Honestly why would anyone expect Mexican food to rise to any important quality level? Most of it is just passable home style food with not much to make a claim as one of the great cuisines of the world. And yes I have eaten it everywhere. Even the best places on the US West coast or in Southern states seem to offer a weird concoction called TexMex that lacks any sense of surprise from one outlet to the next. Let's not reference the odd places that do things with "chocolate or roses". Exceptions that do not make the rule.
How much we miss Ms Rodell's column in the LA Weekly. She was easily the most interesting food writer in Los Angeles. She leaves behind a huge hole in The LA food scene. We still enjoy reading her reviews for their insight and integrity even though it is rather unlikely that we'll be visiting Australia anytime soon.
Well not every good restaurant is in the heart of the city. Especially where Mexican food is concerned. Gladesville Dos Señoritas is tasty, Agave in Surry Hills that I think are more on the point with the cuisine. There are pop ups around professing to be authentic but after stories I have heard and read I won’t waste my money.
Do more research, give the suburbs a go next time.
Oh and La Cocina here in Leichhardt does good food too.
I prefer to make my own Mexican food it’s so beautifully easy and fast to make. Even slow cooking meat to make suadero is worth waiting for.
Thanks for reading ;)
Sydney 1986. All the jalapenos tasted like sweet pickles. Never got over it. And upscale does not help now too!
What is it with the Food section's passion for Australia, over the past eight months or so?
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@ Maggie NYC
I have been asking myself the same question. My guess, it has to do with the relocation of Besha Rodell from LA to Down Under.
But you might have noticed the number of articles promoting chicken. These, I am ready to believe, are in part inspired by the investment of NYT Corporation in the poultry industry -- only a guess.
Like any other cuisine it is best to get Mexican in Mexico.
Or at least close. Even Tex-Mex is not Mexican although it can be great.
I would not get Mexican in Europe either.
Once in a long while one can get a pleasant shock. I had excellent pizza (involuntarily) in Bhutan of all places. But then the pizza on Bengal Bay in Myanmar was just nasty.
Having lived in Asia and Oceania for decades, its amazing how near impossible it is to find a Mexican restaurant of any merit. When iget off the plane in LA I go into burrito-hunting mode and hit local places to kill my mexican hunger.....
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Reading the comments makes me wonder if there are any good Asian restaurants in Mexico?
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Actually....there was a notable Chinese immigrant communi a hundred years ago around Mexicali, with hundreds of Comics China restaurants remaining in northern Baja.
Try "Frank and Blanco's" opposite Sutherland station in Sydney, NSW. Cafe style Mexican eating with very fresh ingredients. Not expensive either.
As a Sydneysider living in Los Angeles, this rings true. It's such a shame too, because Aussie meat and seafood is better quality and fresher than California - I can only imagine what Mariscos Jalisco could do with Hawkesbury Schoolies or Yamba Kingies!
I reckon a lot of the lack of depth (and flavour) is down to:
1) lack of Mexican and Central American cooks (not just a chef to write recipes and supervise, actual staff to cook); and,
2) access to the right vegetables, herbs, chilis and spices - and affordability of those that are available.
The state of Mexican food in Australia is similar to SE Asian food in the US. Angelenos brag about LA being the Thai food capital of the USA, but even the best here is a pale imitation of Sydney, let alone Bangkok! For those who may reply "but have you tried..." - yes. All of them. None of them can play in the big leagues. FWIW, the Cambodian food scene in Long Beach is the strongest competitor in the SE Asian hunger games.
Good intentions and a good chef don't cut it without the right vegetables, herbs, chilis and spices - and prep and line cooks who know the cuisine.
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There's actually a lot of great southeast Asian food in the NYC/NJ area.
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After years of travel in dozens of countries, I will only eat Mexican food in Mexico and the US. I have gone to way too many Mexican restaurants that are well-reviewed and turn out to be garbage. I am sure that there are a few good ones in other countries, but I am not a gambling man. Fortunately, I live half the year in Mexico and half in California, so I get my Mexican fix early and often.
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No Mexcuisine? Sorry, Oz. I'm from LA. I can only go so long without my guac and chips and chile rellenos.
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Hi Besha - as a recently transplanted New Yorker, I feel your pain. Try Casa Latina at the Marrickville Markets the first and last Sunday of each month. That is the only verifiably authentic Mexican food I've found in all of Sydney. Found out about it from a Mexican-American Sydneysider.
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As someone who moved from Oz to the USA a long time ago, the most baffling thing to me is why anyone, anyone in the world even eats Mexican food. It’s not tasty, full of carbs, no salad and to sum up ... it’s extremely unhealthy. The National Beers are also pitiful compared to craft beers in the USA. How Mexican food ever got exported to Australia is, well, a mystery to me. Fellow Aussies, this stuff will kill you!! Please avoid at all costs! And PS. Most stuff exported from the USA to Oz is also bad for you. Avoid at all costs.
