the u-shaped theory of mexican food

Many cuisines run on a simple principle: if you get good ingredients and prepare them in a straight forward fashion, you will get good results. In Mexican cuisine, you start with fresh corn. Then you flatten it (tortilla) or mash it (tamale). Add slow cooked meat or roast vegetables. If you want a light taste, add cilantro, onions, lemon or lime.

That brings me to my theory of price-quality correlation in Mexican food. Everything I described is really simple to do and uses very common ingredients, even if it is a bit time intensive. It can also be made in large batches, so it should be cheap to make. And it is cheap in places where people actually care about decent Mexican food. That’s were you get the killer taco truck with excellent chivo tacos for $1.50 a pop. Olive Market in Bloomington has cheap, but good, tacos in this range. Feast, a preppy place, has decent low cost tamales. Darko Taco is our best truck.

So how can you charge $10 or $15 bucks for something that’s nothing other than slow cooked meat with a wrap? I don’t know, but I suspect the $10 enchiladas plate at the local Mexican place with a sombrero statue is charging for “atmosphere.” They are also doing a lot of extra prep – weird red suaces, drowning stuff in melted cheese, etc. Thus, the typical Mexican plate in this range is bad.

Oddly, Mexican food gets a whole lot better once you hit the $15-$20 range. Why? At this point, you hit a price point indicating much higher quality ingredients. For example, you might get a plate with oysters and octopus. Or you might get a grilled steak. They also maintain a good range of real Mexican plates. The knock-off faux Mexican place isn’t going to be chasing customers in this price range because they know they can’t fake it. My favorite is Guiterrez Drive-In in Salinas, California.