Tex mex=ground beef & yellow cheese- so not mexican & also Taquitos DF on Airline and Gulf Bank has some damn good authentic mexican street tacos
The baskin Robbins made it but with a few modifications The old burger mart closed when the old man got too old to work. He had a sign in his place that said he could refuse service to anyone he wants. I think he was racist. No old style Taco bell either. Edgebrook used to be a pretty cool street. My mom even grew up there for a couple years.
The best tacos I ever had in my life were in Mexico and made that way. They had a pineapple on top of the shawarma, and the guy running it had a foot peddle that he used for an extra blast of heat as the whole thing spun. He'd shave off carmalized pork right into the tortilla, then hit that pineapple with his knife in such a way that a chunk would fly off and he'd catch it with the plate. I was mildly entertained by all this until I bit into one of these. O.M.G! I've been chasing the dragon ever since. Taqueria Del Sol on the Gulf freeway I believe has the shawarma set up, but of course, it was nowhere near as good as what I had in Mexico. There's a place up on 45 around the Woodlands called--if memory serves--Los Petates that has a picture of a schawarma set up on their outside window, but I don't know for sure if they have one back in the kitchen. From the looks of the meat, I think they do it in a skillet, but from a taste standpoint, they are the best tacos I've had in the Houston area. Total hole in the wall, and I was always the only gringo in there, but man was it good.
bob, too funny you know that old burger dude - Burger Mart. My brother and i always called him surly and just got a swiss burger and frito pie and took it home asap. I used to live a little further down Edgebrook towards Shaver street at Arlington Arms and the well named Quay Point when I was 18.
Yeah I edited my post. BR is still there. Burger Mart no. I went to South Houston High and had a friend that lived in Arlington heights. His parents still do and he is a member of Clutchfans too. I lived off vista near strawberry.
Did you know a teacher named Ms. Graham at Dobie? Taught math. Dobie always whooped us at Academic Decathalon.
Rings a bell, but not sure. I was terrible at math and really only good at PE, history and working at the disc Records at Almeda Mall. I did later on do a career day at So Houston high when I was a retail manager. The kids were cool and didn't diss me too bad
The difference is cheese. Authentic is more about the sauce and they do more savory stew type dishes. Tex-mex doesn't focus on those facets, instead relying on the grill and fryer.
Maybe. I remember Tacomadre when it was good. 7 years ago I could buy a torta for $2.50 At the original food truck by my house . No line. I won't get close to one now
Ah but you go too far on the burrito comment. The burrito was actually a small food rolled up you buy off donkeys that dates back to MAYANS. So no, it's not tex mex. You're thinking of the tex mex version.
BUMP! this article clears up some of the confusion. click the link for pictures of delicious food. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/dining/texas-mexican-food.html Don’t Call It Tex-Mex A writer and chef is on a quest to tell the world about Texas Mexican food, the cooking of South Texas and northern Mexico that predates and spans the border. By Rachel Wharton April 22, 2019 HOUSTON — This city’s Second Ward is full of temptations for Adán Medrano, a writer and chef who lives just a few miles southeast. The Mexican-American neighborhood is home to the perfect flaky tortillas at Doña María Mexican Cafe, scratch-made in flour or corn, and ready to be folded around eggs with the fine threads of dried beef called machacado. It has the off-menu roasted tamales at the Original Alamo Tamales, with blackened husks and caramelized edges of masa and meat. And there’s Taqueria Chabelita, where the owner, Isabel Henriquez Hernandez, makes pinto beans whose smoky intensity comes not from pork fat, but from a slow char in a hot pan. For Mr. Medrano, who grew up in San Antonio with generations of relatives on both sides of the Rio Grande, this is all his comfort food, his culinary heritage, his comida casera, or Mexican home cooking. Just don’t call it Tex-Mex, he said. He prefers to describe it as Texas Mexican, which is also how he describes himself. Texas Mexican is the indigenous cooking of South Texas, according to Mr. Medrano, 71, whose second cookbook, “Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking,” will be published in June by Texas Tech University Press. It’s the food that’s been made by families like his on this land since before the Rio Grande marked a border, when Texas was a part of Mexico, and long before then. Don’t get him wrong: Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated, he said. It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years. “That’s not our food,” said Mr. Medrano, who has spent the better part of a decade defining his cuisine, inspiring a growing number of Texas Mexicans in the process. “We don’t eat like that.” You can find Texas Mexican here at Mr. Medrano’s Houston go-tos, and at decades-old San Antonio West Side lunch spots like Old Danny’s Cocina, or even newer favorites like El Puesto No. 2 down the street. It’s at Maria’s Restaurant in downtown McAllen and at Cafe Amiga in Brownsville, both run by granddaughters of their founders. It is dishes like chicken poached with striped green squash and corn, the tomato-noodle soup called fideo, and gulf shrimp and cactus stewed in a mix of dried red chiles. It’s the simple ground beef picadillo or the beef-and-potato stew called carne guisada, both subtly seasoned with a pounded paste of black peppercorn, garlic and cumin, which Mr. Medrano describes as the Texas Mexican version of the Cajun holy trinity. It is what Juan Hernandez, of Doña María Mexican Cafe, has always described as “mama-style cooking”— the mama in this case being his wife, Anna Hernandez, who grew up a block away from the restaurant and is a co-owner. Mr. Hernandez would never call the food she makes Tex-Mex; in fact, it inspired Tex-Mex. That