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| Casa Oaxaca |
Calle García Vigil 407
Oaxaca, Mexico
52.951.514.4173 |
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When Nachito first approached me in the quaint downtown Oaxacan boutique I thought it was to sell me a shirt, but the merchandise he was hawking turned out to be quite different. Oaxaca is known for its food, crafts, and mescal, but we were rapidly finding out that it also served up young Mexican guys looking to meet Americans.
Nachito managed the perfect blend of aggressive and coy, he was cute, spunky, and how shall we say… eighteen? Okay so I’m old enough to be his dad, at least in the red states, but a guy who wants to cheat on his boyfriend is a guy who wants to cheat on his boyfriend, in any language and no matter what age he is. And who am I to deny someone adding fuel to the bonfire that is teen angst drama?
I suggested we eat at the restaurant Casa Oaxaca, located in the stylish hotel of the same name, because it’s one of the pricier restaurants in town and is almost entirely patronized by European tourists (for some reason the only American tourists anywhere in Central Mexico appeared to be me and my three traveling companions). Of course the place was recently reviewed in the New York Times, which is a bit of a deterrent for a cheating location; see my review of Portland’s Giorgio’s Restaurant for what happens when you cheat on someone in a recently-publicized restaurant. This case was different though, as it was unlikely that Nachito’s eighteen-year-old Mexican boyfriend was going to show up in a tourist restaurant with New York City prices.
We were lucky to get a table at the last minute, as the place tends to book up. We were seated in the stark but elegant dining room, not without being unnoticed by the other diners. Some of the elegantly-wrapped middle-aged women of northern Europe raised a plucked eyebrow to the 33-year-old American guy and his 18-year-old Mexican date, out of jealousy I’m sure.
Our prelude to an affair had its own delicious prelude; an amuse-bouche of a cherry tomato stuffed with herbed cream cheese served on a dollop of guacamole and drizzled with pumpkin seed oil. It was light and savory and delicious, especially for such a small piece. I amused Nachito greatly trying to translate the phrase ‘amuse-bouche’ from French to English to Spanish.
Casa Oaxaca had a nice wine selection, our first bottle was one of my favorite cheap Chilean wines, a Los Vascos Cabernet Sauvignon 2002. I enjoyed it with my Oaxacan soup, a velvety-smooth concoction of black beans in a chicken stock punctuated with bits of tortilla strips, avocado, and Oaxacan cheese. Nachito had the three mushroom soup with hierba santa, an herb that’s heavily used as a local ingredient. It was nice but a little too salty for my taste.
The soup seemed to leave a strange aftertaste, which I realized was in fact guilt. I was somewhat astonished to learn that guilt has a flavor, so much so that it distracted me from thinking about the fact that I was buying dinner for an eighteen-year-old Mexican guy with a boyfriend. Thinking a second bottle of wine might cleanse this unfortunate savor, I ordered a Spanish bottle of Pesquera 2001, which was nice but definitely not worth the huge mark-up. I blame guilt for distracting me from the price of the bottle.
My shrimp with sautéed mushrooms and onions served on zucchini blossoms was savory and delicious, but I didn’t care for the bitter taste of a cold side of plantains and chayote. Nachito had the molé of the day, which was a very subtly flavored and surprisingly thin red molé served over chicken with rice and tortillas. It was going well, and between his sputtering English and my sputtering Spanish we were able to make ourselves understood over the delicious meal. I felt odd being openly affectionate in the sparse atmosphere however, thinking that a darker, more cluttered environment would lend itself so much better to cheating.
We finished with the dessert sampler, which featured an excellent pumpkin flan, a coconut flan, a scoop of refreshing and very tasty prune ice cream, a scoop of delicious cactus pear sorbet, a small slice of very French lemon torte, and a scoop of burnt milk ice cream, which tastes exactly like it sounds. The ice creams were serves on toasted tortilla, which looked cute but didn’t really work in the flavor department. The sampler plate was both delicious and a fascinating culinary adventure, but probably a bad idea for a night of cheating fun because it left us feeling a little heavy for what would likely be our only night of sex.
As we stepped out into the night I found myself questioning the wisdom of this restaurant choice, since the place is located fairly centrally in town and anyone could have walked by as we emerged together and headed off towards my hotel. My initial instinct about taking Nachito to a tourist restaurant was a good one, but had I put more thought into it I probably could have found a more remotely located, darker, and more discrete place for my Oaxacan indiscretion. |
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| chumwater |
| November 3, 2004 |
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