The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

https://www.eater.com/2018/3/7/17081968/best-food-texas-tex-mex-barbecue

by samclemens • 8 years ago

182 211 8 years ago

Chardok• 8 years ago

The best part of the "great American melting pot" for me is the fusion of cuisines. Trying to knock a restaurant or food because it isn't "authentic" is completely missing the beauty of the different combinations of flavors and styles that arise. Texans know the difference between Mexican and Tex Mex, and can enjoy both without having to act like one is superior.

By the way if you've never had brisket chili I highly recommend it.

jihadjihad• 8 years ago

Was just talking with my wife about this yesterday when we went to an Asian fusion place for lunch. Sometimes you just want to eat gyoza, sushi, and mapo tofu in the same meal. Doesn't mean you don't appreciate that they're foods from different cultures. It's quintessentially American to gather up the best bits of multiple cultures and offer them all in one convenient package.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

Aren't all modern cultures (with exception of "lost" tribes perhaps) amalgams of multiple historic influences.

It's the quintessence of culture to be a composite of prior cultural aspects.

It doesn't appear to be distinctly American in that it seems to be present in the other continental areas too?

For example traditional British chip shop food includes battered pineapple, and curry sauce and may just as well be cooked for you by a person born in China, say.

jimmaswell3• 8 years ago

It's interesting to think what the transition point was when people just made do with whatever plants and animals were available nearby, and that was "food," to when things became "<country/culture/region/etc> food." If tortilla wraps, beans, etc. were imported to Japan 300 years ago, that would just be Japanese food, but now if a Japanese restaurant started mixing those in, it would never escape the label "Japanese/Mexican fusion" or a variation on that.

geephroh• 8 years ago

Tempura is 16th century "Japanese/Portuguese fusion" cuisine.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170808-the-truth-about-jap...

xeonoex• 8 years ago

This is why Houston food is so great. I actually grew up in the Rio Grande Valley (mentioned in the article), then moved to Houston after graduating from college. Most of the Mexican food in the RGV is really good, but I think Houston has it beat overall, maybe just because of the increased competition. People from the RGV will never agree though, because the RGV is the "authentic" style to them. Most of the time, "authentic" actually means "familiar".

You can find great TexMex and MexMex all around Houston. Not every place is great though. There's always places that serve cheap, bland or stale food. But the best thing about Houston is the variety. There are large populations of people from all over the world. Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and Mediterranean food in particular are pretty popular. Then add the traditional american food, BBQ, seafood, and the Louisiana dishes, and it's hard to find a city with more diversity in food.

RandallBrown• 8 years ago

If you haven't already, check out the Netflix series Ugly Delicious. There's a whole episode about the fusion cuisine in Houston.

nailer• 8 years ago

I'm not American, so have no patriotic love of US food, and was fully prepared for 'authentic' Yucatan to completely eclipse Austin (where I'd eaten a bunch of Tex Mex food before).

I was actually disappointed - the quality of the produce, and the sharpness of flavour in even the cheapest food in Austin eclipsed anywhere on the mid/low range in Yucatan. Queso aside (I do not like American cheese) I'd prefer Austin any day.

minikites• 8 years ago

It's because Mexico ships all the good quality produce to the USA, leaving poor quality produce behind for the domestic market.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

Agreed. The food I got while driving around Baja a while ago was not very good.

always_good• 8 years ago

I lived in Austin. Now I live in Mexico, various parts, and I'd say that Austin has a very short supply of Mexican food.

But there are people who will always prefer Torchy's bizarre tacos over a legit taqueria you'd find in E Riverside or wherever. And they didn't enjoy some of the best tacos I could take them to in Guadalajara. But I would never conclude that Austin's food is better from that sort of experience.

bretthoerner• 8 years ago

Hopefully you realize that your comment perfectly embodies the point of the article?

You're complaining about the "authenticity" of Austin Tex-Mex in a reply to someone who said they loved the Austin food more than "authentic" food they had in Mexico.

weeksie3• 8 years ago

Certainly one of my biggest pet peeves. If I had a nickel for everybody that got in my ear about "authentic" Mexican food and of course was talking about one particular regional cuisine: Tex-Mex, Southwest American, Californian Mexican, Mexico City, . . .

The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.

taeric2• 8 years ago

Completely agreed on the weird obsession that this is. I get wanting to have something you know, but I don't get dismissing the things you don't. Especially on some pseudo ranking based on "authenticity".

dragonwriter8• 8 years ago

Seeking authenticity in cuisine is often about seeking to escape familiar uniformity, rather than avoiding the unfamiliar.

kerkeslager3• 8 years ago

There are tons of examples of this in Japanese food. A friend who spent most of a year in Japan said that they love sauerkraut over there because it has the sour, fermented taste that's emblematic of some of their fine cuisine. Corn (native to North America) is a common topper for ramen. Many Japanese broths and sauces now integrate peanuts (also native to North America).

PakG1• 8 years ago

And how about cheese fondue in South Korea! :) Though apparently they've been making their own cheese since 1959, so at what point may it be considered part of their culture? https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/22701/when-did-c...

Isamu2• 8 years ago

Curry is a huge comfort food in Japan. You see it in every anime.

They reportedly got it from the British Navy, and it has evolved into something distinctively Japanese. The British of course brought it from India.

Japanese curry is sweeter, and has cocoa in it.

speeder• 8 years ago

I am from Brazil, we have largest amount of Japanese when not counting Japan itself. One of the most popular "Japanese" dishes is Tempura that is actually a Portuguese dish seemly introduced in Japan in 1600s or so...

Theory is that Tempura is just corruption of word "Tempero"

vanderZwan3• 8 years ago

When I was an exchange student I had a Mexican friend from Puebla and one from... some small place near the north of Mexico, forgot which one.

