From the Archives - Our Fiesta

Introduction

When my wife and I bought our house, in Albany, California, we probably thought it was a starter home. Well, over 24 years later, we’re still here. Thus, what we assumed could well be the first of several housewarming parties became possibly, probably our only one. Fortunately, the party was glorious, mainly because we procured the food from our favorite (and alas, now long gone) Mexican restaurant, Mario’s La Fiesta . What follows is an account of that party—or, more precisely, the food, because that’s almost all I wrote about. Please enjoy this mouth-watering account from my archives. (At least, it made my mouth water.)

[Here’s the picture we included on our invitations, which we actually printed and mailed out. No, that’s not really our house.]

Our Fiesta – April 1, 2001

[My wife] E— came up with perhaps one of the greatest ideas ever conceived by the human mind: to get the food for our housewarming party from Mario’s La Fiesta. There were gobs of details to worry about for the party (cleaning the house, having enough toilet paper, providing a wide variety of healthy-style soft drinks for the non-drinkers and four pregnant women at the party, battling the logistics of having more than a hundred beers cold at once), so it was great not to have to worry about assembling decorative trays of whores-douvres. As it was, cleaning the place took several evenings, because we didn’t want to spend all Saturday cleaning and then be too tired to entertain our guests. The yard out front had been completely infested with weeds, and completely covered in fallen leaves (the camphor trees seem to do all their shedding at this time of year), and E—happened by a small crew of gardeners working in the neighborhood, and asked them to come out and give a bid, and they did a bang-up job for $100. By six we were almost completely ready. I realized I am an amateur party-giver when I loaded about 100 pounds of ice into a giant tub, before putting in the drinks, then had a devil of a time plunging the drinks through the ice. A bottled fizzy juice thing forced in head-first must have ruptured slightly, because there was a hissing sound somewhere in the tub. But we were essentially ready.

Our first official guest, a middle-aged lady from E—’s work, arrived at 6:10, some 20 minutes early. Then, nobody arrived for a very long time, and I was starting to worry that nobody would show, when everybody seemed to show up at once. Things were so busy that I actually forgot about the food, believe it or not, until I suddenly realized I was starving. “Man, what do they give you to eat around here?” I incongruously thought, before suddenly realizing I’d completely forgotten about my 7:15 food pickup at Mario’s. Panicking, I looked at my watch: it was already 7:15, on the nose. I looked around at a large crowd of guests who didn’t have a single thing to eat: not a cracker, not a celery stick, and certainly not one of those hackneyed spinach/artichoke dips inside a hauled-out bread bowl that seem to curse every party I’ve been to since college. No, my guests—spared though they were from the insipid brie wheels and 7-layer dips and inedible highfalutin pâté-style nonsense—were starving.

I quickly found an able assistant, my former colleague P— who immediately spoke up because he has a brand-new truck, one of those massive one-and-a-half-ton pickups with crew cab. We rushed to the restaurant, making a horribly time-consuming side trip to the ATM to cash up as La Fiesta doesn’t take credit or checks. Inside the restaurant, there was general confusion because a) nobody could understand that I’d placed the order days in advance, since they assumed I was there for a standard take-out, and 2) I was in the wrong place—I needed the banquet facility around the corner.

So I was like half an hour late, and lo and behold there was a La Fiesta employee waiting out front. Kind of an older looking guy, robust but not fat, and I had the distinct impression I was in the presence of somebody important. Sure enough, it was Mario himself! Not even the son of the original Mario, but the very founder, 42 years ago, of La Fiesta! I even shook his hand! He had the solid, nonchalant confidence and cheerfulness of somebody who knows his customer will be completely satisfied.

