I couldn’t wait. I’d heard about El Rey del Taco a long time. Loreto, Baja Sur, is a small town, one saturated with American snowbirds in winter. Finding legit food there that wasn’t Americanized for the gringo turistas was tricky. But locals loved El Rey.
This was to be my Loreto redemption. The previous night I’d wandered over to The Oasis, where a Mexican food writer and a chef in La Paz had recommended I get the clams. Clams are Loreto’s culinary claim to fame, and the pre-Columbian method of burying them in the sand, then setting a fire of chamisal over them so they roast in their shells is a rare treat. Clams escabeche and gratin, too, it was going to be a feast of tasty bivalves.
When I walked in, everyone was speaking English, and no one was eating clams. There was a sort of pasta buffet on offer; think Benihana but with spaghetti and in Spanish. I spoke to the waiter in Spanish, who asked me if I’d like the pasta. Creo que no. ¿Tal vez unas almejas? Clams, baby, clams.
First disappointment: You can’t just order the almejas tatemadas, the cool clam roast. You need to reserve that in advance. Crap. OK, I’ll have the escabeche and gratin. A Tecate arrived. I nursed it. It was gone by the time an older waiter came to tell me there were no escabeche clams.
At this point, I’d need to order something in addition to the clams gratin, so I ordered grouper al mojo de ajo because I normally love this preparation.
Waiter comes back. No grouper. Yellowtail OK? Yeah, sure. Sigh. And another Tecate, porfa. The fish came and it was uninspiring at best. It, and the Tecate was gone, and the waiter asked if I’d wanted anything else. ¿Las almejas? He looked concerned and left.
A third waiter arrived to tell me that in fact The Oasis had no clams. I paid the bill and left, teeth gritted but not gritty from clams.
So lunch at El Rey del Taco was going to be amazing. All the ranchero favorites: arrachera, carne asada, machaca, the works. Freshly made flour tortillas.
Pretty sure you know what’s coming, so I’ll just say it: El Rey del Taco was shuttered. I asked a few people around, but no one knew why. I was pretty crushed. Loreto is not a great eating town — La Paz is the jewel of Baja Sur’s culinary scene — and my two main options proved to be a bust.
So I wandered into the square. The Zopilote Brewing Co. made the first craft beer I’d had in Mexico worth drinking, so maybe there? Then I remembered the hotel manager had said Mita Gourmet was her top recommendation in town. Right next door to the brewpub, I figured OK fine.
A waitress resigned to American tourists treating her language as some sort of baby talk handed me a menu; I’d just heard a half-dozen Americans joke among themselves at their tables about how Spanish sounds, and then spoke it to each other mockingly. Not a great look, guys.
The menu was as tired as she was. Hoary classics like red enchiladas and tortilla soup, and yes, more pasta. Then I saw in a dark corner of the laminated pages chiles rellenos de mariscos. Oooh. Chiles stuffed with seafood? Yes, please.
When it arrived, with a little bowl of the “border beans” that are a close cousin to the charro beans of Texas, and a stack of fresh flour tortillas, I was surprised to see that the dish wasn’t a greasy fried thing, but two whole roasted, skinless and seedless poblanos stuffed with clams, scallops, octopus and shrimp, and topped with a silky chipotle cream sauce that was almost mole-like.
It was, top to bottom, one of the best things I ate in Baja.
And it was a complete surprise that I would never have noticed had I not simply just wandered into someplace and stared at the menu, looking for something offbeat.
Lesson one: Always order the weird thing on a menu. Always. Why? Because it’s there for a reason, and that reason is almost always because the owner or chef really cares about that dish. They sell standard things to earn a living, but they love to make these offbeat dishes. A great example was the lamb with cumin at the Sichuan restaurant near my old house in California. It was there because the owners loved it.
Lesson two: As best you can, be like water, as Bruce Lee once said.
When I am in Mexico these days, I am technically working. I know, I know, tough job, right? And yeah, I know I am mega lucky. But I really am searching high and low for both everyday, mom-and-pop places that serve standout classics, as well as high-end restaurants where chefs, like Hector Palacios of Casamartes in La Paz, and Javier Plasencia of Jazmango in Todos Santos (among his other restos) are pushing boundaries in Mexican cuisine.
I am not a large mammal, so I can only eat so much in a day. And I absolutely hate wasting food, so I can’t bring myself to order eight dishes and take just a bite or two of each. I just can’t. In order to pull off even two big meals in a day, I average six to seven miles walking throughout the city, or wherever I am, to walk off the calories so I can get the most out of each meal.
So when a meal is “wasted,” as at Oasis, it is a setback. Not catastrophic, and even there I learned something: pasta, pasta, pasta, pizza, pizza, pizza, everywhere in Baja. I had thought it was just to appease the Americans, but it’s a relic of a wave of Italian immigration to Mexico after the First World War. Fun fact: the Caesar salad was invented in Baja by an Italian immigrant. It was only after the pasta spectacle at Oasis that I looked all this up.
I have couched all this in traveler’s terms, and in the culinary realm, but being open and flexible and supple in your thinking is so, so vital to, well… everything.
Physical flexibility and balance are well known indicators of longer lives. Minds that cannot flex with changing times ossify. My dad, who’s 90, wondered aloud (and disapprovingly) on his birthday at how much our country has changed since he was young. Um, yeah, dad, that’s literally almost a century ago. Things change and we must in some cases force ourselves to adapt, to flex, even in old age.
Now think about your personal life. I am blessed in many ways, but one is that my life is my own. Fiercely, in fact. I know so many people, some dear to me, who would give almost anything for this flexibility. Maybe they have kids, or elderly parents (or both), or are shackled with huge debt or make-work jobs whatever. Their ability to be flexible is limited, and so, over the years, I have learned that I must be like water around them.
When a thing doesn’t happen that ought, or when it turns out you can’t do a thing you thought you could just an hour ago because, well… life, it might help to try what I have trained myself to do in the many, many setbacks I’ve faced as a more-or-less professional wanderer: Stop. Close your eyes. Deep breath. Let it out. (To be fair, yes, I have been accused of looking like Sad Pablo Escobar in this process.) What’s my next step? Bend. Flex. Be like water.
It’s not always going to work. But this little ritual has helped me, at least, stop spiralling into anger and panic in these situations. Because maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe just not how you expected.
A longtime mentor and friend urged me, in my early 50’s, be like the water, don’t fight the rocks, flow around them… so this hooked me! In Portland Maine, at Street & Co, my ex ordered an appetizer. It was an odd description, stewed garlicky squid in a tomato based broth…. Squid as you are aware can be tough and rubbery if over or under cooked. But they can be sublime. This little dish, served in a small pottery crock, was the latter!
We’d have eaten it as the entree…
"Benumbed alacrity." "The hell with it." "Whatever." "Everybody gets it in the end. . ."
These are all internal coping mechanisms-- uttered, muttered, or thought-- that have been shared with me over the years by folks who'd just "had it up to here" with life's vicissitudes but figured out a way to deal with them without becoming apoplectic.
Now I have another. Thank you.
(BTW, those chiles rellenos sound absolutely scrumptious-- and me stuck up here in this torrential rain in the wee hours without a clam or an octopus in sight. . . .)