They cannot see eye-to-eye over whether burritos are "real" Mexican food. Obviously, being the good friend I am, I liked to poke and prod this.

umanwizard2• 8 years ago

To resolve the debate: I've been to Mexico dozens of times and burritos are very popular among the locals of the places I've been to.

Burritos are Sonoran food and Sonora is part of Mexico.

galdosdi2• 8 years ago

It depends on your definition but FWIW Flour tortillas, which burritos require, were only invented very recently, after Europeans brought wheat to the americas. Wheat tortillas have caught on in some parts of mezixo, primarily near the UsA border but are barely seen in other parts. Corn tortillas are the older more universal staple and have a revered place in mexican history and culture that wheat products do not.

Time marches on and maybe burritos are a regional cuisine but they are surely not a general national cuisine.

As a comparison, pizza is a USA national dish. Scrapple on the other hand is more of a Philadelphia area regional dish, even if Philadelphia is indeed inside the USA.

Use whatever words you want, I'm just sayin'...

kalcode3• 8 years ago

People are always taken back about how much classic staples didn't exist prior to the discovery of America. On top of that realization is that the food wasn't adopted immediately. Meaning a lot of common dishes didn't exist until after 1700/1800s.

Things like tomato sauce and pasta in italian cuisine wasn't until almost 1800. Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'. Yet most cuisine we eat didn't come into existence until AFTER America.

Another example is chilis in thai cuisine. Capsicum didn't make it over the ocean until america was discovered. So all the spicy peppers in so many dishes from Thai to Vietnamese food didn't exist in their cooking until it was brought over and eventually incorporated.

Potatoes is another one. Originated in Peru. Russian potato vodka? Irish Potatoes? Germans bangers and mash?

Nope, nada until America was discovered.

Chocolate, Vanilla. Staples of desserts of european cooking...except not until America was discovered.

These above ingredients alone are associated with so many traditional recipes but they didn't exist until recently. It really shows how quickly food and traditions change and the idea of 'authenticity' is over blown.

dragonwriter8• 8 years ago

People are always taken back about how much classic staples didn't exist prior to the discovery of America.
Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'.

I can pretty much guarantee that's not true of discussion of authentic cuisine of the Mexican or Tex-Mex varieties, since “Mexico” and “Texas” are both post-Millenial identities, and both identities of the Americas. Sure, it might apply to some views of authenticity of European, Asian, or African cuisines (and if by “America” you actually mean the “European colonization of America”, which some parts of your comment suggest, it might apply to similar views of authenticity of Native American, including Inuit, Aztec, Inca, etc. cuisine.

But, even where it might apply, I don't think that is what people usually mean by authenticity; they mostly mean before changes made to support mass commercial distribution or production, and without adaptation to ingredients they are locally cheaper or more popular in places outside of the place where the cuisine originates. (In America, that concern might often be phrased as “before Americanization”, but that's not “before any impacts of the discovery of America”.)

dllthomas• 8 years ago

Germans bangers and mash?

Not that germans don't eat plenty of potatoes and sausage, but "bangers and mash" is a British thing.

steve_adams_862• 8 years ago

Saying America was discovered is correct terminology from the colonial perspective hundreds of years ago, but I think today the proper term would be when America was colonized. It had been discovered a long time before then, and it might strike native Americans and others as a eurocentric way of speaking about history.

atomi• 8 years ago

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_plants_of_Mesoame...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Exchange

derefr3• 8 years ago

Being discovered in the New World by European explorers (and then taken back to Europe and cultivated there); vs. being a cultural invention of people living in the Americas and having to deal with its local climate and growing conditions; vs. being discovered by European explorers but found to only grow in the local climate and so farmed there, are all pretty different things, and it’s weird to conflate them like this.

Tomatoes and potatoes, and the vanilla bean, were cultivated in Europe, by Europeans.

Chilies were cultivated in the Americas (over 6000 years ago), and then traded to European explorers who took them back home and grew them there, too.

The cocoa bean was cultivated in the Americas, by the Olmec; and then traded to European explorers who tried to grow it, failed, and ended up invading the area to farm it.

Of these, the first is European cuisine, through-and-through. The second is aboriginal Mesoamerican cuisine. And the third is what you might call “American” cuisine, insofar as—like most of the historical cuisines in America itself—it was a cuisine invented by farmers from Europe (and the slaves they brought from everywhere else) learning to live in the Americas.

magic_beans• 8 years ago

The Americas were never "discovered" -- the myriad people living across the Americas certainly knew it existed. The land, and the people inhabiting them, were conquered.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

Tobacco. Corn. New World squash. Peanuts. The impact was immense.

vidarh• 8 years ago

I just made "viking" bread with my son as part of his homework, and I have no illusion that the recipe I found is authentic either, but the first recipe I found had potato flour in it...

"Authentic" viking bread would have been made with hand-milled oat and rye, with some wheat; to date you can see much more oat and rye harvest in most parts of Scandinavia; but just as you point out, potatoes are today also seen as an essential part of an "authentic" Norwegian diet and is a part of most dishes considered traditionally Norwegian.

Even more amusing to me is that while porridge is authentic in that respect, the most common modern types are not: rice porridge is certainly quite modern, yet it's pretty much considered as authentically Norwegian as you can get to have rice porridge served with butter, sugar and cinnamon, with both sugar and cinnamon being "modern" introductions.

And it was first a few years ago I learned that most of the Christmas cookie traditions we have are less than a century old, with ironic ones like "fattigmann" (literally "poor man") being introduced in the 1930's in a cook book where the recipe including more eggs than the average 1930's family consumed in a year, and so not actually spreading until much later.

Christmas traditions in particular, now that I have a kid of my own, has driven how that "authentic" and "tradition" usually really for the most part stays consistent only a generation or two. What my son is growing up with certainly has some parts in common with the Christmas celebrations of my childhood, but it has already morphed drastically, both in terms of traditions and even the food we insist is very authentic.

analog31• 8 years ago

I'd love to read an article about what people actually ate before those staples arrived.

