Peruvian food is amazing but in order to find a really good Peruvian place, you need to look for a really basic, hole-in-the-wall kind of place. The fancy – looking ones are worthless.
Mexican food is either crap by nature or I never found any good one. I’ve been to Mexico but only to resorts, and that’s not Mexican food. Whatever is being served as Mexican food in Canada, the East Coast and Illinois is so bad that just thinking about it gives me indigestion. N and I even have a joke about ordering Mexican because the idea is so ridiculous.
Cuban food is the best in Cuba. The stuff that immigrants serve in Miami can’t compare to the simple fare that real Cubans make in Havana. I love Cuban food in Cuba (not on resorts) but I dislike it in Miami and outright detest it on the East Coast. Those nasty pork sandwiches, just bleh already.
Argentinean food doesn’t really exist. If the meat is fantastic, that’s your Argentinean food. Outside of the meat, it’s got nothing.
Colombian food is also all about finding a little hole-in-the-wall place where recent immigrants congregate. They have the best empanadas, though. Argentinean, for instance, have lousy empanadas. Sorry, Argentinean friends, but I’ve got to be honest.
I don’t know any other Latin- American food.
P. S. The spell – checker tries to place the word ” Trump” after ” Latin.” And after the word “spell.”
Clarissa's Blog 
You can find excellent Mexican food in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
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…and in Texas. The fact that those four states all share a border with Mexico may have something to do with the availability of Mexican cooks!
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If I try in in Texas and it’s horrible, I’ll blame you, guys. While right now I just blame Mexicans. 😄😄😄
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How about Texas? I will be in Houston next week but I’m afraid even to try. I can digest fried scissors and stewed screwdrivers but Mexican food defeats me.
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Just make sure that you go to a REAL Mexican restaurant that’s owned and staffed by Mexicans — not to a “Tex-Mex” one (such as the “Chili’s” chain) that serves ersatz “Mexican” food.
Don’t try to pick out a “real” Mexican restaurant on your own. Ask the local people that you’ll be mingling with to direct you to one.
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Tex-Mex is the worst, you are right. Brrr.
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The best Mexican food is the one made by my former roommate. You know him. Mexican and Peruvian foods are by far the best in the entire American continent.
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Well, he never offered me any, but I trust you!
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There’s a lot of those Cuban joints here that sell the pork sandwiches and none of them make dishes like my mother or grandmother cooks, so I don’t have Cuban food when I eat out. My preferred restaurant food is Thai or Italian, for an Italian place you have to go to a hole in the wall place in a strip mall that is run by an Italian family. The best Italian I’ve had is at a little Mom and Pop place in the Poconos located in a strip in between a dollar store and a dojo, beats the pants off Olive Garden anyday😁
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What about arepas? And some pretty decent Mexican places are popping up in NY.
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I suspect that Mexicans who run Mexican restaurants keep the real authentic good Mexican food to themselves. Every time I’ve gone to a Mexican restaurant claiming to be “authentic” the food has been very bland, and I refuse to believe that bland stuff is consumed by people who gave the world the chile pepper.
But a lot of these restaurants cater to these midwesterners or transplanted midwesterners and have been around for years because even hole in the wall places don’t get most of their business from recent immigrants.
National chains turn cuisines into blecch. Almost any mom and pop Italian restaurant is going to beat the pants of Olive Garden (which is now indigestible and salty beyond belief.) I don’t even want to think about what a national “Indian” food chain would be like.
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Exactly. Bland and everything tastes like paper.
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Haven’t been to Arizona lately?
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The best empenadas I ever had were made by Filipinos (who also made the best satay I’ve ever had so it might be a talented individual rather than national cuisine).
Texas is a mixed bag for Mexican food ime and Houston is not traditionally a Mexican stronghold (Texas until the 1980s was roughly equally white, black and mexican but the distribution was very uneven).
I’m wondering if they would have Navajo tacos in Houston. A Navajo taco is frybread (Amerindian staple) with regular taco ingredients. It can be great if the frybread is light and fluffy instead of heavy and soggy.
The best Mexican food I’ve ever had in the US though (as an urban area) was in the Scotts Bluff area of Nebraska.
A store front restaurant had the best menudo ever, a hole in the wall in an industrial area had the best guacamole (perfect balance between the smoothness of the avocado, tartness of lemon and spiciness from jalapeno) served with nachos from handmade tortillas and fried on the spot (rather than cooked as tortillas first) it actually made them kind of… refreshing.
The last was a small house where the front room was converted into a small restaurant. It was plain (enchiladas, tamales) but homemade delicious in a way that commercial mexican food almost never is.
The best Mexican food I had in Mexico was a small town near Oaxaca on market day. It was fresh shredded goat meat* stewed in a spicy sauce served on fresh handmade tortillas and loaded up with cilantro and lime juice.
*live goats were lined up behind the cooking area
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The narrative is more delicious than the food. 😃
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Have you had papas a la huancaina? I’ve had two dishes by that name and both were amazingly delicious.
The first was was slices of boiled potato covered with a sauce made from llama cheese (smuggled into the US) and aji (Peruvian chili).
The second was quartered boiled potatoes partly covered by a thick peanut mixture (roughly ground). It was addictive but it was easy to eat too much and end up with your stomache hating you.
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I love this dish!! My sister often makes it at home and it’s the first version that you mention. I can’t make it here because I haven’t been able to find those yellow Peruvian hot peppers that go into the sauce. But oh, deliciousness!
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Mexican food in H-town, gosh: there must be some good Mexican food but I wonder whether there is any inside the loop, i.e. not at a huge distance from the conference. Mexican cuisine is actually one of the great ones of the world but most of what is known as “Mexican” outside of Mexico, is not. Good and authentic tacos they have. I would like to find some really good Puebla or Oaxaca food. There is this article http://www.houstoniamag.com/articles/2014/6/30/houstons-top-ten-regional-mexican-restaurants-july-2014
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Let’s go together to one of these places.
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Cuchara and Hugo’s are the only ones remotely nearby … but we will definitely try.
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