Category: Mexican

The diminishing of the American diner’s disposable income has posed a significant challenge for restaurateurs, particularly those who specialize in fine-dining fare. In a downtrodden economy, Americans are less willing to spend their hard-earned money on meals that cost almost as much as a utilities payment. Instead, the dining consumer has increasingly turned toward a more casual dining experience. This dining trend has prompted enterprising chefs to overhaul and upgrade comfort food favorites. In recent years, restaurateurs have transformed burgers from a ubiquitous fast-food favorite into a gourmet casual experience showcasing pricier, premium meat patties and sundry upscale ingredients. Similarly, pizzaioli are expressing themselves artistically on their crusty canvasses with creative ingredients heretofore not available on pizza. Even such humble comfort food favorites as mac-and-cheese and the grilled cheese sandwich have metamorphosed from plain and boring to glorious and inventive. Though these gourmet versions of foodstuff from humble beginnings might cost just a bit more, they’re not nearly as steep as the fine-dining experience diners might have opted for in better times. It stands to reason that the previously pedestrian taco would eventually evolve, too. So says PBS who took the pulse of esteemed chefs and culinary professionals across the…

In as delicious a dichotomy as you’ll find on any novel, the chapter from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory which most terrorized and traumatized children actually provides glorious fantasy material for many adults.  In that memorable chapter, a gluttonous brat child named Augustus Gloop falls into a Chocolate River and is sucked through a pipe into a room in which fudge is manufactured.  By being squeezed through the pipe, Augustus’s once endomorphic body (described in the novel as “fat bulging from every fold, with two greedy eyes peering out of his dough ball of a head“) is transformed and he emerges as an extremely svelte shadow of his former self.  For calorically overachieving chocoholic adults who struggle with the battle of the bulge, the notion of falling into a river of indulgent chocolate then being sucked into a pipe and coming out thin is fantasy indeed.  While some adults might prefer that the river of chocolate be a brook of beer, the food fantasy of true New Mexicans who love our official state vegetable is to fall into a river of rich, delicious chile grown in the Land of Enchantment.  That, alas, is fantasy.  In the real world, we…

When my friend Ryan “Break the Chain” Scott and I first visited Mamba’s Kitchen, we deliberated the genesis of the restaurant’s name. The possibilities were intriguing. The restaurant must be named for the black mamba, one of the world’s most venomous snakes, I thought. Ryan surmised then quickly dismissed the notion that the restaurant’s name honors Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star who calls himself the “Mamba” because he wants to have the type of basketball precision the snake has (it can strike with 99 percent accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession). Could it share the Mamba sobriquet with Beatrix Kiddo, the protagonist of the brilliant Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill, we wondered. Perhaps it’s named for Mambo Italiano, the 1954 hit song by Rosemary Clooney. Because the edifice which is now home to Mamba’s Kitchen twice previously housed two soul food restaurants, we finally reasoned Mamba’s Kitchen must be a sort of hybrid Soul food-Mexican food fusion restaurant.  Clever though our conjecture was, the reason for the restaurant’s name is far more down-to-earth and beautifully innocent.  Mamba is actually named for the grandmother of restaurant founder and owner Rebecca Sandoval.  When a grandchild couldn’t pronounce “grandma,” he…