Mojitos for all

A shot of tequila, a half bottle of wine, and two very weak mojitos later...

Tay and I started today with a leisurely breakfast at Cafe Tacuba, which serves good food in a beautiful historic palace with awful service. It took us about 30 minutes just to get the check. Tay tried atole and the chicken tamales, and I went for the house special enchiladas which were really good.

After, we walked though Chinatown to Ciudadela market, where we spent a few hours browsing the several hundred stalls. Tay picked up a few things and I ended up buying a simple sling sack for carrying things for $40 pesos. We sat down for a beer (at the restaurant at the market where I protested to Tay that they might might charge us a higher price than a bar outside).

I introduced Tay to my favorites tacos (a 10 scale taco in my book) and we walked into colonia Roma.

In Roma we hit Los Insurgentes, a kind of hip dive bar popular with the bohemian and hip young counterculture crowd of the two neighborhoods of Roma and Condessa that
It straddles. We were in search of pulque, a precolumbian alcoholic beverage made from fermented agave sap.

In Los Insurgentes, a cup of pulque costs about 20 pesos. It's far cheaper than beer. Pulque is most popularly served flavored with nuts and fruits (and probably a lot of sugar). Tay and I ordered a glass of fresa (strawberry) and original pulque, because you gotta go full Aztec (actually, even the civilization a 1000 years before the Aztecs drank pulque and even had a pulque god).

Pulque is repellant to the point of undrinkability. The aftertaste is a kind of slightly nutty and reminds me of the smell of agave plants. That, and the fact that its cheap, are the only positve atributes of pulque.

It's a thick, foamy, milky white liquid, slightly viscous, with tons of fiber from the plant. The alcohol and tiny foam bubbles give your tongue a strange tingling sensation. The taste is somewhat bland but acidic, tangy and sour, like a hint of old yogurt. Trying to describe it to my brother, I mentioned it was like drinking a glass of thickened stale sweat, and after that I wasn't able to take any more. I suppose that if you get really wasted on the stuff, the taste/texture doesn't really bother you, but I don't know how people get to that point.

Taylor's strawberry favored pulque was more tolerabe, but the yogurty taste remained and the thickness and sweetness made the entire thing a bit like drinking a melted strawberry frozen yogurt. We left money on the table and left our drinks less than half-consumed.

We spent a few hours resting at home, and then went out to an Argentine restaurant for dinner in Condesa. We got a nice table by a window to get a view of the lively street scene, had a really nice meal and split a bottle of wine. My house made linguini was great. Fonda Garufa was the name of the place. After the meal, and braced by the wine for the cool evening, we went searching for a bar. We finally found one, and after getting past the metal detector wands and frisks, we entered a kind of bar which was surprisingly empty for a saturday night in the heart of Condesa. The music and other clientelle suggested we might have been at a less popular gay bar, or at least a closeted bar.

Anyway, we ordered two mojitos (the running gag of Tay's trip here) and the waiter finally brought out four. "Two for one tonight" he told us. Two for one mojitos- on a saturday night? How desperate is this place? Anyway, it turned out the mojitos were pretty weak, more like the potency of one strong mojito was split between two glasses, so after the two beverages, we walked home, trying to avoid eye contact with all the indeterminate-gendered hookers along Nuevo Leon. It was a good night.