An amusing side note: I read about an analysis showing that Stradivarius used a red pigment from America in some of his violins. I doubt it had an effect on the tone, but it's just interesting to see what kind of trade was occurring.

Fnoord• 8 years ago

Saying it is because of the discovery of America (apart from the unfortunate choice of words wrt "discovery"; it was already discovered) completely discredits and discounts all the importing of e.g. spice from Asia.

Example: Dutch speculaas cookies [1].

"Speculaas dough does not rise much. Dutch and Belgian versions are baked with light brown (sometimes beet) sugar and baking powder. German Spekulatius uses baker's ammonia as leavening agent. Indian, Indonesian, and Mediterranean spices used in speculaas are cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper; these were common in the 1600-1700s due to the Dutch East Indies spice trade. Family recipes may also include other small amounts of spices like anise, etc." [emphasis mine]

I don't know what's been more important for which cuisine, but not mentioning say VOC's imports and only WIC (which was smaller and came a good ~20 years later) is inaccurate. The WIC was more into slave trade, especially after conquering of Angola and Brasil from the Portuguese.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas

valuearb2• 8 years ago

Agreed. Moved to Phoenix from Portland, Oregon and I love Mexican and Tex-Mex. But all the Mexican I've tried here is just good, not great, family style mexican.

The closest place to great food is the TeePee, which is about as unassuming as a restaurant can get. The fancier places just crank up the spiciness to uncomfortable levels.

The best mexican?/tex-mex? I've ever had is still Chez Jose in Portland, Oregon. I'm really not sure how it's classified, other than awesome. Every trip back we eat there almost every day.

stoolpigeon• 8 years ago

Or could it be that you just prefer what you got at home?

I grew up in Phoenix and love going back for the amazing Mexican food. From more established places like Los Dos Molinos to the little out of the way dives, there is no way you can convince me that Phoenix doesn't have good Mexican food. Tex-Mex I don't care about but I've spent plenty of time in Mexico too and Phoenix has great Mexican.

brandonmenc2• 8 years ago

Try Restaurant Mexico (Res Mex) in downtown Tempe, on Mill Ave.

flyinghamster2• 8 years ago

The closest place to great food is the TeePee, which is about as unassuming as a restaurant can get.

This is a principle that I've often found applicable to Mexican/Mexican-American food: the more impressive the decor, the less impressive the food. The Chicago area has lots of unassuming taquerias that knock the socks off of fancy, nationally-advertised chains.

brandonmenc2• 8 years ago

I feel this.

Growing up Italian-American, with relatives who came off the boat cooking things for me, then having a 'merican who did a semester abroad in a single city in Italy tell me the way I cook isn't "authentic."

galdosdi2• 8 years ago

Ha! I've had the same experience many times as a Mexican American. Usually with Texans and Californians who visit NYC, try say, some actually authentic mexican tacos, and pronounce them lame and "inauthentic" because they do not resemble americanized texmex they grew up on.

Like, what? I'd understand the complaint if we'd gone to a place advertised as texmex.

I guess the annoying thing is they misleadingly refer to texmex food as "mexican" which it is not. It is a separate (and also tasty) cuisine that relies on different traditions and ingredients, eg flour instead of corn tortillas. Food is all great, but lets not use confusing terms

solatic• 8 years ago

Just to echo on the search for authenticity, many places in the US will serve food at a higher level of quality than many places in the country of origin. Abroad, the food comes under the same economic pressure as anything else, and most of what is available cheaply will be mass-produced somewhere and sold out to people who are eking out a living reselling it to consumers. The difference in the country of the origin is that the local industrialized production of the ingredients will make the product cheaper compared to US restaurant prices, and it will be available more widely than the one or two restaurants in the US city who make the food, but it's definitely not as high quality as the US restauranteurs who need to make more of the ingredients from scratch.

It's one thing to object to food being sold as a certain style when that style would never include some of the ingredients that are being included, but it's well more important to just make delicious food.

nostalgeek2• 8 years ago

Just to echo on the search for authenticity, many places in the US will serve food at a higher level of quality than many places in the country of origin.

Pretty sure it applies neither for French or Italian cuisine.

clairity4• 8 years ago

i think it's the crap-ton of processed cheese and beans in many tex-mex dishes that tarnishes it's authenticity. (the long and rambling article mentions this, but i didn't have the patience to figure out what they really thought it was.)

i like a good breakfast taco but i'm not generally a fan of most tex-mex. it hits you over the head with lard, carbs and over-cooked meats with no balance to it at all.

mcguire4• 8 years ago

Beans, along with maize ("corn") and squash, are staples in pre-Columbian America.

bluedino2• 8 years ago

Beans tarnish the authenticity? It's all about beans. My father was a migrant worker, they came from Mexico to Texas and then whatever state they could find work in. All they ate was beans and tortillas, that's all they could afford.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

Hey! Don't knock canned refried beans. They are low in saturated fats, have good quality protein. And tasty! Its too easy to use the word 'processed' when it just means 'cooked'.

vram223• 8 years ago

There was a good John Steinbeck novel in which beans were often mentioned, probably tortillas too. It might have been Cannery Row or another title. Enjoyed reading it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannery_Row_(novel)

olso4052• 8 years ago

It might just be a slightly mislabeled desire for new/good food. People probably say "authentic" when what they mean is "something different from what I've been getting in my hometown for the last 20 years". And they probably say "authentic" when they really just want quality preparation and ingredients. Quick, cheap American interpretations of ethnic food has become synonymous with inauthenticity, but obviously that's not always the case.

idk, I get what you are saying, it's a bit of an empty cliche, but at the same time, I think there are interesting things people are trying to ask for, just using the wrong words

mcguire4• 8 years ago

I had a friend once who complained about the baby corn in Chinese food not being authentic. I just looked at him.

