Both Angie and Mike love to eat, so traveling in Mexico has generally been a fantastic experience. Nearly everywhere we go, the food (la comida) is freshly prepared, reasonably priced, and exceptionally delicious.
A plate of al pastor tacos – it doesn’t get any better than this
Our time in La Cruz has been more of the same. Our first night, we picked a taqueria called Tacos on the Street. Their menu is very simple – the only thing you can order is strips of ribeye cooked over charcoal. You can choose to have the meat on tacos, or in a quesadilla, or on a tostada, but whatever you order it comes from the same grill. This restaurant can keep things simple because the meat is that good. They only recently began serving drinks (previously you had to bring your own) and now just bring you a bucket of beer on ice – drink as few or as many as you like, and they’ll just add it up at the end of the meal. Since there’s a nice marina in La Cruz there are plenty of gringos around, and the restaurant has adjusted their prices to match – tacos and beer are about 30 pesos each ($1.50) instead of the more typical 20 pesos ($1).
Good morning! Chilaquiles for breakfast
A typical Mexican breakfast is chilaquiles – strips or triangles of freshly fried corn tortillas sauteed in salsa, along with eggs and refried beans. The salsa can be red or green, and sometimes there’s also chorizo, machaca (dried beef), or carnitas (marinated and fried pork) served on the side. It’s hard to beat a plate of chilaquiles to start the day!
Each time we stopped by this pollo asado place, the grill was completely full – it’s a popular spot
One of the unexpected delights of food in Mexico is pollo asado – whole chickens roasted over an smoky grill. Most reasonably-sized towns have at least one place roasting chicken, and the reason is that it is unbelievably delicious! The slow roasting keeps the meat moist while the smoke adds extra flavor. Pollo asado places seem to typically be takeaway spots, so we’ll walk over to collect a chicken (which generally includes rice, cabbage-based salad, salsa, and a stack of freshly-made corn tortillas) for somewhere between 100 and 140 pesos ($5-$7 USD).
Carving al pastor from the spit
A highlight of any town is finding a spot that serves authentic tacos al pastor. Also called adobada in the north, al pastor is marinated pork stacked onto a vertical spit. The spit is topped with a hunk of pineapple (so that the juice drips onto the meat) and then slowly turned in front of either gas or charcoal heat. After ordering, the meat is freshly carved from the spit. It’s the Mexican version of schwarma (from the Middle East), doner kebab (from Turkey), or gyros (from Greece).
All of this writing makes the author hungry – time to head ashore for some tacos!
At a taqueria with friends from S/V Luego, our waiter offered to take our picture. He took our camera and then turned it into a selfie…