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I totally agree with you!. Like you, I moved to the US from down-under. And I am equally baffled by Mexican food. It is tasteless, drenched in fake cheese and bitter tasting tomato type sauces.
It's an acquired taste. But I agree with you that this is not the healthiest of foods, especially the chips which in this country are about 94% GMO corn chips.
There are some good Mexican restaurants serving interesting dishes. The trick is to tell the waiter to take the chips back.
What?! Tacos are actually quite healthy- the authentic kind, that's just meat in a corn tortilla. Perhaps you've never had real Mexican food because this just sounds like blasphemy.
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Tacos 3-for-a-dollar on the streets of Mexico city would beat those strange rectangular slabs of meat in the photo. What makes for great food is a spectrum of availability: a great source of house wines and mid-priced wines allow the great to stand out. So, too, holds for ethnic cuisine. Only if there are enough common examples is there room for amazing stand-outs.
Because the Mexican influence is so strongly dispersed in America (take that Trump), there is so much good food out there that there is little need to have haute tacos.
In the absence of that baseline goodness, that which purports to be great is an unfortunate fact of life in Australia. Fortunately, there are so many unique treasures down under that it's still a great place to live and visit.
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I hate to break it to you, but the restaurant's decor isn't all that attractive or exciting either.
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May I second that!
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I felt the same way in San Francisco, when looking for decent Chinese food. The food in China town was almost entirely like what we used to find in Australian country town Chinese resturants in the 1980's.
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The best Chinese food in the SF area is in Richmond.
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Most of the restaurants around Circular Quay are little more than overpriced tourist traps. Locals generally don't eat there. There are some little gems though, like The Spice Room, a very good Indian Restaurant , with nice views of the ferries the harbour bridge oh and the railway line.
Mexican or TexMex isn't really that big here. Pan Asian cuisine though that's a different story. I can go down the road and eat food from any province in China or Korea. There are great Thai restaurants in any shopping area as are Japanese.
Might just have something to do with the neighbourhood Australia is in.
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I lived 8 years in Asia. Mexican food is nearly impossible to replicate so far from the source.
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If you can get the ingredients (and you can, even in Australia) you can replicate the food. It's all about taking the time to understand the ingredients and executing the style properly. It took me some time and effort, but I'm a old, white geezer of European descent living in Northeast Ohio, and I can make a pretty mean taco. They could too.
I find 80% of the "Mexican" food in Australia inedible,
I'm an American expat living in Sydney but happen to be, at this very moment, visiting family in Chicago and not a day goes by here that I don't have champurrado and tamales from a street vendor or tacos at Rick Bayless's new joint (yes, he's a white dude but he does beautiful things with Mexico's various cuisines) or whatever Mexican food I can get my hands on before I return home.
Sydney does some amazing things with food and other cuisines, but Mexican food is not one of those.
I'd even venture to say it might be one of the worst places in the Western world to eat Mexican, at least to date.
Fingers crossed that changes.
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Jess your comments have been noted. So funny!
You're Not going to be let back in.
How dare you air such home truths.
Enjoy your trip.
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@ Jess Sydney
You are luckier than I: I find 99% of the Mexican food in the US unpalatable.
On several visits to Sydney and Circular Quay, I've generally been disappointed in the restaurants there. Sad to hear that this tradition continues.
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I was skeptical about Mexican food in Australia but Mamasitas in Melbourne is excellent.
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While I wholeheartedly agree with the article’s thesis, the few good Mexican restaurants are the exception that prove the rule. I would direct you to Radio Mexico in St. Kilda. The only place I found that rivals Los Angeles although it doesn’t hold a candle to Mexico City.
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I'm just wondering if people from the Commonwealth have DNA that prevents them from appreciating Tex-Mex food. The wonderful, fantastic, my-all-time-favorite Keith Floyd went to the Southwest USA and produced horrible margaritas and chili (it was still entertaining). The comments here from Aussies suggest a contempt for tortillas, beans & rice. When one thinks of the Commonwealth - Toronto, Sydney, London - one doesn't think of Tex-Mex. I'm an expat American and I find bangers&mash and meat pies incredibly boring. Inquiring minds want to know: are we born to not 'get' certain foods by birth?
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A contempt for tortillas, beans and rice? Not in my family but we do have trouble sourcing great ingredients living in a rural area.
I certainly don't think that it's an ingrained st birth, but simply a matter of what you are exposed to or how adventurous you choose to be.
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Australia is basically South Asia, mate.....come for superb Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai and Chinese at restaurants sometimes without English menus. Quite good stuff. Mexican is unfortunately a stretch for us.