That's like complaining about tomatoes in Italian cooking.

steve_adams_862• 8 years ago

Also what the hell, those little corns are great! I don't care where they came from.

derefr3• 8 years ago

Most people who speak of “authenticity” don’t really want “authentic” Mexican food”; what they’re really after is food with a clear regional provenance. They want food with a cultural narrative behind it, where that narrative doesn’t feature their own culture as one of the characters.

JackMorgan• 8 years ago

Having grown up in Costa Rica, and having worked as a tour guide in Mexico - this is extremely true. People love the idea of authentic Costa Rican food, but for me growing up that meant beans and rice 5 dinners a week. It sounds fun and authentic - for meal one...

code_duck• 8 years ago

I moved to northern Minnesota and found that the Mexican food was generally low quality. Not only the recipes and style, but especially preparation, ingredients, presentation, quality standards and just about everything. However when I mentioned this to people there they would immediately say something like “I know it’s not -authentic-, but...”. However my point was that average sit-down family restaurants served food that more resembled a TV dinner or fast food place’s meals, which is not really related to authenticity.

marzell• 8 years ago

Coming from NorCal, everyone seems to think they are an expert on what 'authentic' Mexican food is, even if they've never been there or only to a resort. There's also a strong tendency toward fetishism of truly crappy food, which people cutely term 'simple' or 'rustic' but which often is in fact poorly prepared and overly salted and made from the cheapest of ingredients.

It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.

The taco truck under the BART tracks in Oakland with the $6 heart-attack (and heart-burn) burritos doesn't serve traditional/authentic Mexican food, it serves traditional Cali/NorCal Taco Truck food. If you love it, that's great, but honor it by celebrating what it really is, which is a separate food tradition that is wonderful in it's own way.

sbussard2• 8 years ago

which often is in fact poorly prepared and overly salted and made from the cheapest of ingredients.

Like Chico's Tacos!

It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.

Fact! I prefer the style of cuisine that comes from the Chihuahuan desert.

ryanmarsh• 8 years ago

I had a nickel for everybody that got in my ear about "authentic" Mexican food

I liken this obsession with simulacra[0]. People looking for an original of something that never existed. “Greek” or “Mediterranean” food in the US is like this too.

Although nothing beats Tex-Mex, fight me.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

wutbrodo2• 8 years ago

The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.

I strongly disagree; it can be pretty useful in certain contexts. Namely, on contact with US/Western market demand, a lot of cuisines get blander, sweeter, less complex, and sometimes heavier. (The history behind this is pretty interesting, and if you'd like i can pull up a source on this). For those whose palate is used to more flavor and complexity than the Western palate, the difference between the Americanized form of a cuisine and the "authentic" version can be pretty substantial. The latter can be preferred for either reasons of taste or reasons of variety (the difference between American Chinese and American Thai is far tinier than the difference between a given regional Chinese cuisine and a given regional Thai cuisine). Note that this is probably the case in every country: I was born and raised in the US, and I remember finding McDonald's to be pretty bizarre when I'd visit India, because the flavors had been modified to fit the local palate so heavily (this was about 20yrs ago; I gather that the menu has changed a lot since).

This isn't a search for authenticity per se, which as you say, is pretty much meaningless. It's just an attempt to avoid the flattening of every cuisine into a similar spectrum of flavors. Unfortunately, restaurants only exist if there's enough demand for them, so food with flavors outside of the country's palate are hard to sustain unless there's an ethnic enclave nearby that can support an "authentic" place.

weeksie3• 8 years ago

I get what you're saying but the same is true of any transplanted cuisine. Thai food in Australia is different than in the US is different from wherever but in most cases it's a lot closer than you're giving credit for—which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south? And of course you get some places like Uncle Boon's in NY that do a tremendous job of recreating Thai street food but wrap it up in a lot of cuisine. I can promise that Uncle Boon's is not frequented by FOB Thai immigrants, but I doubt the menu will lose its flavor profile.

As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.

Besides if we're talking about the western palate we're including all of Europe in that, with an incredible diversity of cuisines and tastes.

colordrops• 8 years ago

I think people typically mean traditional when they say authentic.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

Seriously, when is the last time you ate at a good restaurant serving Canadian food. :-)

On a more serious note, one of the interesting things about the IBM Watson Cookbook was looking at food not by region but by k-means clustering around a set of spice vectors. It really drove home for me the notion that 'regional' food really was more about the reliable availability of certain flavors and spices than it was around culture or people.

mwfunk• 8 years ago

Agreed. Whenever I hear people use authenticity as a litmus test for good food, it always comes across as being snobby for the sake of being snobby. Not only is authenticity in food a very fuzzy concept, but it really has nothing to do with quality (it may even suggest lower quality).

It's like saying that something that's popular must be bad, or that something that's expensive must be good. I mean, if you're a connoisseur of something, then you inevitably end up learning about the more authentic, less well-known, more exclusive versions of that thing. But saying that those are defining qualities of anything is BS, and only reveals the degree to which someone is a connoisseur because they actually appreciate something, vs. it's just part of the personal image they want to project to other people.

kodablah4• 8 years ago

The death of traditional tex mex is hinted at in the article. I think it's because the vast majority of transplants and modern youth simply do not want cheap mounds of food from dingy establishments. Yet true tex-mex can only operate this way. They cannot raise prices and modernize their establishments because then they are completing on a separate, higher-priced plane. I'm not going to a tex-mex restaurant that wants > $8 for lunch because it's unlikely to be tex-mex. But others are not going to any dingy restaurant serving mounds of unhealthy, greasy food regardless of prices, and so we have the impasse.

It's no different than saying froyo is killing the ice cream truck.