Mario saw how far away the truck was parked, and said to bring it right up front and double-park. Then we went into the banquet facility and I saw my food there, on the counter, in two huge, four-inch-deep aluminum casserole trays, next to three deep tubs of salsa (one a smoked tomato thing, one a classic salsa roja, and the other green tomatillo). My heart soared like a hawk to see so much La Fiesta food in one place at one time. At this point Mario beckoned to P— to come forward and help haul: “We’ve got a lot of food here!” Imagine my amazement when another member of the La Fiesta family approached, wheeling a large dolly with a stack at least four feet high of more giant trays of food. It was probably more food than I’ve ever seen in one place. (I’m not counting Sizzler as food.) I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

Mario’s wife Rosalinda settled up the bill. I’d ordered 30 flour tortillas, which weren’t on the menu but which Mario supposed he could provide, though he had no idea when I ordered how much they would cost. Well, they ended up charging me four dollars and change, roughly a quarter what I would have paid at Safeway. And somehow, though I’d meticulously calculated the total and the tax, the bill came out about $25 lower than expected. All in all it was an extremely reasonable sum: within fifty bucks or so of the most expensive dinner for two I’ve had with E—, and we were feeding forty-plus people.

The food absolutely filled the bed of P—’s truck, and this is one of those massive pickups that it so large, in fact, that it doesn’t deserve to exist except as a legit work truck, with the type of oversized bed that could carry the space shuttle, the lunar lander, and any modern sedan all at one time. There wasn’t even room in the bed for the salsa and the bag of chips (which was the size of a small cow), which I carried up front on my lap. I was so excited at this point I thought I was going to cry. We were just about to pull away when I remember the Agua Fresca. Agua Fresca is a lot like punch, except that it’s made from fruit instead of corn syrup and food coloring. Thus, the flavors are things like pineapple and strawberry instead of “blue” and “red.” It’s delicious stuff, and I’d ordered four gallons. So I went back, and found to my horror that I couldn’t get back in. The banquet facility is right next to People’s Park, which is so full of desperate homeless people I couldn’t blame La Fiesta for having a big locking gate out front. It was some time before I discovered the doorbell. Mario came back out, and I said, “The Agua Fresca!” He threw his hands up in the air. “Ah, the Agua Fresca!” he shouted. He turned back and went inside, yelling, “The Agua Fresca!” Everybody in the place starting running around yelling “The Agua Fresca! the Agua Fresca!” and looking for it as though it were a small animal that could run under a table and hide. Suddenly Mario found it, seeming to pull it out of thin air, though it was a massive lidded plastic pail, at least three feet tall. He loaded it up on the dolly and we rolled it out to the car. It took all my adrenaline-boosted strength to hoist it up into the crew cab. I could hear the ice cubes clattering around and I all but drooled down the front of my shirt.

[Here’s a photo of another giant order from La Fiesta, from another party years later. You get the idea.]

We drove as fast back to my house (my house!) as is prudent in a truck filled with such a precious and precarious cargo, and when we pulled up I ran into the house and yelled for assistance. At least half a dozen guests, half-crazed with hunger I imagine, streamed out the door and helped unload. It was like an army of ants carrying massive crumbs to their queen. I distinctly heard a colleague of mine ask another, “Have you ever seen Dana this happy?” It didn’t even all fit on our dining room table. The dining room was instantly thronged with people. And the food was a hit! I was in there for at least half an hour before I got anything to eat, and the burden of socializing with guests was starting to be a severe obstacle. I almost wanted to dismiss the whole party so as to get at those enchiladas verdes and chiles rellenos, the magical refried beans and the rice, the guacamole (a huge tray), and the three, count-em three, kinds of salsa.

The husband of one of E—’s friends approached me, plate-less, looking quite grave: “I will know if this is worth eating,” he said in a low voice, “after just one taste of the guacamole. If it isn’t good, nothing will be.” I practically forced a chip into his hand. (Later in the evening, his gut bloated with gas and cramp, he apologized for having doubted my choice, explaining that he’d been subjected to a dreadful hotel-catered “Mexican” buffet the previous week, the awfulness of which was heralded by milky-sour-cream-based, uniformly weak and thin ersatz guacamole. 

