Hey! Want to help me pick which place gave me a bout of mild food poisoning? Because I really want to know! First up...
Cocina San Marcos
I got home from grocery shopping and hit up Kafe Nasty to see if he wanted to try an overpriced bánh mì but he was budgeting so I decided to go on my own and then I got halfway there and I was like, "Every Sunday, we pass the Mercado Central and I keep saying I have to go there and then I never go there so why don't I just go there now?" Because my rationale was that I could handle a couple little tacos before a bánh mì.
I got in there and take my time looking around and I settle on this one joint in there, Cocina San Marcos, because there's no line and they have tinga. I wanted cachete but I do love me some tinga.
That is a picture of the two best tinga tacos I've ever had. They cost me about ten bucks (I think $4.50 a piece and then tax) and thankfully I had cash on me because my card wasn't jiving with their reader. I liked that the tortillas had a little crisp to them. My Mexican coworker told me that that's a cheater move; a kitchen will throw a little oil on the grill to get the tortillas to cook faster and the crisp is a side effect.
I ate the hell out of these. The tinga was tender and spicy and the salsa verde was the second best I've had this week. My aforementioned Mexican coworker traded me some tamales for my focaccia and her salsa verde was [chef's kiss].
B.T. Dubs, no, she is not in contention for the "prize" of us knowing who gave me food poisoning; she gave me the tamales the day after this.
Anyway, satisfied with my crispy tinga tacos, I continued on my way to my next destination...
D's Nuts
Sorry, I meant
D's Nuts
Gotcha! I'm just playing. No, where I really went was
D's Nuts
No, no, don't go. Don't go. I'm done, I swear. I really went to
D's Bánh Mì
Let's just get this part out of the way so I'm not making corrections three days later like in my last review of Frank & Andrea: The best bánh mì in Minneapolis is from My Huong Kitchen and is only nine dollars. The bread was airy and fluffy with just the right flaky crust on the outside, the pickled veg were sweet and the chicken was tender and lightly seasoned.
This aint the picture of that one.
This was the Saigon bánh mì, the cold cut model, because D's website said they were sold out of lemongrass chicken; it was fourteen dollars and the bread was too big.
"Charlie, what do you mean the bread was 'too big'?"
I mean I couldn't get the fucking thing in my mouth.
So I squeezed the hell out of it and ate half of it and took the other half home.
It was... unremarkable. For fourteen dollars, it was unremarkable.
But for fourteen dollars, I was going to finish it.
Got it home, unwrapped it, and started eating it, wishing I had my fourteen dollars instead, and that's when I noticed something. You see that lighter colored piece of meat in there? Right in the middle?
Yeah, that meat was a gray color. Grey colour if you're British.
My first thought was, "Oh, it's just a bit of oxidization," and then my second thought was, "Fuck this, stop eating it," and I threw the sandwich away, saying out loud, "Guess I've got food poisoning, now!"
Thank fuck my symptoms wound up being mild. If this was a shit & barf case, I'd be tempted to call the health inspector. But this was mild nausea; later that night, I had exactly four potato chips and stopped because I was sure I'd ralph. Then I tried to watch Sinners but couldn't focus so I just watched The Alfred Hitchcock Hour instead.
Fourteen dollars for an unremarkable sandwich that you can't fit in your mouth made in a kitchen that apparently had some pretty lax quality control standards that day.
But who knows? These were both new-to-me places and I couldn't see in either kitchen. I know I'm making a case for the bánh mì place but it could have just as easily been the taqueria.
Yeah, no, I don't really believe it was the taqueria, either.
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