Just a stone's throw away from Montebello...

Oh, absolutely it is :-D

Yeah, pig out paradise?...not exactly how I'd describe SD

So, we've hash and then re-hashed, traversed and then back-tracked up one side of the county and down the other trying to understand what makes SD tick, or fail to tick, as a food/foodie destination, and we've come to no definitive conclusion.

Well, here it is...reality TV

Did you know that according to an article in today's U/T we are a virtual breeding ground for successful contestants on reality TV cooking programs. I'm not so sure we should believe our press, but you read it and decide for yourself - http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/m...

Plus, he's just really a nice guy.

Have you been to his place in V de G...Finca Altozano? Totally relaxing, great food, probably some of the best flour tortillas I've eaten in quite a long time. Just a really nice place to while away an afternoon

Nice little article and Q&A with Javier Plascencia about his cooking philosophies and life. Having eaten at many of his locations, I can attest to the fact that he is doing so much with what Baja offers.

http://www.voxxi.com/chef-javier-plas...

Not sure I'd really want to try those cow udder garnishes, but who knows, maybe, under the right circumstances I might.

Not enough tequila while you were prepping...

If you're grinding the meat for the meatballs anyway, just grind the bacon with it. Saves cleaning a cutting board, a knife and your time to mince it up. It also incorporates into the meat a little better I think.

I know :-(. At least they did some interesting Mexican food while it lasted

If all you can get are canned tomatillos, skip the roasting step altogether. Trying to roast/char a canned tomatillo is next to impossible. Just go straight to the blender. You can still get the char flavor from charring the onions, garlic and fresh chiles is you can get them.

Texcoco and El Charco are stellar examples of regional Mexican being done well in SD.

For some of the cross over stuff, I was thinking more of Chad White's pop-ups, Jay Porter's feature dinners at El Take it EZ and so forth.

I've had good luck with the rotisserie chickens at Sprouts in La Mesa.

If you are in Costco in the late afternoon and early evening (especially Mission Valley), there are people waiting for the chickens to come off the rotisserie, and Costco is cranking them out big time. When you can get them right off the spit and not sitting in the warmer for any length of time, they are generally pretty juicy. Just be forewarned, you need to be aggressive to get the fresh ones, people will run over the top of you to get the ones that are just being put out.

You can broil the tomatillos just as easily and achieve the same result.

Line a small rimmed baking sheet, or pie tin, with some aluminum foil. Lay out your dehusked, rinsed and dried tomatillos. Put directly under the broiler and go about 6 or 7 minutes depending upon their size. Remove from heat, and carefully flip them over. Return to the broiler and go another 3-4 minutes. Remove and let cool. Some of them may burst, but that's okay. Just scrape everything, including any juices, into your blender and then proceed. You can also put any onions, garlic cloves (unpeeled) and chiles in with the tomatillos and broil them too.

Fresh tomatillo sauce (nothing roasted) is fabulous, especially with chicken and fish.

Tomatillo sauce will thicken up, sometimes substantially, as it sits. If stirring isn't enough, just add a little water or stock and you should be good to go again.

SD Mexican food falls almost exclusively into the taco shop genre. Simplicity is the key. Few ingredients, sometimes good flavor, key trait is that it's CHEAP. There is a very small market for mid-to upper end Mexican food.

If your friends are talking about something other than tacos, burritos and combo plates, then, yes, the Mexican food in SF probably far exceeds San Diego.

A carne asada burrito in SD is very, very hard to beat and they're usually pretty good from joint to joint. No rice, no beans, no laundry list of other choices to stuff into the burrito, just a stretchy tortilla with some chew, grilled carne asada, a hit of guac and pico, add the house salsa of your choice. Mission-style burritos are nice, but a SD CAB is better.

Tortas? Not too many places, though the ones we do have are pretty good. Tamales? check. Mole? Mayahuel & El Agave, check. Mariscos? In spades at all price ranges from the $1.25 fish taco at El Pescador to a Gobenador eaten standing in the parking lot at Grape & 30th, to TJ Oyster House and Los Arcos, if it comes out of the ocean, some Mexican restaurant in SD is doing a pretty decent job with it. Pozole? check. Guisados? check. Tortillas from nixtamal? check. Mexican sweet breads? check?

He's the issue with Mexican food in SD, you've really gotta dig to find the good stuff. It's easy if you're in South County because some of the best options are there. San Diego has a completely different mindset about food than does the Bay Area. It's much harder for restaurantuers looking to do something other than tacos, burritos and combo plates, to get a strong enough toe hold to survive in the taco shop culture we have here. As a result, we don't have the diversity that exists in Mexican cuisine here as much as other areas do...in spite of being right on the border.

But, SD does have one thing going for it that SF doesn't and that is our proxcimity to Tijuana and Baja. It is an easy trolly right to the border and some of the most interesting a creative food in the area right now. It's so easy to just go spend the day doing a taco crawl, or sampling local craft beers or wine, or crossing to have a very nice upscale meal at a very reasonable price. The good news is that a growing number of SD chefs are exploring Baja and coming back and introducing some of the ingredients and dishes they're eating SOB in their restaurants NOB.

