Places we LOVED to eat ...part 1: Mexican restaurants
Posted Friday, September 27, 2013 11:06 AM

This started out attempting to cover a whole bunch of places, but for some reason the Mexican food just took over!  Part 2 will cover others. 

Any list of beloved eateries in San Antonio or Texas HAS to begin with a Mexican restaurant.  Mexican food is like crack for Texans.  We just gotta have it, at least once a week if not more.    San Antonio has always outdone itself in providing awesome Mexican Food.   When we’re not going out to eat it, we are trying to cook it at home, but it’s never quite the same.  There’s a reason for that that most of us probably are better off not knowing about.  Most restaurant Mexican food is LACED with lard.  That’s why it tastes so damn good!!!

It took years for my Mexico-born husband to warm up to our classic Tex Mex, covered in chili gravy.  He grew up on interior Mexican food, a completely different animal.  Just as delicious, but far from Tex Mex.  He shunned it for years, but now swills it down like a native Texan.

I was carried in my parents’ arms to eat at El Rancho on a regular basis before I could even walk.  We would attend our Baptist church services  and then hot foot it over to El Rancho, along with a lot of other Baptists.  My regular was the number three:  cheese enchiladas (made with those red corn tortillas and covered with chili gravy), tamale, refried beans, and Spanish rice.  Everything else was superfluous as long as I got those items.  I will eat any and all Mexican food that is placed in front of me, but it must have those basic items.  Years later I discovered the awesome chili gravy offered at Casa Rio, in which huge bites of roasted pork swam, and they were big bites too, almost a meal in itself.

The El Rancho where we indulged was on the Austin Highway close to Broadway.  At some point it closed, and moved over to the corner of Rittiman Road and Harry Wurzbach.  They did take-out too, and we were regulars for that as well, especially when the Sunday night munchies hit you.

Our El Rancho had this huge painting of a Mexican toreador in that classic “on his toes” pose, waving a bull by with his cape.  For some reason, the style in which it was painted made it look like the toreador was mooning us.  As a young child, I would always stare and stare, wondering why on earth anyone would put up a painting like that.  Now I realize his toreador pants were just too tight.  That was all.  Or maybe the artist was just having a joke on us all, kind of like Michelangelo when he painted God mooning people on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

We never abandoned El Rancho, but occasionally indulged at other places.  La Fonda in Alamo Heights was always enjoyable.  That was the one in the two-story L-shaped shopping center on Broadway just past the Austin Highway where you turned South to go downtown.  There was a cool Winn’s store there also, a Satel’s for men’s clothes, and some type of sporting goods store.  To enter La Fonda, you went up these green carpeted stairs at the corner where the shopping center formed an L.  Great food as well, and a little bit more upscale than El Rancho.  But of course, we were in Alamo Heights.  La Fonda closed down at some point in the 90s, but while it was still open, we were still going there when my daughter was a child.

Sadly to say, I did not discover Casa Rio and Mi Tierra until I was an adult!  We blundered into them one day on one of our visits and have been returning every since.  The food at Casa Rio is great, but what makes it spectacular is that pork chili gravy.  My daughter also reports they make some of the best flan she has ever tasted.  The only drawback to Casa Rio are the pigeons.  If you are eating outside you had better make darn sure your chair is tucked well under the umbrellas.  The pigeons both roost and walk around the top of the umbrellas and are notorious for walking up to the edge of the umbrella, hanging their tails over and letting loose on unsuspecting customers.  I have seen many beautiful dresses and hats ruined.  Just don’t eat there if you are wearing a backless sun dress.  Also, if the pigeons even think you are going to stand up and leave,  the wretched creatures will swarm down like little fans on top of your table and go for the leftovers.  On our last visit, we had not even pushed in our chairs after finishing before there were about eight pigeons covering the table like biblical locusts.  Waiters will rush in and try to shoo them away but sometimes not even that works.  

My Uvalde area cousin married an Italian dude from New Jersey and moved off up there.  The poor soul!  She only got her Mexican food once a year when she got to come back to visit, and made her parents take her out to the local restaurant at least every other night.  How did she live like that?  For years, Brother Wes was a long distance truck driver.  As soon as he crossed the Texas state line from any direction, he was scanning for that first Mexican restaurant, and that big rig would quickly come to a screeching halt when he spotted one.

When my daughter returned home for Christmas, her first request was to stop and eat Mexican food.  It did not matter where … In New York, Kimberley and her Texas friends seek out Jamaican restaurants, notorious for hot and spicy meals.  When the Jamaicans see the little blondies walk in and order Jamaican jerk, they warn them, “You gonna throw that up and die, Missy.”  They don’t realize that Texans are in their midst.  The girls always finish their meal with gusto, and the Jamaicans stand amazed.

Wow.  Mexican restaurants took up a lot of space, which is really not surprising.  More to come in part 2 on Jim’s Frontier Drive In hamburgers (I am drooling, friends …), Luby’s, Bun ‘n Barrel, Earl Abel’s, take-out pizza, and other delightful places ….