El Cartel - Finally a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh I can support

This guac rocks. 

One thing I've never been able to do in Edinburgh is find a Mexican restaurant I can endorse.

Sure, I rave about Lupe Pintos deli, where you can buy all the ingredients to make your own brill Mexican food (and get awesome recipes from their cookbooks or just asking the staff), but I've never found a restaurant, cafe, street stall, whatever in Edinburgh that I could recommend to my readers.

Until now. El Cartel on Thistle Street.

Oddly enough, El Cartel was launched by the team behind Bon Vivant, which isn't Mexican. But in spite of that they got it spot on when they cooked this place up.

El Cartel has three things going for it, a kind of Holy Trinity of Awesome that will make them tough to top for the foreseeable future.

1. Simplicity

This may not come as a surprise, but I've often tinkered with the idea of opening a restaurant. But I always get bogged down by the complexity and richness of Mexican cuisine. I would want it to be a taqueria, a fonda, and a restaurante all in one.

That can't really be done. So El Cartel don't do it. This is basically a taqueria (taco shop), and a fecking amazing one at that. By focusing on tacos and getting it so, so right, they probably accomplish more than they could if they tried to add all the soups, tortas, moles, and platos fuertes in Mexico.

2. Authenticity

So they're just going to do tacos (and a few other things). Great. But what kind of tacos?

This is the all-important question, because tacos are probably the most eaten and least understood "dish" in all of Mexican cuisine.

Thanks to Taco Hell, I mean Taco Bell, and the dominance of flour tortillas in Tex Mex and California, most people outside Mexico don't really know what a taco is.

A taco, as I've said before in this blog, is ANYTHING folded up in a soft corn tortilla. None of that U-shaped hard shell crapola.

So whatever the filling, if it ain't in a soft corn tortilla, it ain't a taco. And at El Cartel they only do soft corn tortillas, which are obviously homemade by the way.

Look at the charring and the uneven edges: that's how you know you're eating a good tortilla!

But it also matters what you put in the taco. That ground beef and "seven layers" ain't Mexican either. 

Mrs MexiGeek ordered cochinita pibil, a classic of the Yucatan, complete with cebollas en escabeche. This is absolutely the first time I've dined in a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh that has served something I've actually cooked at home. 

I chose the "duck carnitas". Prehispanic Mexico had no chicken or pork, so they ate wild duck, wild turkey, and venison. These things are still important parts of Mexican cuisine. Having said that, I've never heard of shredding duck into carnitas. Texture-wise this resembled the crispy shredded duck of Asian cuisine. It may sound odd, but Asian fusion is actually pretty big in the trendy bits of Mexico City, so I can imagine this being served in Mexico. And if it isn't, it should be, because this was delicious.

3. Vibe

Great food deserves a great setting. Though the "greasy dive" thing can work for some venues, most people don't want to eat in a shit-hole.

El Cartel has a great vibe. Almost everything is black, and the skeletal dia de los muertos decorations add splashes of colour - as do the snack-bar style spinning coolers of their frozen margaritas. 

The place is casual - walk-ins only, no reservations, but also user-friendly. If there aren't any tables, they send across the street to Bon Vivant and will come fetch you when a table opens up.

One drawback to the black decor is it was way too dark to photograph our food, so the photos in this post were shamelessly ripped off from their Facebook page.

In addition to this, El Cartel also sports some excellent starters, including excellent guacamole with pomegranates (yes, this is a real thing) served with plantain crisps (also a real thing), probably the most impressive selection of tequilas and mezcals of any restaurant in Edinburgh, and their own homemade habanero sauce.

There are other salsas on the table, but forget them. Go for their own brand. I literally couldn't make a better one myself.

Of course, being the aficionado I am, I have some suggestions as well. They use a soft crumbly cheese, which is basically like feta. I hope they look into sourcing their queso from Gringa Dairy. It would give their tacos that extra bit of authenticity.

And while they have ample tequilas, mezcals, and Mexican beers, I would really like to see michelada on a menu, and if any restaurant in Edinburgh is gonna do it, this is the one.

(Miro's Cantina has what they call "michelada" on their menu, but it's just beer and cholula.)

I've been waiting a long time to write a review this positive. I imagine a lot of people are interested in trying authentic Mexican food, but don't have the confidence in the kitchen to attempt these recipes. So I've always wanted to be able to name one local restaurant I could send them to.

And now I have one. El Cartel. The only Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh approved by MexiGeek.

¡Viva la Revolución! or no quiero Taco Bell

I am not on vacation. I am on my Babymoon. (It's totally a word; look it up.)

I haven't been doing much elaborate cooking since the arrival of Baby MexiGeek número dos, but this is a good opportunity to talk about something that's been happening in the UK over the past few years. Some people are calling it the New Mexican Revolution.

I actually have a bad association with the phrase "Mexican Revolution" as applied to food, thanks to crap like this:

Once at Open Mic Night at the Mercury Café (which is the coolest place in Denver), a Hispanic poet summed up his opinion of this ad with the lines

Your revolución is not my revolución.
Fuck that dog.

