Visited Mexico for business and pleasure during November. We stayed in the Condesa neighbourhood in Mexico City and a short time in Acapulco. All the photos here in Flickr, as usual a selection below.
The team behind Patrona decided to try a new concept in the place where it all began. Café de Nopal is no more, but now Cholo offers a much wider variety of Mexico City style tacos and even Northern Mexico style burritos that the previous restaurant ever could and it is open for lunchtime during weekdays and Saturdays too.
This is one taquería I will be frequenting as much as I can 😉 .
The team behind Café de Nopal has done it again. Now with a much larger space, a fixed menu and an alcohol sales license this place is always packed with food lovers, including the occasional Mexican resident in Helsinki.
Unfortunately it’s not open during lunch time and bookings are still difficult to get, but hey, you can’t have everything.
The proper Mexican food invasion in Helsinki continues. After Café de Nopal opened at the end of 2010, a separate team set up Pueblo in Eerikinkatu 25 during 2011.
I know some of the Mexican staff personally. Their tortillas are excellent and they have my favourite beers on offer, but the food is sometimes a little too salty for me (I cook without salt, so that might be the problem). Regardless, it is very nice to have an alternative open during lunchtime in the heart of the city.
I’m allergic to beans. Maybe that’s why I had to flee so far I ended up in Finland 😛 . Take the delicacy above, called huarache, for example. It happens to have beans inside the dough, and made me sick the whole night after I ate it. At least I didn’t end up in hospital with serum like the time before that.
It’s ridiculous. It’s akin to a Finn being allergic to potatoes or a Japanese being physically unable to eat seaweed.
We spent 2 excellent weeks in Mexico visiting my family. With the new member of the family in tow we didn’t do a lot of tourism so I do not have that many “publishable” pictures this time, but below you can find some.
The rest, as usual, in the set.
Eating a taco based on a Lebanese recipe in a taquería run by the descendants of Japanese immigrants to Mexico. You would only notice they’re Japanese-Mexican for the plea to aid the victims of the Japanese earthquake and the fact that their grilled onions are served in soy sauce.
My friends at Café de Nopal have been offering birria tacos (goat Jalisco style) with broth for some time now, so I decided to try to prepare reindeer the same way. The result was excellent, probably one of the best attempts at Finnish-Mexican fusion I’ve gone for.
Ingredients (serves 4)
Warm the oil and fry the garlic, onion and chillies until they’re soft. Add half a litre of water and the cumin. Let boil a few minutes. Blend this mix and then sift it. Return the sauce to the fire and add4 litres of water. Cut the meat in small cubes and add it together with the tomato. Leave cooking for 3-4 hours, add more water if necessary. Serve the broth separately from the meat. Warm the tortillas. Offer some sliced and diced onion with coriander and lemons on the side for people to put together their own tacos. Serve with Mexican rice and pico de gallo on the side.
As you probably know if you read this blog, one of my passions is food, especially of the Mexican kind. Unfortunately, most of the Mexican food you find outside of North America is not really Mexican, so I make a point of testing Mexican restaurants when I’m traveling to make sure they are more Mex-Mex than Tex-Mex so that I can recommend them to friends.
You can find an abridged list after the map below (they’re listed by how far away they’re from Finland, with the first being the farthest out).
When a Mexican moves abroad, one of the first things he or she misses is the food (obvious if you’ve read this blog for a while or know me personally). The Mexican food supply in Finland is very limited, so obviously many of us have had the idea to open a proper restaurant here where we could show our Finnish brothers what and why we long for: real tacos, sopes, tortas and other far-away delicacies.
Nobody had had the guts (and the knowledge) to do so until now. A couple of friends opened Café de Nopal in Lönnrotinkatu 9 a few days ago and my prayers have been answered ;). In a few days I’ve already had avocado soup, lentil soup, gringas de pastor, tacos dorados, chile relleno, flan, pan de elote and Chiapas coffee. The taste was good enough to remind me of Mom. I guess I’ll continue visiting often.
Update 8.10.2012: Café de Nopal has now become Cholo, Street Mexican kitchen. Great authentic Mexican food as well, slightly different concept