantime, we can walk ten minutes down the street and explore a brave Somervillian attempt at creating something similar.

Gastronomy Day

Yesterday was a good day, foodwise. As the weather was unseasonably warm, The Boy and I walked down to Harvard Square to have lunch for the first time at Cambridge 1. We really should have checked it out before now--especially as it's owned by the people who also run two of our favorite bars, Middlesex and The Miracle of Science--but for some reason we'd never got around to it.

Well, now we realize we need to make up for lost time. The menu is small in choice--pizza or salad--but inventive in range (pizza toppings include potatoes, arugula, rosemary, bresaole) and the crust is thin and buttery. Ah, read Robert Nadeau's review. I had the sopressata-topped pie, which went well with a glass of crisp, tart Sauvignon Blanc, and The Boy had the bolognese version and a very soft Chianti.

While we were there, a French(-Canadian?) photo-shoot started happening a couple of tables down. The photog and his assistant were all rumpled, unshaven, black-leather French stereotype artistes; the model was a Charlotte Gainsbourg waif with impossibly long, shiny, chestnut hair. They shot lots of moody, shadowy angles. We pretended to be cool in the corner ...

After lunch, we checked out the leftovers at Tower Records (going out of bidness). I picked up a "best-of" by The Beat (sorry, that's The English Beat) and also the Brazilian Girls album, which I suspect will become a fave.

In the evening, we wandered up the street to our favorite Mexican restaurant, Tu y Yo, which we love because a) it's five minutes away and b) there's always something unusual on the menu. This is not your extreme-fajitas place (there used to be a sign on the door that said, "We do not serve burritos"); many of the recipes come from the owner's family, and date back to the 1920s. They feature a different special every week, and are big into complex sauces, braised meats, and the whole Slow Food concept.

This weekend, they were hosting the second annual celebration of Mexican gastronomy. We went last year, and were fed crunchy taquitos filled with crickets in a mole sauce, and soup served in hollowed-out gourds. This year, the prix-fixe menu looked like this:

Cocina de la abuela
~
Appetizer
Picadas (tortillas topped with tomatoes, jalapeños and cheese)
Garnachas (tortillas topped with potatoes, beef, salsa and cheese)
Plátanos stuffed with cheese
~
Soup
Chayote and cilantro
~
Entrée
BBQ pork ranchero style (with tomatoes, chiles and garlic)
Squid stuffed with avocado and cilantro paté
Chicken Queretaro style
~
Dessert
Estela’s dessert

We assumed you had to choose, but no: they brought out everything. The soft corn tortillas were hand-made (you could see where the chef's knuckles had kneaded the dough into circles); the pork was served in tender chunks, sitting in rich, dark, spicy-sweet juices; the tiny squid came whole, three to a plate, their heads full of buttery, intense green sauce.

Dessert was a small bowl of shredded carrot, raisins, almonds, coconut, apples and cream--it wasn't particularly sweet, but worked perfectly to end the meal on a lighter note.

On our way out, the owner asked how we liked the meal, and reminded us that tonight's eight-course menu would be completely different. It sounds delicious, and includes pork loin in huitlacoche and mole with epazote (pork, chicken and beef with Mexican herbs), but frankly, I'm not sure I can eat that much again for a while ...