Having said that, there are still a ton of tex mex establishments just barely raising their prices. Some are locally chaining up (e.g. Matitos, Cristinas, etc in the Metroplex), some are not really traditional (or in the process of losing it) and already chained up (Chuys, Pappasitos, Uncle Julios, etc). The rest are operating on small margins, but they're not completely dead and some are even opening anew or revamping. They are no longer dirt cheap, but still not expensive.

conductr7• 8 years ago

In Dallas area, I find you have to go south to find anything close to authentic. Like Herrera's in Oak Cliff (which is now even getting chained up). Dallas is very economically segregated and south is where the these rent issues are less present and dense mexican communities have formed.

kodablah4• 8 years ago

While mostly true, we have to be careful with words like "authentic". Tex-mex has variations in every area, even among metropolitan areas (same deal w/ Fort Worth, except many "authentic" ones are in North Fort Worth). For example, I consider a chimichanga to be quintessential tex-mex even though it's probably not Texan or Mexican and not "traditional" or "authentic". Some tex-mex places may laugh at you for asking while others will serve it proudly.

bfuller3• 8 years ago

There's also plenty of places in east Dallas. I'm finding you have a lot of criticisms about Dallas that are more about you not knowing your way around here than the actual food scene.

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

The death of traditional tex mex is hinted at in the article. I think it's because the vast majority of transplants and modern youth simply do not want cheap mounds of food from dingy establishments.

This is the fate of local business in general when cities gentrify, not just Tex Mex or restaurants. You either make yourself suitability upscale and worthy of the newcomeer's dollars or get priced out because everyone else will. The city trades culture for dollars. Hole in the wall establishments don't survive that.

kurthr• 8 years ago

Tex-Mex was really popular in Europe in the early 90s (along with the color orange). I ate at a restaurant in Paris that served decent enchiladas and chalupas, but the guacamole old, brown, and inedible. Today, I suspect you could get much fresher avocados... and of course margaritas are everywhere.

Now Tex-Mex is moving up-scale even in Texas. It's weird, but there's so much competition at the food trucks, fast casual, etc that it's hard for the old grease ladlers to pay the rent (and rent has really gone up).

The joke, “Tex-Mex is it’s invented in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio makes it popular, and Austin takes all the credit.” really only sounds right in Austin where self-deprecatory hipsterism is a thing. The valley and SA don't care.

nimbius• 8 years ago

Whats killing tex mex --and frankly quite a number of other american fusion cuisines-- is what I like to term lard-as-a-service. Elites didnt kill tex-mex, Texas did.

Things like Tacos al Carbon and fajita dishes take time, patience, and effort to achieve not only a reproducible but flavorful and healthy results. Huitlacoche, corn, and other fresh produce have the duality of problems for restaurants and cooks: discounts offered only at scale and the potential to spoil.

Finally, places like McDonalds have ruined food. Everything has to be delivered in 6 minutes or less, or your yelp review will shutter your business. this combination of 'fast/cheap/good' drives restaurants to eschew creative dishes and involved recipes in favor of simple durable ingredients. Sure, the fajitas came frozen, but most customers wont care if you fry them in margarine and drown them in an ocean of inexpensive cheese that has an amicable shelf life. Refried beans can either be made in house, or if you dont like the idea of hiring a chef for a fair wage, purchased from a sysco truck on 70lb batches of flavourless grey box shaped paste.

Or, skip it altogether and sell something that was cheaper than sourcing 6 vegetables like Brisket and canned beans. So long as someone else cooked it, its not on your ledger.

jimmaswell3• 8 years ago

Do that many people look at yelp? The most anyone I know sees are the reviews that pop up on Google Maps, and I've never noticed those reviews to be unfair about small wait times or the like.

ravenstine2• 8 years ago

Everyone I know looks to Yelp first, I'm guessing in part because Google Maps' UI for reading reviews is somewhat obtuse in contrast. I live in the LA area, so it's possibly a regional thing.

chrissnell3• 8 years ago

I was born and raised in San Antonio. My grandmother wrote a locally-famous cookbook back in the 1960s, "The World of Mexican Cooking". [1] It's actually almost purely Tex-Mex, although she does have a chapter for "Mex-Mex" recipes. The recipes are fantastic, authentic, and most are easy enough fo r the average home cook to prepare. I asked my aunt, who now owns the copyright, if I could typeset the book in LaTeX and distribute it under an open-source license. She was cool with it and I started the transcription but never got beyond the second chapter--it's hard, tedious work! If anybody knows of some software that I can feed scanned pages into and get a PDF of OCR'ed text plus the artwork (it had wonderful art doodled in between the pages and paragraphs), please let me know.

By the way, Tex-Mex is the quintessential melting pot cuisine and one of the things that ties us San Antonians together. Tex-Mex has been embraced by many different ethnicities. My great aunt and uncle were children of Syrian-Lebanese immigrants who came to the US via Mexico. They opened up a restaurant, Karam's, that was one of the most famous and popular Tex-Mex restaurants in San Antonio for decades until it closed in the early 2000's.

If you're ever in San Antonio, skip all of the crappy tourist restaurants on the Riverwalk and head straight for the original location of the Blanco Cafe [2]. In my opinion, it's the most authentic and delicious Tex-Mex joint in town.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/World-Mexican-Cooking-Margaret-Curry/...

[2] https://www.yelp.com/biz/blanco-cafe-san-antonio

* EDIT: I just remembered that I did scan the book to PDF already. I have it here on my phone but I'm on a plane at the moment. Once I'm on the ground, I'll see about uploading it to Github for everyone to check out. The scanned version is sub-optimal and I think my grandmother would have appreciated my efforts to typeset this. If you're interested in helping out, we can figure out some way to divvy up the chapters and you can help me with OCR+proofing or doing the image->text manually. Thanks for your nice comments! I hope to get something for Show HN soon.

jimmaswell3• 8 years ago

There are book scanning machines on Amazon of varying price and complexity, some advertising coming with OCR capability of their own.

fein• 8 years ago

I might be missing something, but that tex mex eatery has food that actually looks worse than the Mexican places up here in the mid west.

kodablah4• 8 years ago

I might be missing something, but that tex mex eatery has food that actually looks worse than the Mexican places up here in the mid west.

