La Mexicana

Posted By Michael Stern on June 13, 2008 6:04 PM

Sometimes we feel sorry for our friend Jim Rains. He's got a beautiful wife, a great job, and a bucolic home; but he's a Texan and he lives in Connecticut. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Jim grew up eating excellent Mexican food whenever he wanted it. And in our neighborhood – virtually the entire northeast – it scarcely exists. Well, Jim's loss was our gain, at least on a recent trip to Houston, where he highly recommended we stop into a restaurant called La Mexicana. "It's nothing fancy," he warned. "It's plain and it's cheap … and it's goo-ood." We had it in our crosshairs as soon as we arrived in the Lone Star State.

It opened in 1968 as a corner grocery store. In 1982 the Trevino family began to offer sit-down meals in a festively-decorated dining room and bar. They since added a cafeteria for take-out and, in 1992, a bakery with all sorts of interesting pastries. When you sit down for a lunch or dinner, a waiter (outfitted in white shirt and tie) brings a basket of thin, elegant tortilla chips, still warm, along with a mild red sauce and a hotter, lime-tinged green pepper sauce. The chips are large and somewhat fragile; if you eat your way through half the basket so that only smaller, broken half-chips remain, the old basket is whisked away and a new one of full-size, warm chips takes its place.

The menu is huge, including fajitas a la Mexicana, for which the beef is stewed rather than grilled, tacos, flautas, tamales, enchiladas, and chilies rellenos. We began with an order of chile con queso, which comes with a large bowl of jalapeno slices to heat it up, then went on to an all-seafood meal: fish tacos made with succulent strips of grilled (not deep-fried) mahi-mahi, and shrimp in a chipotle chili sauce. The tacos were light, refreshing, and incendiary (we asked for them that way), the fish, cabbage, tomato, and cilantro laced with little nuggets of tongue-searing pepper. They were accompanied by Mexican rice and a bowl of creamy-smooth, blue-black refritos.

For dessert, we indulged in chocolate cake topped with flan and fudge-coated coconut macaroons. And for the road we took a bag of heart-shaped cinnamon-sugar cookies.

By the way, La Mexicana offers a full breakfast menu, starting at 7am. Choices include all sorts of huevos rancheros, eggs scrambled with chorizo (Mexican sausage), migas (a sort of tortilla omelet) and, on Saturday and Sunday only, menudo, which is a bowl of stewed honeycomb tripe. Menudo has long been considered a sure cure for hangovers.