Eventually I made my way to the table and had, over three or four trips, what in aggregate could be called the Super Mario platter—at least three each of rellenos and enchiladas, with rice and beans and tortillas accompanying each round. I ate more La Fiesta that night than I ever have in a single sitting. It may have been because I was standing up, thus giving more room in my gut. Plus, it’s very hard to cut a chile relleno with one hand (the other hand was holding the plate), so I ate at least one of them in a single bite.

Ten years ago, had we the inclination and the means to throw such a party, I imagine it would have ended at three or four AM or whenever we ran out of booze. Instead, the last guests left at 2:40 AM, which was actually 1:40 AM except we lost an hour at 2:00 AM (when daylight savings began). Many of the guests had assumed it was BYOB, and we ended up with more than half, perhaps even two thirds, of the beer un-drunk. We never even opened the tequila, and barely tapped the vodka. The bowl of spiked Agua Fresca was only half gone at the end, though the total of un-spiked Agua Fresca left over was only about 2-1/2 quarts. When I think about it, I realize it was more popular than the booze! Part of that was the pregnant women at the party, but then again all of their husbands should have been drinking for three. I guess my generation is slowing down. As for me, I spent a lot of time in bed on Sunday, not because I drank a lot (I didn’t) but because I had eaten so much. Kind of a lard hangover.

The leftovers? A vast amount. I think when you order large takeout from Mario’s, they pay little attention the quantity you actually ordered and just give you gobs of food. Maybe they round up to the nearest hundred items (I’d ordered four dozen of each). I can’t wait for my next excuse to throw a party.

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Pretty Good Guacamole

Introduction

It’s still summer, which means it’s time for guacamole. If you’re interested in learning how to make it, you’ve come to the right place. Don’t bother with any of the recipes you’ll find online. My instructions are better, more complete, and best of all aren’t infested with annoying ads. Recipe websites are the worst, with nefarious pop-ups, videos suddenly springing to life, requests to access your location, invitations to mailing lists … just keep all that crap out of your life.

Following the structural tradition of my posts on homemade pasta, fettuccine Alfredo, Bolognese Ragu, and homemade macaroni and cheese, I’ll give you this guide in the (perhaps mythic) who-what-where-when-why-how format of the newspaper reporter.

Who, where, and when

The first time I had guacamole I was a little kid. It was a bad batch made with really awful avocados that were not only basically rotten, but also really stringy. (I’ve never understood why, but that occasionally happens.) I was revolted, and decided I didn’t like guacamole or even avocados. My evil brothers encouraged my utter failure of judgment because hey, more guac for them. (I should have been more skeptical when they didn’t ridicule my taste. They pretended that their love of guac was a bizarre idiosyncrasy and it was only natural I didn’t share it.) When I finally gave guac another try, many years later, and realized the error of my ways, I was livid—at myself, of course, but also at my brothers. On some level I still haven’t forgiven them.

I didn’t learn how to make proper guac until about 1990, when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara. A Chicana friend of mine named Tina showed me the ropes, and I have zero reason to doubt her ethnic and culinary cred. (For some reason I’m more nervous about presenting myself as an authority on this Mexican dish than I am with regard to Italian food. Perhaps it’s because I once recommended a Mexican restaurant to a friend of mine who rinsed the piss out of me for its not having been authentic enough for his more sophisticated palate.)

What

Guacamole is something made right before you eat it, whether you serve it with chips or as a topping or both. Guac is not that homogenous over-smooth green stuff you buy in a tub, and I don’t care where you buy that. (Just because Whole Foods charges like six bucks for a paltry inch-tall tub doesn’t make it good, and scarcely makes it guac). You cannot cut corners with this food, even if the store-bought stuff is arguably better than nothing. They should have a different name for that stuff, like Avocado-Whiz.