You're not missing anything, that is tex-mex and I promise you it is not worse. That is just how it looks but it's awesome.

chrissnell3• 8 years ago

That's just the thing about Tex-Mex: it's a dumpy-looking plate. A truly authentic plate of chile con carne enchiladas consists of corn tortillas softened in hot oil, then filled with greasy cheddar cheese (never that white-and-yellow mix crap), then topped with enchilada gravy (a roux), and greasy all-beef chili (no beans!!!!) and more greasy cheese. It's assembled and then put under a broiler to melt the cheese. The result is a melted mess on the plate. Not fancy, but oh, does it taste good... Blanco Cafe is a dingy little hole in the wall with chipped tables and dirty fluorescent lighting on the ceiling but it's the best plate of enchiladas you've ever had. Order the Mexican Dinner plate.

kerkeslager3• 8 years ago

Food photography is insanely difficult: just like they say, "the camera adds 10 pounds", lighting and color differences between direct vision and photos make food look slightly off. Our brains are attuned from millions of years of evolution to see anything slightly off with our food to be gross. As a result, even food that looks delicious in person looks disgusting in photographs unless you're extremely careful to get the lighting just right. Professional photographs like this[1] are carefully lighted and highly edited, and even slight variations can make the lettuce look a bit off and the bun a bit burnt[2] or the pickles seem old and the cheese fake[3].

Long story short: people's low-res cell phone photos of half-eaten food taken under fluorescent lights basically indicate nothing about the food.

[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/usa/documents/newbigma...

[2] http://louiseroserailton.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/mcdo...

[3] http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/10/article-2171302-13...

bg42• 8 years ago

As a resident of Dallas, thanks for this :) Looking forward to trying the recipes.

bg42• 8 years ago

Wow, is this really going to 1-2k a copy?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0931722462/ref=tmm_p...

Bought a copy off of eBay for $10. Not sure what the above is about.

conductr7• 8 years ago

Life long Texan and agree San Antonio has the best Tex Mex. Houston & Austin are close enough to be very good (and where my expectations come from, first 25 years living there). I live in Dallas now, the Tex Mex here is just horrible (comparatively). It's more of a Cali/modern inspired style. I've only found a couple places that are close to what I consider authentic, but they're in odd locations that are difficult to patron. This, well the Dallas food culture in general (it sucks), is my biggest complaint about living in this city.

That said, I still eat Tex Mex 2-3 times a week, but always look forward to my visits back to Houston/Austin. Unfortunately don't make it to SA too often but will give that place a try next time I do.

friesen• 8 years ago

El Paso would like a word with you.

Agree with you on the food situation in Dallas in a general sense. But you can find loads of great tex-mex in East Dallas and Oak Cliff.

djrogers2• 8 years ago

I live in Dallas now, the Tex Mex here is just horrible (comparatively). It's more of a Cali/modern inspired style.

California would like a word with you...

To call Cal/Mex cuisine 'horrible' is patently ridiculous. If you can say that, haven't had a gordita from an L.A. roach coach, or a green corn tamale from El Cholo, or a Mission style burrito, etc etc.

Oh, and lest we not forget San Diego - a legit fish taco is sublime.

mmagin• 8 years ago

I can't be the only one who would donate to a Kickstarter (or similar) to fund this. :) If you've already got it scanned, it would be easy to outsource some of that work.

dragonwriter8• 8 years ago

By the way, Tex-Mex is the quintessential melting pot cuisine

Not really; it's not any more of a melting pot than south-of-the-border Mexican cuisine is, or than California cuisine is (among many others.) It's just a melting pot with different sources and biases.

tptacek2• 8 years ago

Quintessential means "perfect example", not "most".

mauvehaus• 8 years ago

My wife and I made a cookbook for our wedding. We had people submit (hopefully "old family") recipes electronically, and collected them into a slim volume.

Recipes we got in text form we typeset directly with almost no editing, recipes we got in image form, we included in image form. I did the layout with Scribus, and then we got copies printed and handed them out as our wedding favors.

It was exhausting work.

I don't think I've ever underestimated the scope of a project quite as badly as that one. If it weren't for a substantial volume of bourbon, and the fact that I was between jobs at the time and could work on it full-time, we'd have never gotten it done in time for the wedding.

As it was, we were way too close to deadline to get the printing and binding done inexpensively from an internet vendor. We ended up using a local printer and binder, and while it was a lot more expensive than going with an internet vendor, they really pulled the project out of the fire for us[0].

All this to say: What you're doing sounds amazing. And as you've discovered, is an astonishing amount of work. If you keep it up, I promise that the results will be worth it, but it's a long way to go to get there.

I would caution you that even if you manage to OCR the text with relatively few errors, a lot of the work in doing a cookbook is in the layout. You may have discovered this already, and if so I apologize, but getting the text into electronic form is, at most, half the battle.

Good luck, and if you get through this project, please submit it to Show HN so we can all see it!

[0] Red Sun Press deserves a shout-out for their work and their willingness to deal with a print run of <100 copies a <100 page book. If you're in the Boston area, I highly recommend them: http://www.redsunpress.com/

skxx• 8 years ago

Hey there fellow Texan. If you're planning on releasing it on a permissive license I'll help with what I can. Do you already have high quality scans of the pages you could upload to GitHub?

chrissnell3• 8 years ago

I'm on a plane right now but I will try to get it scanned when I get back. I'll edit my top level post when I do. Thanks!

AdmiralAsshat• 8 years ago

I have no experience with LaTeX, but if you setup a GH repo for the open-source chapters and privately send me a scan of the book, I and/or others could submit PR requests on a chapter-by-chapter basis with some plaintext transcriptions. Someone could mark up the recipe sections to LaTeX from there.

jimktrains2• 8 years ago

Ditto on this! LaTex also isn't too terribly difficult, so it might be possible to get 90% the way there just by copying what's been done for the first chapters already, and then @chrissnell can do the fine formatting how he'd like it to look.

pchristensen2• 8 years ago

Tex-Mex is the quintessential melting pot cuisine

Wouldn't that be fondue?

mieseratte• 8 years ago

Wouldn't that be fondue?

