Offbeat Eats

One of the things that I enjoy about visiting the Southwest is that you can get a much broader menu of Mexican food choices. While a bit of determined scouting can yield some decent burrito joints and even taquerias up my way, if you are searching for, say, pozole or albondigas, you’re going to have to search pretty hard. But when I’m in Arizona, it’s actually pretty easy to chase some of these things down. In this particular case, I was looking for lunch after helping a friend clean out a fake server farm (Really! Backstory here, he bought the remains of the farm at auction), and decided that what I was really craving was a proper Mexican-style Torta. Since we were in the west Tempe/North Awatukee area, I had a plan: I was going to head up to the Guadalupe Mercado, a nice outdoor market at the corner of Guadalupe and Avenida del Yaqui in the small town of Guadalupe. There we found Del Yaqui in one corner of the Mercado.

One of the nice things about visiting my childhood home in Mesa, AZ is that there almost uncountably many good places with a 10 minute drive to score a really good Mexican breakfast (you can see my previous reviews of Amada’s in Mesa and Salazar Bros. in Tempe, for example). But I really like to mix it up and try new places when I can, so when we recently found ourselves heading down to downtown Chandler for a trip to Peixoto, we decided to check out another place on my potential breakfast burrito hit list: Taqueria Mi Casita.

As mentioned in the previous review, a trip to Arizona often involves meeting up with friends. For our second lunch outing with friends, we went to an old favorite, Culinary Dropout, that I hadn’t visited in a few year. Culinary Dropout is an Arizona-based chain, with the original location opening back in 2010 on Scottsdale’s “Waterfront” to good reviews, and now it has grown to over a dozen locations. We went to the relatively new Scottsdale Quarter location, which is one of the newer “outdoor malls” in North Scottsdale.

My visits to Arizona’s Valley of the Sun always involve a combination of trying to find the new and exciting places to dine, while occasionally indulging in an old favorite. In this case, we headed over to Tempe, AZ, where there, in a fairly nondescript strip mall a block east of Rural Road, sits Delhi Palace. Back in my undergraduate and graduate school days, Delhi Palace was the standard gathering place of not only my own friends, but my brother’s as well; a typical Christmas visit to Arizona could see as many as ten people gathering for the lunch buffet. But as folks age, move away, start families, etc, the annual gathering at Delhi Palace started to fade away, with my last visit with friends happening in 2015 (although a few of us migrated to a similar periodic gather at Haji Baba a few blocks away. This trip, however, I decided to call up my old friend Karla (a veteran of many previous Delhi Palace gatherings) and see how our old haunt was doing.

After concluding my business trip to Tucson, before heading north back to the Phoenix area to catch my flight home, I used this as an opportunity to indulge in another favorite, hitting up a good old-school Mexican cafe. Tucson is a particularly good town to accomplish this; while it has a handful of well-known places (including El Charro, who nominally claims to be the originator of the Mexican-American style deep-fried Chimichanga), if you’re really craving Mexican, head to 12th Avenue in South Tucson. In an approximate 3 mile stretch of 12th Avenue has an outstanding array of Mexican bakeries, taquerias, hot dog stands, and restaurants. And one of the longest existing places on that stretch is El Merendero, which has been in business since 1965.

One of the shortcomings of rural New Hampshire living is that we don’t have a lot of a great breakfast options. There are some breakfast gems both locally (like Lou’s in Hanover) or regionally (like Polly’s in Sugar Hill), but when I’m really craving a good, solid breakfast, I’m generally craving something Southwestern, and we don’t have a lot of good options that way. But I travel a lot, and I recently found myself in Tucson, Arizona, craving some sort of Southwestern breakfast, and also wanting to have breakfast at 6:30 in the morning. And there was one place in Tucson I know would meet these requirements: Baja Cafe.

Back in mid-December, I had a brief work trip to Tucson, AZ. While I can nominally fly into Tucson, it always involves enough connecting flights that it’s pretty much just as easy to fly into Phoenix and drive. This also gives me a good opportunity to have a visit with my parents, and usually that involves a trip out for dinner. In this case, we opted to go for a long-time favorite of both myself and my parents, Blue Adobe Grille.

As my regular readers know, for the last few years one of our major hobbies here at Offbeat Eats has been backpacking, usually with Fitpacking (review here), with us doing periodic 50 mile hikes through various wilderness areas. This year’s first Fitpacking trip back in March took me back to an old favorite, the Superstition Wilderness Area (you can see a nice photo album over on Flickr) for 50 miles of hiking through some of my favorite canyons. As you could read over on the Fitpacking review, the food on Fitpacking is actually quite good, but I’d be kidding you if said that you don’t have the occasional cravings, and at some point on Day 4 of our hike, someone brought up “Cheeseburgers” as a topic, and I immediately found myself craving a specific item: a green chile cheeseburger (and, once the topic of “green chile” came up, I also found myself craving a green chile beer as well to go with it). While the southern Superstitions are generally no place to score a cheeseburger (although they’ve got a decent chile cheesburger up at Tortilla Flat if you’re by Canyon Lake), I knew just the place we needed to go when we got back into town. It was Fate. Fate Brewing Company, to be specific.

We’ve talked more than a little about “Pizza Cognition Theory” here at Offbeat Eats: the theory that the first pizza you are exposed to sets your expectations and preferences for pizza, and it’s something I definitely believe in. But it also applies to other cuisines, in particular, Americanized Chinese food. As I discussed a fair bit in some other reviews, like Rhode Island’s House of Wu, Chinese food’s more than a century-long experience in America morphed it into it’s own sort of cuisine; it’s definitely not “authentic” Chinese anymore, but it’s got it’s own particular culinary multicultural heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it in its own right. And when it comes to Americanize Chinese cuisine, Cognitition theory comes into play here as well, since the general flavor and textural profiles I expect if I’m going out for generic “Chinese” food is mostly sculpted by the spot where I got most of my Chinese food as a child, Golden Gate Chinese Restaurant in Mesa, AZ.

About halfway through my visit to the family in Arizona, my parents noted that almost every food outing my brother and I did was Mexican food (the one notable exception was the obligatory trip for chicken shwarma at Haji Baba). This wasn’t by accident; of the many, many global cuisines that one can easily get in London, Mexican food is distinctly not well-represented, so Dan is pretty much always craving Mexican and Mexican-adjacent food on his trips to the United States. And, while the situation is distinctly less dire, while New England doesn’t suffer as badly as “Old England” does, you’ve still got to go our of your way to find good, authentic Mexican food. So yes, a trip to Arizona usually involves more than few trips for breakfast burritos, usually a trip to one of the area’s old-school Mexican places (this time, we did Los Dos Molinos, which I’ve reviewed back in 2012), and a smattering of other local places. This time, we ended up meeting with our old Social Studies teacher for tacos and cocktails at Tacos Chiwas.