Why

Obviously you should make guacamole because it’s delicious. It’s also good for you, because avocados themselves are nutritious as is everything else that goes into it. And if you have a bunch of avocados that are perfectly ripe and will be rotten tomorrow, you practically have to make it. (Back when I commuted to San Francisco for work, I once called my boss and told him I had to work from home because my avocados would be perfect at lunchtime and rotten by dinnertime. As a fellow foodie, he was fully supportive.)

How

The best thing about guacamole is that it’s pretty easy to make. So long as your ingredients are good, all you have to do is basically get out of Mother Nature’s way. By this I mean you need to refrain from doing all the things people do to ruin their innocent produce and turn out an inferior product. Here is a list of what not to do:

• Don’t put sour cream in your guac. I cannot fathom why people do this. It simply doesn’t belong. I mean, would you put sour cream in your beer?
• Don’t mix your guac in a blender. It’s not supposed to have the texture of mayonnaise. I was once at a dinner party and the hostess set out a bowl of this strange white-green substance. Since there were chips nearby, I grasped that it was a dip of some kind. It tasted like nothing. I asked what it was and was shocked when the hostess said, “It’s guacamole!” I was struck dumb. I’d had no idea that’s what it was trying to be.
• Don’t put garlic in your guac. Yes, some recipes call for this, but garlic is not authentic, it doesn’t greatly enhance your guac, and it gives you bad breath.
• Don’t roughly hack up the onions. If you get big hunks of onion in your guac, that drowns out the other flavors, plus you (again) end up with dragon breath.
• Don’t just mix avocados with commercial salsa and pretend that’s guac. It won’t work. The only exception is if the salsa is from Mario’s La Fiesta, but this is sadly impossible as they folded a decade ago.
• Don’t make it right at the table in front of your guests like some silly overpriced Mexican restaurants do. That’s just a gimmick. This takes a little more work than your guests would have the patience for.
• Don’t start with inferior ingredients. If the avocados and tomatoes aren’t in season, it’s just not going to work out that well. This is a summer food, unless you live in California and your local produce market has connections in South America (though really, shouldn’t you source your produce locally, blah blah blah?).
• Don’t add peyote. That’s totally not the point. I don’t care if the characters in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo spiked their guacamole … you shouldn’t. (Note that Acosta himself just said no to that spiked guac.)

So here are all the ingredients you’ll need:

• Avocados (preferably Hass)
• Onion (red is best, or white)
• Cilantro
• Lime
• Tomatoes (preferably dry-farmed Early Girl, though cherry tomatoes work too)
• Salt
• Crystal sauce (or Tabasco)
• Rice vinegar (optional)

I won’t bother with the quantities of each ingredient because how much you use has simply to do with the number of avocados you have, and (to a lesser extent) the number of people who’ll share it. Everything else is up to your judgment: what looks right, like what you’d see in a good restaurant? What tastes right? You can always taste as you go (chips being easier than a dozen little tasting spoons) and add more of whatever it seems to need. Experimentation is necessary and fun. If you avoid the don’ts listed above, it’ll turn out fine.

OK. To start, sink a sharp chef’s knife or paring knife into the avocado, across the middle horizontally, until you hit the pit. Rotate the avocado so that you cut all the way around, then twist the two halves apart. Thwack the knife into the pit so you can pull it out. Now slice the flesh of the avocado into rows, then go across those like a grid so it’s kind of cubed. Scoop that out into a big bowl. You’re not really going to mash this per se. By the time everything is mixed, it’ll be mashed enough. Again, you want it chunky.

It would be a shame to use mealy, pink tomatoes like what the giant supermarkets have. I suppose really good commercial pico de gallo would work in a pinch, but really you want those Early Girl tomatoes, in season. They should be bright red and so flavorful that you actually curse under your breath that you spent so much of your life eating terrible tomatoes before discovering these. Dice them into pieces roughly a centimeter on a side (though of course they shouldn’t be perfect cubes—what kind of nutjob are you?). Throw them in the bowl without the juices. (If they’re really watery you might question their quality. The non-flesh part with the seeds should be fairly gelatinous.) Can’t get good tomatoes when you need them? Not to worry. The photo at the top of this post was of a batch that didn’t even have tomatoes … it was still pretty good.