And for the record, in 21 years of living in the US, I never once saw a Mexican eat at Taco Bell.

This UK "New Mexican Revolution" is essentially a growing interest in and awareness of Mexican cuisine in the UK. And this time it's legit. I've seen it myself.

When I first moved here, it was still a novelty to get flour tortillas in supermarkets, and they were invariably called "wraps".

Every "Mexican" restaurant seemed to be a fajita factory, and no one I met had ever heard of enchiladas.

I once got excited because I found a jar labelled "guacamole" at Tesco. It turned out to be avocado-flavoured mushy peas.

What is it with you Brits and your mushy peas? Seriously.

Of course, even back then there were some early pioneers.

Lupe Pinto's in Edinburgh has been importing and selling Mexican ingredients for over 20 years. They also make hella good guacamole and salsa.

And the Cool Chile Company in London have been importing dried chiles from Mexico since 1995.

I moved to Edinburgh in 2001, and if it weren't for Lupe Pinto's I wouldn't have survived. I got everything from them: tortillas, beans, spices and seasonings, tomatillos, even my favourite Mexican beer, Negra Modelo.

This one time I got a can of chipotles en adobo and made these awesome burritos. But I used the whole can (plus some other chiles) and they were so hot Mrs MexiGeek could literally see through time, like Lisa Simpson when Apu cooked Indian food.

Good times!

But in 2005 Thomasina Miers won Masterchef. Her cooking had a huge influence from her time in Mexico, and she went on to found the Wahaca restaurant chain and write two excellent Mexican cookbooks.

And in the past few years especially there seems to have been an explosion of Mexican products, restaurants, and suppliers, from chipotles in major supermarkets to recipes for Yucatecan pickled onions in Good Housekeeping to the rare and coveted pasillas Oaxaquenas being available on British soil thanks to Luchito.

The thing is, London is getting a disproportionate share of this New Mexican Revolution, especially regarding restaurants.

The majority of the UK quality Mexican restaurants are in London. They even had the UK's only Mexican bakery, Los Pastelitos, until it closed recently. ;(

As the UK's capital and largest city, you'd expect London to have more of everything, and to get everything first. But I'd still like to see a bit of that action up here in Scotland.

There's a Wagamama on Lothian Road; why isn't there a Wahaca as well?

Obviously, this has to be a two-way street. A browse of the menus of Auld Reekie's existing Mexican restaurants still yields a helluva lot of fajitas. But I'm starting to suspect that, at least in some cases, this has more to do with what the clientele demand than what the chefs want to make.

We, as a nation, need to put down the fajitas and try something new.

(Ironically, this "something new" would likely be a very old dish, like pato en pipián, which is duck in a delicious sauce made from pumpkinseeds.)

As soon as Baby MexiGeek can go on a plane, I need to arrange a trip to London to tour some of these places (Mestizo and Taquería are topping the must-see list so far).

Until then, let's all keep spreading the word about Mexican cuisine and see if we can make this a Permanent Revolution.

Loco

I have crazy idea: to write a book -- a novel, though I hate that word -- about a Mexican chef.
It's crazy because I'm not a chef and I'm not Mexican*.
This idea started when I first moved to Edinburgh ten years ago. I found that, contrary to my expectations, Mexican food was available (there was once even a Mexican restaurant across the street from my flat). But it was very different from the cuisine I grew up with in Southern California.
I had always thought of burritos as the prime Mexican dish, but in Britain they are rarely on the menu. Instead, the country is obsessed with fajitas, which I don't remember eating until I was a teenager.
My first thought was "This is not real Mexican food." Then, of course, I realized the food we eat in SoCal may not be authentic either.
Not long after that I discovered a brilliant Mexican deli at Tollcross called Lupe Pintos. They seem to have everything, including homemade tortillas (both corn and flour). I stocked up with provisions and started making my own Mexican food.
Alison, my wife, became very fond of burritos; however as that was all I ever made, it did get to be a bit same-y. I started wondering what else I could cook. Lupe Pintos have their own cookbook, called Two Cooks and a Suitcase (actually I believe they have more than one now). So one year for my birthday, Alison got me the book, and I began broadening my culinary horizons.
They idea for the novel, though came much more recently.
Last summer I was sitting in the Ivory and Willow in Corstorphine with Alison and our daugher Abby. I noticed they had nachos on the menu. A lot of British cafes and pubs serve nachos now (of greatly varying quality). I guess it's an easy dish to make, especially if you don't make your own tortilla chips, and it doesn't require any fancy presentation.
I started thinking about how most Mexican food in Britain is still pretty humble, and not very authentic. And basically, I came up with the plot -- about Mexican chef who seeks to elevate his national cuisine to Michelin-star quality -- by the time we finished our lunch.
But as I said, I'm not a chef, and I'm not Mexican. All my previous writing had been about me, more or less, but this project would require serious research.
So that's what this journey is about: learning how to cook real Mexican food and learning how to elevate it to fine dining. Along the way I'll report on how the book is going and any other culinary experimentations I attempt.
*Actually I do have some Mexican ancestry, but no more than many other Americans from the southwest are likely to have