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I'm up for great Mexican. Part of the reason I was on the pacific coast in Mexico early this year was to go an acclaimed restaurant.
Tex-Mex; I'll pass, thanks.
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I’m an Australian of Italian heritage; I have lived in the US for the past 35 years and have yet to acquire a taste for Mexican food. I was introduced to it in San Francisco by a Californian soon after arriving here and have ever since wondered what the big deal is? I had two great Mexican meals at Cafe Poca Cosa in Tucson, AZ, a few years ago but the rest of my experiences have been underwhelming. I do empathize with the US expatriate community in Australia; I couldn’t get Vegemite in the US for years!
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Could not agree more. I’m an expat living in Brisbane. My partner thought he didn’t like Mexican food till I, using ingredients imported by me, made him some.
The recent spate of “Mexican” chains has not, to my mind, improved matters at all; it’s tasteless gluggy food, all rice-and-bean filler and no zest. And — mayonnaise? Really?
But over the past 20 years it has gotten easier to get ingredients — there are now seasons during which I can find habaneros, jalapeños, and even lately anchos! When I find them, I buy them and freeze them so I can make salsa. An import deli here has masa every once in a while; they also now stock some decent flour tortillas.
That said, I’m looking forward to my annual trip home, including multiple visits to my favourite taco truck...
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Everybody knows the best tacos on earth on are spaced evenly, about every half mile or so, between LA and Tijuana. My personal favorite is in Burbank, at an undisclosed location.
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A fine and useful review, and I trust your taste, but I can't help noting that, apart from the pallor of the tortillas, the photo of the tacos would invariably draw comments such as: "Yum!!! That looks amazing!" Well, they do look good, which is why something 'looking amazing' is not very useful. Just saying.
By the way, how were the Kangaroo Burritos? What? You didn't? Well, I maybe next time...
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Brutal review!!
It hurt just reading it. I know exactly what you are talking about after enjoying amazing Mexican food in the local community here in Houston.
I think I arrived at $90 price doing the same exercise as you did sitting in faux Mexican restaurant with awesome view in an European capital.
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Perhaps it is because there aren't enough Mexican chefs and cooks in Australia?
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My experience of restaurants across the world is that the swankier and expensive ones invariably serve the worse food.
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I never understood any greatness associated with Mexican cuisine and why would Australia need it?
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Perhaps you need to enjoy eating food, sans a knife and fork.
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Grading restaurants in Sydney is really simple. The closer the place is to the Opera House the more likely you are to find yourself in an overpriced tourist trap. It's no different to looking for a bargain in Times Square.
If you are in Sydney better flavor and value can be had out in the suburbs with whatever type of Asian food takes your fancy.
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You're wrong actually. There are a lot of very good restaurants close to the Opera House: Quay, Aria, Otto, Rockpool, to name a few, and Bennelong which is closest of all, located inside the Opera House.
No doubt you didn't have time to visit these when you were here.
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On my way to Bankstown for breakfast pho right now ☺️
" good " was not the operative word rather they were " overpriced tourist trap ". All of the restaurants listed qualify as overpriced tourist traps even though they are all quite good. There is a reason that they so closely grouped and suffer the crazy rents in the Circular Quay area and it isn't to pick up business from locals. At any one of those places it would be no trouble to drop AUD300 on dinner for two and Bar Patron follows the same philosophy by charging $20 for the cheapest margarita or $22 for chicken enchiladas.
While some are spending hundreds at Quay or wherever I take the train to Marrickville, eat Vietnamese, get change from $50, buy a roast duck to go and have much more fun.
By the way, you can't get good Mexican in Providence either.
Sigh. The Tramp Tower Taco Grande in Oz? I was in Oz a half century ago, on R&R from that made for TV disaster. Sydney was vibrant and friendly. Fish and chips shops were a few steps from street carts selling wonderfully hot meat pies. The downtown bars served wonderful hot steak, chicken or shrimp dinners for a dollar. Everyone was happy and healthy and friendly. Now I eat old fashioned Tex-Mex in quiet, old restaurants where the Menu items rarely exceed twenty bucks. Free in house created corn chips and two salsas, hot and awaken, are instantly served at the bar or table or booth free. Thank you, NYT, A fine start to this Long Weekend :)
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As you wrote,
"Should it be all that shocking that a corporate takeover by private equity, aggressive expansion and a restaurant-as-marketing for a big liquor brand might result in lackluster food? Probably not."
Neil Perry's Rockpool restaurants and his burger chain are very good.
His name and brand association does not elevate the quality of the other restaurants in the group but will very likely increase the exit multiple when the PE firm sells or IPOs in the next year or two
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This place (on the Gold Coast) is much less fancy, but the (MexiCali) food is great, at least by Australian standards, and it has more authentic ingredients than most places. California Tacos - http://www.californiatacos.com.au/
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