Restaurant Review: El Tapatio Mexican Cuisine, Middletown, NY

On our way back from Ithaca on Saturday, my family was getting hungry.  We stopped in Middletown, NY, for gas and I whipped out my iPhone and checked Yelp! to see what was nearby.  Less than a mile away, we found El Tapatio Mexican Cuisine, so I turned the car around and drove to 252 Rt. 211 East, where we parked beside the micro-strip-mall that houses El Tapatio, along with a Chinese restaurant and a liquor store.  In my experience, crummy locations are always a sign of good food, so my hopes were high.

Perhaps you remember this Puerto Rican boy band
from the '70s and '80s.  Hopefully, you don't.
If you need a reminder click here.

As we entered the vestibule, there was a specials board, with several items on it, but the menudo caught my eye.  The owner's daughter, a cute little girl of about five, brought us our menus a few moments later and, as we nibbled on chips and salsa, Kimberly and Ian quickly decided on steak tacos, but my attention was caught by the non-gringo items on the menu.  Lengua (beef tongue), nopales (prickly-pear cactus), cueritas (pork skin), and cecina (dried beef) all made appearances as ingredients in burritos and tacos and I was tempted, but my mind kept going back to the menudo on the specials board and that's what I ended up ordering.

"Now, just what is menudo?" you may be asking yourself just about now.  Perhaps you remember Menudo, the Puerto Rican boy band that was (in)famous in the 1970s and 1980s and that helped launch the careers of luminaries such as Ricky Martin of Livin' La Vida Loca fame, and a whole bunch of other people I've never heard of.  That's not the menudo we're discussing here.  We're talking about the traditional soup made of beef tripe and intestines, pig's trotters, and hominy.  How can you say "no" to cow's guts, stewed ever so gently in a spicy broth with pig's feet and corn that has been soaked in lye, and served with lime, onions and cilantro?  I mean, really???

While we waited for the meal to arrive, Ian commented that he wished that he weren't so squeamish about food, that he wished that he enjoyed the adventure of trying things like fish heads and tacos de ojo, but that he just didn't feel up to the challenge.  Still, when the food arrived, he took great pleasure in watching as I spooned up bits of intestine resembling calamari rings and scraped meat off of the hunks of bone that filled the bowl.  The broth was pleasantly spicy, much like a good pozole rojo and the trotters gave the broth a richness much like vietnamese pho.  It was great stuff and I was extremely happy with my menudo and warm corn tortillas.

Though he couldn't bring himself to taste any of the solid parts of the menudo, Ian tried the broth and liked it, so that's at least a step in the right direction for him.  Now, he just needs to step it up before he travels to China in April and gets to sample real Chinese food.  Kimberly, conversely, opted against sampling the menudo and, as I am a man who wishes to remain happily married, I didn't press the issue with her.  She and Ian enjoyed their tacos immensely.  My only regret for the evening is that we were in a bit of a hurry to get home, so we didn't stay to sample any of the desserts at El Tapatio.  Something tells me that we'll have another chance to do that when we travel through Middletown next time.

Menudo!  A steaming hot bowl of guts and bones!
What's not to love?!?!?

Ian's steak tacos.
How can you go wrong with steak tacos?

A week with nothing on the menu

Why is it, Gentle Reader, that projects always seem to start out with a couple false starts while the rest of the world whizzes by? I started this blog with the intention of blogging about the food that I prepare for my family and my ongoing efforts to provide healthful, flavorful and earth-friendly meals. So, with my son spending the week in Virginia with his grandparents, what do my wife and I do? We either eat leftovers or eat out.

When I cook, I usually try to cook enough to have leftovers the next day. Frankly, a lot of the food tastes even better after having an extra day or so for the flavors to meld. This week, we had spaghetti with sauce that I made and froze when my niece was visiting two weeks ago. We also had a second round of the coconut-lentil soup that I mentioned in my last post. With a fresh batch of chapatis, it was wonderful.

Last night, on our way back from the shore, we stopped at one of our favorite places to eat on the drive home, Neelam, in Middletown, NJ. Previously, we've been to Neelam on Thursday nights, when they have their dinner buffet and everything has always been wonderful. Last night, we ordered from the regular menu. My wife ordered the lamb vindaloo and I had the vegetable thali. The vegetable thali came with papadum and soup as an appetiser. The main meal featured a thick, spicy lentil curry which I could have been happy with all by itself. Along with the dal were a saag paneer and a creamy mixed vegetable curry that had a hint of sweetness and was the perfect foil for the dal's heat. Naan and raita rounded out the meal and left me thinking about my long-standing joke that someday I want to move to India and become a real vegetarian. Though, in all honesty, I've got to admit to really enjoying the lamb that Kimberly traded me for samples of my dinner.

We planned on having dinner in NYC tonight, but our plans ended up changing at the last minute and we were faced with the prospect of Supper Without Ingredients at home. Instead, we chose to get dinner from A Taste of Greece, which is one of our standard answers to the question of what to eat when there's nothing in the house. As always, the food was fantastic. I've never had anything there that wasn't delicious (I love their french fries with lemon juice and oregano!!) and, tonight, Kimberly and I both opted for the lamb souvlaki. As always, it was delicious, though I was forced to pick on Kimberly just a bit for ordering lamb twice in two nights.