Assuming you're not cracking wise, that would be a reference to the American "Melting Pot," that is the mixing of cultures, as opposed to a culinary term.

mkm416• 8 years ago

Queso!

njarboe• 8 years ago

Nice to hear you feel that Tex-Mex as a melting pot cuisine. I would concur. The article itself is so focused on the race, sex, nationality, and class of the cookers of the food I find it unreadable. The author is definitely not interested on how food can tie us together.

nubianwarrior• 8 years ago

Another thing that will not tie us together is continuing to ignore conversations that are uncomfortable, or as you put it unreadable, to you.

jriot• 8 years ago

I would also add that Cajun food is a quintessential melting pot cuisine.

the-pigeon• 8 years ago

Authentic Mexican cuisine means Mexican food in the style of someone's favorite Mexican restaurant. Typically one in their hometown.

ARCarr• 8 years ago

I want to help with transcribing this.

cicero2• 8 years ago

LaTex-Mex?

matthewmcg• 8 years ago

I, for one, would love to see a "TeX Mex" cookbook.

unethical_ban• 8 years ago

Blanco Cafe is pretty good - I've been there many times, drive by it several times a week. Chuy's is a good Texas chain for Tex-Mex as well. Taco Cabana... meh, but it does it. Pappasitos too.

San Antonio also opened my mind to true Mexican, like Jalisco style food heavy on lard, onion and fried stuff like Carnitas.

nikanj• 8 years ago

Fiverr.com, mechanical turk or something similar should get these typed in for less than $5 per page. Throwing money at the problem might be easier than sacrificing time.

xingped• 8 years ago

Would love to help you out with the book! Let me know!

ddavis• 8 years ago

Thanks a lot for sharing, I enjoyed reading this.

I spent most of my life in Texas and went to college in Austin. The first thing out of my mouth when I get home: "let's go grab some Mexican." I can't think of anyone (friends and family living outside of Texas) that doesn't do the same -- Tex-Mex will never be killed :)

jordigh2• 8 years ago

The article doesn't seem to talk about it, but why do people crave authenticity anyway, as if they were afraid that they were getting scammed by their food? Nobody cares that spaghetti bolognese isn't from Bologna or that Haägen Dazs isn't a remotely Scandinavian word, and nobody had cared for a long time. Why are they caring now? More internet? More migration?

What's changed that's making everyone realise, in abject horror, my god, we have seen this food's ethnicity, and it is ours!

ravenstine2• 8 years ago

People like things that seem exotic because it's novel.

They care more now because life is generally easy(or, rather, straight-forward) so people need amusement and ways to feel special. It's unique experience they crave, even if it's the merely perception. Oddly, flavor comes second. [ which I believe is the case with the recent popularity of phở, but that's my subjective belief. ;) ]

pmichaud• 8 years ago

My pet theory is that our culture is becoming increasingly atomiticized, like everyone experiencing their lives as entirely disconnected from anyone else or to history or some bigger sense of meaning.

There are upsides to it, but I think people are craving some "grounding" in a world where things/groups exist for deep reasons--where there's a continuity of identity that lasts many generations instead of the blink it lasts in most peoples' current experience.

banned1• 8 years ago

First it was Tex Mex music. Now this? :-(

cicero2• 8 years ago

When I think of "authentic" Tex-Mex, I think of El Fenix in Dallas. They certainly have a long (in American terms) and interesting history[1] with that cuisine. My favorite comfort food, especially during cold weather, is their Mexican Dinner with tamales, chili con carne, and a cheese enchilada.

1: http://www.elfenix.com/history

kodablah4• 8 years ago

I don't think that, personally, at least its modern incarnation. But this just goes to show that opinions differ on this. Also we shouldn't necessarily attribute history to "authenticity" as many times the history is held up for marketing purposes and does not represent their modern approach.

sudosteph• 8 years ago

Growing up in NC, I was never really exposed to the idea that there were different types of Mexican cuisines in the US. Everything was just "Mexican" food there. Now that I've experienced west coast varieties, I'd definitely say it's Tex-mex dominant in the southeast. Queso is such a staple there. I just couldn't believe it when I arrived in Seattle and couldn't find it anywhere!

I don't think tex-mex will die any time soon though. It definitely is a comfort food that people will always crave. I haven't noticed a downturn in tex-mex style mexican in NC, but it's not competing with Brisket there either. Still, even small towns in NC usually have some sort of mexican restaurant, often staffed by immigrants from Mexico with soccer games playing on the TV, so maybe that makes it feel more authentic. Ultimately it's the portions, the approachable tastes and textures, and the price that will keep Tex-Mex restaurants chugging along. It's not a hip food, and probably wont ever be again.

mcguire4• 8 years ago

Here in north Alabama, El Palacio (of Mexican Food) on the parkway in Huntsville closed a few months ago. Another part of my childhood is dead.

(I grew up in Texas, frequently eating in dimly-lit Tex-Mex restaurants with pictures of toreadors and dying bulls, sometimes on actual felt. This was before even fajitas became popular---burritos, enchiladas, tacos, and chile rellanos were the popular fare. Walking into El Palacio made me feel like I was 6 again.)

logfromblammo2• 8 years ago

Guadalajara Jalisco on Madison Blvd., next to the Wal-Mart. It's the best one in Madison, in my opinion, but I can't speak for Huntsville proper. Chapala, the one that has "authentic mexican restaurant" right in the name, next to Publix on County Line, is certainly genuine enough, but the service responsiveness ranges from sluggish to glacial.

