Next time, just shove a tortilla chip in my mouth and mug me. Damn the Times. Those summer drinking articles just made me thirsty for margaritas in the sun. Six of us headed to Mercadito Grove for after work refreshments.
But I'm sorry, was my shirt so dirty that I needed to be taken to the cleaners? Did I look like I wanted to be bent over a table and banged with a tejolote? To quote Pulp Fiction, DO...I...LOOK...LIKE...A BITCH? My snack-sized beer-battered tilapia tacos with fussy chipotle napa cabbage slaw ($13.50) could have used more lime, more onion, more chili, more anything. Shrimp tacos in a spicy red sauce with slivers of avocado ($13.50) were more flavorful, though there were probably about five shrimp total in the four teeny tacos. A scant cup of mashed avocado masquerading as guacamole was salt free, lime free, onion free, pretty much flavor free -- and at $9.50, far from free (and so very inferior to the one I made in Hudson). The $32.50 small pitcher of white sangria could have been pruno for all the sugary fruit cocktail in it.
Okay, the margaritas weren't bad, but again, they weren't as good as the ones we were making this past weekend. I did like the tres cítricos with fresh grapefruit, lemon, orange and sprinkling of chili powder ($9.50) -- I'm stealing the idea for a cocktail party.
But the bill came out to a whopping $270 for six (only four actually ate dinner) with tax and tip. $270, and I was still hungry and completely sober! Even by insane New York standards, that is way too rich. We paid $270 for the luxury of breathing in exhaust fumes from 7th Ave., noshing on a bland cabbage patch doll's meal and fending off a sleepwalking junkie repeatedly trying to hock $1 roses. (His brilliant sales pitch: "Uno, uno," even though Spanish was clearly neither his first language nor ours.)
We could have gotten 100 larger and infinitely more delicious tacos at Tacos Matamoros, and we still would have had enough money leftover to buy TWO bottles of Don Julio tequila Anejo. I work way too hard for my money to be throwing it away on such utterly forgettable food.
When I was in Mexico City, we went to a mercadito at the edge of town to eat the best $2 octopus tostadas on god's great earth, the tentacles pounded and boiled into tender submission, seasoned brightly with vinegar and herbs, and piled high on a thick, crunchy fried corn tortilla.
"Do you think this kind of food would sell well in America?" the vendor asked me.
I told him it would. I told him we needed him. People would line up to sponsor his visa once they'd tasted his tinga. But a town that allows the mediocre Mercadito to thrive and expand doesn't yet deserve his pulpo.
Mercadito Grove
100 7th Ave. South at Grove
1 9 to Christopher St.
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