I don't know that you can really say the Mexican food in one area is "better" than another. They're different because the food culture and attitudes in the two areas are pretty different.

Oh, and rolled taco = taquito = tacos dorado...all one in the same.
Flautas = rolled tacos made from a flour tortilla.

Here's the link to a recent discussion that has an embedded link to a pretty decent list of good places to have Mexican in SD. http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/901875

Bacon isn't perceived to be "healthy", chicken is.

So what? My health is my concern and I'm responsible for it. And given some of my family history, it is important that I DO make reasonable choices the majority of the time.

If I were a diabetic (and for the record, I am not) I think I'd want to know that Costco chicken has added sugar. It might not prevent me from buying and eating the chicken, but it might affect what else I eat along with it.

If were a celiac patient - or feeding a celiac patient - I might want to know that there is modified food starch (frequently from wheat) in the chicken.

I am not gluten or wheat intolerant, but like a good portion of the population I do have a sensitivity to wheat since it's been so overused in the processed food industry. What the hell is wheat in the form of modified food starch doing in my chicken?!?!?? Chickens have done just fine for several thousand years without it. My grandparents raised chickens in Lemon Grove for 25 years and never added wheat to either the feed or their butchered chicken. And I truly resent having to pay $25 or more to acquire a chicken that hasn't been shot up with antibiotics, hormones, steroids, sugar, wheat and "natural" flavorings in the form of spice extracts.

I recently had some DNA testing done on 72 genes related to metabolism and exercise. I now know where I have gene mutations or gene variants (yes, I have an extreme snacking gene variant), if my body metabolizes certain things quickly, slowly or normally. So, what goes in my mouth may not matter to you, but it does matter to me because, well frankly, it's my body, not yours, and I now have a pretty good idea what my body is, or isn't going to do with it.

Your choice is yours and mine is mine. I happen to love bacon and I also eat Costco chickens from time to time. I eat both in moderation and don't really worry about either one all that much.

Your guess is as good as mind...double D?

Foster Farms at Keil's

Dontcha just love it...

The lable says no hormones and no steroids, but the label shows modified food starch (why? in a chicken), potato dextrin, sugar and spice extracts among other things.

I don't know what is worse, chicken on steroids (hello 18 oz single lobe breast) or one pumped full of "stuff" it doesn't need to be.

I've long had a love/hate relationship with those Costco chickens. I know they're pumped full of things that probably aren't very good for me and do nothing but add weight and artificial flavors. On the other hand, when it's 6 pm, I've worked all day (I don't *do* Costco on the weekend) and I'm tired, they're a quick and easy meal that I don't have to make, plus I get leftovers for at least lunch and another meal.

San Diego is, if nothing else, suburban. Most of what happens, happens outside of downtown...or at least it did until very recently. It has absolutely no history of a strong city center, let alone one with a lot of fine dining. In fact, the city center was for years dominated by stinky tuna boats, seedy dive bars and strip joints. Until recently Little Italy and Barrio Logan (nee Logan Heights) were not exactly prime addresses.

Why do you think it would have developed one had not Petco landed where it did? The convention crowd more or less assured that it cater to a clinetel that was either here on a shoestring or expense account.

I think there are also other flavorings that are pumped into the bird as well, "natural" or not.

Lord knows what's pumped into it, but it is good and usually moist.

Geez, now I'm hungry just reading that...

I accessed it from my tablet and not my regular computer, I wonder if that makes any difference. It's not a newspaper I read, so I'm pretty confident that I didn't register sometime in the dim past. Too bad you couldn't get in, they had sidebar links to several other articles, mostly about the abuses of the "juniors" and the the affect that social media was having. In any event, as you noted above, it's interesting and actually somewhat amusing that social media is doing what Mexico has refused to do for so long.

Who knew...

She used to be a regular on HGTV. Haven't seen her for a while but I really like her too (but not for the same reasons you guys do <gg>)

She did the re-do on a restaurant up the street from me that was featured on Restaurant Impossible a couple years ago. The place wasnt' in bad shape to begin with, but she did take it up a couple of notches. I like her design style.

FWIW. . .I didn't have to register to read the piece in the Miami Herald

IIRC, Tom Ham's opened around 1969 or 70.

I go there once a year since our department has had their annual Christmas luncheon there for at least the last 15 years. I never looked forward to it but politicially, it wasn't a function I could not attend.

The food was better this past Xmas than it had been for several years.

Wonder who's going in...

The location is great, but it's cursed, no one survives very long there

If you want a bit of acid try some lime juice. If you can get Key limes that would be great because they tend to be really tart in the U.S., but really, any of the limes we have available to us here would work. I'd probably start by using the juice of 1/2 a lime and if it's not enough work up from there. You could ad the lime juice during the saute stage, or at the end, or possibly a little bit at both points.

You can probably Google something like poblano cream sauce and get lots of hits and ideas for different experiements.

Point taken, but in SD a good view often times does trump the food.

We did some H.S. graduation thing there too...but it was a lot earlier than the late 80s ;-D