E. V. Olive Oil - Tijuana/Ensenada Purveyors

You can get Spanish and Italian olive oils from the major supermarkets of Tijuana and Ensenada (Soriana, Ley, Comercial Mexicana, maybe even Calimax) but they are very expensive. Nothing to do with import duties, just a weak peso against the euro. And the gesture is so much like carrying coals to Newcastle -- our own olive oils are every bit as good as that European stuff.

L. A. Cetto sells olive oil from their own lands. It is excellent and (the last time I bought it) inexpensive. Cetto's cava is on Cañón Johnson, which is Constitución as it heads south past Calle 10. They also sell it at their winery, valle de Calafia, where you can also pick up some of their own canned peaches (?!) and other things. Cetto also has a tasting room or two in Ensenada but I have no current knowledge of those. If you go as far as Calafia Valley, you may as well visit Cetto's next-door neighbor, Doña Lupe, who's been practicing organic farming for a generation now (olive oil, wine, other goodies).

A lot of places along the Ruta del Vino will sell you extra-fancy local produce but expect to pay extra-fancy prices. If you're doing the winery crawl, you might stop at San Antonio de las Minas. There's a cheese shop specializing in Real del Castillo ranchos that also offers olive oil at a price only one or two notches above reasonable.

In Ensenada you could also try Super Pando in the Santo Tomás complex (avenida Miramar between Sixth and Seventh). They cater to the gourmet crowd.

My favorite source of local olive oil is the ejiditarios themselves. Ejidos are (or, soon to be, were) communal agricultural lands: the farmers often sell their products from roadside stands in or near their ejidos. Needless to say, you won't find them along the toll road. The ejidos between Tijuana and Ensenada typically sell such things as tamales, olive oil, cured olives, honey, pollen, and royal jelly.

As you head south out of Tijuana on Carretera 1, the first ejido you'll encounter is Santa Lucía, now called "north Rosarito". There along the southern side of the road, amid now-dense traffic, you'll find a dozen or more stands selling tamales: some of them still sell olive products as well. Just south of the town of Rosarito you might find a few more stands. Then not much until you get to El Tigre, where you might find local cheeses and olive products being sold from a white building on the west side of the road. After that, again nothing until you're south of the main part of Ensenada. I used to get olive oil for a dollar a liter from the ejido at Maneadero -- but the last time, after more than half an hour of WalMart traffic, the ejiditaria charged me seven bucks U.S. for a 375ml bottle. (I dunno, maybe she had just been to WalMart and saw how much they wanted for Spanish olive oil.) Still down to earth is the ejido at La Bufadora (at least the last time I checked) so if you're that far south you may as well head into the peninsula.

Along the Ruta del Vino (Carretera 3) there are also a few ejidos ... El Porvenir and Nécua, I think ... and then a few more once you get north of Calafia Valley, starting with Testarazo.

Baja California's duty-free status really isn't B.S., it just isn't a tourist attraction -- it no longer saves tourists money. Back in the days of protectionist tariffs, yes, it was a tourist attraction. But nowadays it just means that we bajacalifornianos can't bring anything into mainland Mexico (our car, our clothes, our parcel post) without first satisfying the Customs inspector that we're not attempting to import merchandise from the Pacific Rim.

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Mexicali?

For more information: a paperback, China en las Californias (Hu-DeHart, Preciado Llamas, González Félix, and Velázquez Morales, authors), Colección Divulgación, Conaculta/CECUT, Tijuana, 2002, 128pp. ISBN 970-18-8303-9. Four papers in Spanish presented at the symposium of 26 October 2001.
Therein we learn that the Chinese in Mexico did indeed concentrate around the railroad lines throughout Mexico -- because their shops received both goods and customers that way. Also that many of our Chinese landed in San Francisco and were conducted under guard to Mexicali.

The first Chinese in Baja landed in Ensenada as part of a wave of immigration that began in the 1880s and which made landfall also in La Paz and Guaymas. (I'm going to try to attach a photo circa 1945 of the Yun Kui general store of Ensenada, which received the third business license to be issued by the federal territory, circa 1890.) The Chinese population of Mexicali began in the 1910s, when Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler thought they'd make some money sharecropping cotton: they pulled strings to bring Chinese down from San Francisco but, at the same time, many of their tenant-farmers were Chinese and they imported their own workforce in directly, through Ensenada.

The Chinese food here in Baja is not a Sino-Mex fusion, it is garden-variety Cantonese because that is where our Chinese emigrated from. To this day I find new arrivals from Kwantung Province working in these restaurants. Their immigration papers are being sponsored by the owners, distant family members.

The reason for the large number of Chinese restaurants in Mexicali dates back to the nationalist movement of the 1930s. Chinese throughout the country were being lynched or run out of town; the federal territory of Baja California was the one part of the country they were being tolerated. (And that only as a matter of degree, since Mexicali had its own nationalist "hate" groups.) It was easier for the Chinese fleeing the interior of Mexico to hop a train and get off in Mexicali than it was to take a ferry from Guaymas or Mazatlán to La Paz.

The "comida china estilo Mexicali" that I've had in Mexicali, Tijuana, and Ensenada has all been much of a muchness -- almost identical stir-frys heavy on the vegetables and sauced with cornstarch -- so it's hard to recommend one place over another. I have been told by people who know Mexicali far better than I do that it does have a few places better than the rest ... and yet ... no one has ever offered me the name of any of those places...

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Need a recommendation for Tijuana

If you really want to do Bourdain-in-Tijuas, then get away from La Revu (Avenida Revolución). That's all Disneyland. We put that up for the tourists a hundred years ago and they've been falling for it ever since.

Even so, I could recommend La Casita on the west side of the street near Fourth or Fifth, and Sanborns corner of Ninth on the east side: both do a fair simulacrum of real food albeit without the mariachis in Sanborns's case and with the occasional strolling trio in La Casita's. Café La Especial, on the east side near Fourth, is one of the oldest restaurants in the city and still gemütlich in spite of their predilection for combination plates.

Your closest option for real-folks food is on either side of Revu. The three blocks east of Revu have a few restaurants that fall between Bourdain and pasteurized, like Bol Corona on Negrete near Third. Most street food is found west and north of Revu. There are open-air markets on Second and Third between Revu and Niños Héroes, near the old City Hall, which is now a cultural center worth visiting. You can pick up a walking map at the bus station when you arrive and bear in mind that I'm writing from memory, which often errs by a block or two.

What I would recommend to you instead is to arrange with Grey Line to take you home on a subsequent day. Bourdain doesn't get everything done in three hours and neither will you. You can stay at the Hotel Ticuan on Eighth between Revu and Constitución, a good value because it's new. Mexicoach (whose bus terminal your Grey Line will probably dock in) runs a service called City Tour in which open-air busses circulate hourly during daylight hours: you can get off and on at thirteen stops throughout the city. Make a full circuit first while the driver fills you in on the background of each area, and with the next circuit get off at the stops you thought were most interesting. That way you'll get to try the street food of Parque Teniente Guerrero, pub food and beer straight from the tanks at Cervecería Tijuana, fancy food in the Distrito Gastronómico ... you get the idea.

Mariachis usually show up after 7:00pm in locals' restaurants, afternoons on the weekends, and they're getting pretty scarce. Round-the-clock mariachis would be a Revu thing and, on that street, should be taken as a harbinger of bad food and watered drinks.

(Yes, I live in Tijuana.)

Xolotl in Mexico