Offbeat Eats

During our visit to the Detroit area, I was craving some Mexican food. Normally this would involve a trip down to Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood, but for most of the trip we were up in the northwestern Detroit suburb of Livonia. But Carol’s extended family had a favorite Mexican place nearby that they really liked, so we headed off to a strip mall on 6 mile road to visit The Taco Factory.

After meeting up with fellow backpackers Dan and Sarah in Phoenix, our Fitpacking trip to the Grand Canyon headed up north, stopping for dinner in Flagstaff. I’ve always enjoyed Flagstaff, between the cooler climate, the nice setting at the foot of the San Francisco peak, and the more laid back atmosphere, and look forward to trips when I can get that far north. And, in my experience, Flagstaff has always had a good dining scene, especially in the downtown area, with a lot of good restaurants and hang-out spots for nearby Northern Arizona University. But for this visit, we were aiming at a spot just a bit east of downtown on the old historic Route 66: El Tapatio.

A recent trip to various spots of interest around Newfound Lake had us passing back through Bristol, NH around dinner time. While I’ve already got some good places in Bristol that I enjoy, such as The Bristol Diner and LinCross Roast Beef, I decided that this was a good chance to check out another spot. We’ve driven past Cielito in Bristol several times (it’s across the street from The Bristol Diner), and decided that this time we’d actually have dinner there.

Over an extended Labor Day holiday, Carol and I did another Fitpacking backpacking trip to Mount Rainier National Park, and that was a good opportunity to catch up with friends and revisit some favorite locations (well, we tried to do this back in 2022, but Covid-related complications threw a big wrench right into our plans). Before we headed out on the trail, we were meeting up with my college roomate Steve and his wife Emily at their house in Seattle’s Wallingford district. There are a number of good smaller restaurants and breweries in the area, and one I was interested in revisiting for a simple meal after our travels was a favorite from a 2016 (my, how time flies), TNT Taqueria.

One of the more interesting Pandemic-era changes around the “Lower Upper Valley” was that, while there were a lot of restaurant closures, there were also some openings of note, primarily replacing those closures. Particularly when it comes to Mexican cuisine. Newport, NH used to have an outstanding Baja Mexican place, with the odd name of The Little Red Baron, but it closed in a squabble between the town (who owned the building) and the restaurant over septic system refurbishment, and there had been a gap in the area’s Mexican offerings for a while. But, in relatively short succession in 2023, we had three Mexican places show up: Rancho Viejo in Claremont (replacing the departed Pleasant Street Restaurant), Jalisco Mexican Bar and Grill in Newport (replacing the departed and dearly-missed Country Kitchen), and the similar named Casa Jalisco Bar and Grill in Claremont. While I have been to the first two a few times, the last of these I hadn’t had a chance to check it out, and a recent event in Claremont gave me an excuse to drop in.

A few weeks ago, our friends Geoff and Kristi were headed down to Concord, NH, and wanted to check out two spots in downtown Concord: Nawlin’s (a speakeasy that used to be called Mike’s BARbershop) and Hermanos Cocina Mexicana. It’s been a while (2016 to be exact, when I visited El Rodeo in Concord) that I’ve really checked out the Mexican food scene in the Concord/Manchester area, and a quick look at Hermanos Cocina’s menu looked promising, so we decided to give it a look.

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.

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.

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.