Places like Casa Blanca, Rosie's, and Phil Sandoval's are all like Olive Garden for Mexican. They're what I think of when I imagine an "inauthentic tex-mex" restaurant.

Speaking of which, there are zero good Italian restaurants in the area, according to my spouse. There's a decent one in Chattanooga, within a mile of the 24/75 junction. But that's at least 2 hours away.

Chuck Wagon BBQ on Madison Blvd. sells Texas barbecue, if you didn't already know. Most of the other barbecue joints in the area are essentially Memphis barbecue, plus white sauce. The owner has also been referred to as the "barbecue Nazi", in reference to the "soup Nazi" Seinfeld episode, so you'd best know what you want before reaching the counter.

mcguire4• 8 years ago

It's been a while since I worked out that way and ate at Guadalajara and the Chuck Wagon (it's the only Texas barbecue around, it's good, you take what he gives you when he's open and you eat it and like it). Guadalajara is good, but it's just not the same. (Do they even serve fried ice cream?)

Is that Portofino's in Chattanooga?

S_A_P• 8 years ago

No mention of the city with the best Tex-Mex. Houston. Sorry this article is not accurate.

bluedino2• 8 years ago

This site contains information about the origins of many tex-mex dishes - it's an interesting read

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmexican.html

wallacrw• 8 years ago

Crunchy tacos. All day long. I don't care where it's from, it's genius.

JoeAltmaier4• 8 years ago

My wife cuts to the chase: its good, but its not what she grew up with in New Mexico. No argument of 'authenticity'. Just not how Mrs. Mays cooked it!

Kalium• 8 years ago

Given the obesity rate in San Antonio, the death of tex-mex is almost certainly going to be a boon for the health of many a Texan.

sbussard2• 8 years ago

I'm from El Paso and lived in New Mexico for six years. Personally, I've never had really good TexMex or Authentic Mexican food anywhere outside of the southwest. I've always thought of TexMex as a variation of Mexican food involving high quality beef with a peppery seasoning, like you can get at Taco Cabana or Rosa's. It's sad to me that some people might think places like Taco Bell/Chilis/Applebees are an accurate representation of TexMex or Traditional Mexican. It's also strange that queso is so overused everywhere outside of the southwest. Side note: Navajo Tacos are superbly delicious.

beat• 8 years ago

The myth of authenticity isn't killing Tex-Mex. Economics are. The increasing advantage of corporate chains over mom-and-pop restaurants, the increasing cost ratio of mass-market factory ingredients over local meats and vegetables... it's just plain cheaper and more profitable to build another Taco Bell or Chi-Chis than to keep Grandma's restaurant going into a third generation.

rwc• 8 years ago

Didn't expect a Chi-Chis reference on HN. For what it's worth, "A combination of bankruptcy and hepatitis drove the chain out of business" in 2004.

http://journaltimes.com/news/local/glad-you-asked-what-happe...

pc2g4d• 8 years ago

This theory goes against the grain of the "fast casual" movement where people are willing to pay more than bottom dollar for food... if they're convinced they're getting something a little better than Taco Bell. Chipotle, Qdoba, etc.

mywittyname4• 8 years ago

Chipotle is dirt cheap. A chicken burrito bowl (my go-to) is $6.50. It's pretty much the cheapest food around my work. The only other contender is the Chinese place where I can get a lunch for $6.75.

DoreenMichele6• 8 years ago

When I worked for a Fortune 200 insurance company, I sometimes had to call healthcare providers to verify information. Healthcare providers were sometimes major hospitals, but they were often small offices providing medical or dental care.

Although doctors are highly educated professionals, their education specifically covers medical stuff, not business stuff. Small offices routinely had piss poor knowledge of regulations like HIPAA and lousy business practices. Small shops often simply lack robust practices in important areas outside their main area if expertise. This is a serious problem in business.

Similarly, I imagine that in many cases, Grandma's restaurant was started because Grandma was an excellent cook and she decided to make money off of it in an era where her lack of business acumen was less of a hindrance. The grandkids may not cook as well as Grandma and may have no idea they need to up their game in non cooking areas as well.

So Taco Bell comes in and Taco Bell has better business practices and a robust system in place to standardize the quality of its so so food. The fact that no gourmet chefs work there won't hurt the business the way it kills Grandma's restaurant when the grandkids just can't turn out a dish like Grandma could.

I would really like to see a world that does a better job helping small shops perform well as business entities. But that isn't the world I live in currently. Currently, small shops often die because they simply lack business acumen that franchises have well sorted.

Retra• 8 years ago

And entrepreneurship becomes harder, so it becomes rarer, and of course people by far tend to go into business only if they know other people who do, and so inequality continues to grow.

dahart• 8 years ago

Maybe it's just keto/Atkins trends that are making BBQ so popular?

Tex-Mex might be plenty authentic, but I haven't found carnitas in the states that match my memories of Mexico. Not even BBQ pulled pork that compares either. It could be entirely a perception that is influenced by being in Mexico rather than the quality of the food itself, but it doesn't really matter, the Mexican food in Mexico seems better.

Best meal I ever had in Mexico was a hole in the wall joint in Guanajuato where a woman would bring a new dish of her choosing to all 4 tables in her restaurant room, about once every 15-20 minutes. You could walk in and sit down, and just eat what you get, for as many courses as you wanted, then on your way out, pay for however many courses you ate. It was soups and meats and vegatables, not much of the fare you'd consider "Mexican food", but one of my best memories of eating in Mexico.

dalacv• 8 years ago

People care more about this topic than Net neutrality. As they should. I mean it's Tex Mex for crying out loud.

Joof• 8 years ago

It's partly how we view the cultures. Popular 'chinese' food is also supposed to be cheap, but we have a similar view of their manufactured goods. Japanese food is expensive, we consider their manufactured goods as high quality.

Meanwhile, Chinese food is some of the most highly regarded food in the world.

Mexican food... probably gonna expect it to be cheap.

The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

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