began in the early 1900s, when local Mexican-American home cooking was first adapted in restaurants run “by Anglos for Anglos,” Mr. Medrano said. In the 1970s, writers started referring to that hybridized cuisine as Tex-Mex: refried beans as smooth as pancake batter; chili made with powdered spices and stock, instead of the carne con chiles based on whole dried red chiles; fajitas with anything other than the skirt steak that gave the dish its name; and extra cheese on everything. The idea of distinguishing Texas Mexican from Tex-Mex came to him after he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America program in San Antonio in 2010, after careers in producing and writing for television, and awarding foundation grants to nonprofit arts and education projects. Mr. Medrano, who also founded San Antonio’s annual Latino film festival in 1977, originally took the classes for fun, he said, but they led him to an epiphany: After decades in the shadows, his food needed not just a champion, but a name. Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes,” published in 2014. Since then, Mr. Medrano has traveled the region, cooking, lecturing at schools and museums, and gathering knowledge from chefs, anthropologists and home cooks, many of whom are quoted in “Don’t Count the Tortillas.” (This summer he will even make carne guisada tacos at a Fourth of July celebration in Moscow, at the residence of the United States ambassador to Russia.) Mr. Medrano is also the executive producer, writer and host of a forthcoming bilingual documentary, “The Roots of Texas Mexican Food,” slated for release this fall. (He is pitching it to TV providers in the United States and Latin America.) The film focuses on Texas’ archaeological and historical sites, and on the women who have been the primary architects of the cuisine. His work has been revelatory for restaurateurs like Sylvia Casares, a well-known Houston chef who operates Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen. “I had been searching for 20 years for how to describe my food,” said Ms. Casares, who is originally from Brownsville, at the state’s southeastern edge. Ms. Casares met Mr. Medrano after he recommended her restaurant to a Houston reporter as a place to taste hallmarks of the cuisine, especially her enchiladas. Her crew makes hundreds a day the Texas Mexican way, each tortilla bathed in chile sauce and softened in hot oil before being rolled around its filling. And what about the blanket of cheese on top? “There’s a little on there for looks,” Ms. Casares said. Ms. Casares said Mr. Medrano’s work corrects both a lack of vocabulary and a lack of knowledge about history, even for some Mexican-Americans. “The problem with most people is they can’t get their heads around Texas’ indigenous foods,” she said. Like many Mexican-American restaurateurs, she puts both Tex-Mex and Texas Mexican items on her menu. (Some dishes can overlap, or fall somewhere in between.) Most of her customers assume those that appear more traditionally Mexican were imported. Yet these are not “south-of-the-border” creations, said Mr. Medrano: “Texas Mexican didn’t cross the border, the border crossed it.” Until the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, much of southern Texas was Mexico, and for centuries before that part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. That’s why, to Mr. Medrano, the heart of Texas Mexican culture is an area that includes southern Texas — the Rio Grande Valley, Corpus Christi and greater San Antonio and Houston — but also part of the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation — moved into the Roman Catholic missions founded in San Antonio in the 1700s. That’s where contemporary Texas Mexican food began to take shape, said Ramon Vasquez, a member of the nation who also gives tours of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park from a native food perspective. César Martínez and the El Paso-born chef Rico Torres, of the modern Mexican restaurant Mixtli in San Antonio.) This rich and living history is the reason San Antonio was awarded the rare City of Gastronomy designation in 2017 by Unesco. The city tapped Mr. Medrano to help create its application. The recognition is a remarkable turnabout. The missions, after all, are only a few miles south of the plaza where Texas Mexican women were blocked from selling carne con chile from open-air stands in the early 20th century, while the dish itself was co-opted into chili. This is also where Otis Farnsworth, a Chicago transplant, opened his highly successful Original Mexican Restaurant, one of the first places serving what would become known as Tex-Mex. Today, Farnsworth’s restaurant might be called out for cultural appropriation, or what Mr. Medrano calls “cultural poaching.” And Mr. Medrano does get angry at the lack of respect for his culture, the many ways in which Mexican-Americans have been wronged throughout history. But he is generally driven by love for their cuisine, which delights him every time he sees a tortilla puff on a griddle, or catches the mingled scent of black pepper and cumin. “We need to share the beauty of the food,” Mr. Medrano said, “and if we do, the world will be more beautiful.”
Fajitas were "invented" by Mexican workers in the Rio Grand valley of Texas. In the 1970s and 80s the skirt steak of beef was "throw away" meat at the butcher. It was either super cheap or even free. The Mexican migrant workers would buy or trade for the skirt steak at the butchers because it was almost nothing. To make it edible, they would then marinate it for 24 hours and cut it real thin to eat on tortillas. In the 80s, it started moving up out of the Rio Grand valley and started becoming more and more popular. Now skirt steak is sort of expensive due to supply/demand...its the "lobster" of Tex Mex.
Much like brisket, ox tail, and chuck eye steak. Its a damn shame, all could be had for so cheap back in the day, is so expensive now. Ive always said the best food will always come from migrants and poor countries. Having to make due with what resources you have and can afford, will run the imagination to create something wonderful.