Now dice up those onions. If they’re strong, use less. And like I said before, don’t just hack them up willy-nilly. Use a razor-sharp knife and make very thin slices, like you could read through, almost all the way through the onion but not quite. Then shift it 90 degrees and slice the other way. Now turn this on its side and slice down again to create tiny cubes. Once you have a nice pile, hack it all up further, pivoting the knife around. There’s no such thing as too fine … your patience will ultimately limit you. Throw those in the bowl.

Next comes the cilantro (which is the only ingredient Tina didn’t teach me to use, probably because we couldn’t get it). Tear the leaves off the stems, wash them, and hack them up nice and fine and throw them on the pile. How much you use is a matter of taste. If you don’t put any in, your guac will still be just fine, but cilantro really does make it better.

Squeeze in some lime, and shake in some salt, and then glug in some Crystal sauce. How much of each you add is, again, all up to taste. (As explained here you should not skimp on salt in the name of good health.) If you have very young children you might go light on the Crystal sauce. (Why wouldn’t you just use cayenne pepper? Well, you could, but the Crystal sauce includes vinegar which makes your guac tastier. If you don’t have Crystal or Tabasco sauce, or are going light on that so the guac isn’t too spicy, add a tiny bit of rice vinegar for a bit of zip.)

Now, if you’ve started with beautiful ingredients, take a moment to gaze at your bowl of goodness before you mix it up. It should look about like this:

Note the fresh red and green peppers in the background of the above photo. Did those go into my guac? Nope. They’re just for show. I’m not sure what that salsa is doing there either … I was probably just eating it with chips while I made the guac, out of sheer gluttonous hedonism. By the way, I’ve noticed how modern smartphone cameras take liberties with the color, trying to make everything look better than it is. I really don’t like this about the camera software. But rest assured, my tomatoes really were that red. Just gorgeous. Note the size and shape of the Early Girl on the cutting board there. It’s not a beefsteak tomato, and it’s not a Roma, okay? If you can’t get Early Girl, get cherry tomatoes, like I said earlier. (Weren’t you paying attention?)

Now you stir everything together … not with a whisk, not with a hand blender, and not with any force. Just mix it gently with a big spoon until the ingredients are combined. Then stir it more only as needed to re-mix as you adjust the flavor. The great thing about making guac is that you can just go crazy fine-tuning it by adding more of this or that ingredient, tasting all the while by dipping in chips. If half of it’s gone by the time you declare it officially done, that’s not such a bad problem to have, innit? I mean, you’ve just had this blissful kitchen time…

Here’s what the finished product ought to look like:

If you’re serving this at the table, you’ll want to move it into a nice clean bowl that’s just large enough to hold it all. (This provides the added benefit of giving you, the deserving chef, the opportunity to clean out the mixing bowl with a rubber spatula like a cat licking her paws.) I took a final photo of my latest batch in a nice white bowl, but I won’t post it here. The phone software went nuts and enhanced the color to the point it almost looked like the guac had M&Ms in it. This was a ridiculously brazen act of auto-retouching and I cannot deceive you like that. Maybe next time I make guac I’ll get out my real camera and snap some more photos to post here. Sheesh.

Now, one of my favorite things about making guac is the way you get people to eat it. If your household is anything like mine, all you have to do at this point is say, in voice only slightly louder than normal conversation, “There’s guac.” You’ll witness a stampede as your family members descend on the bowl from every corner of the house.

Oh, one more thing: don’t serve your guacamole with lame national-brand chips like Tostitos—it deserves better. You don’t need to go full-yuppie with chichi brands like Late July either. Get that weird brand whose label is in both English and Spanish, if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that offers such a thing. (I have no idea what people do in, like, Vermont.) My favorite brand is a local one, Casa Sanchez, that offers both thick and thin varieties. Find the chips that look like what you’d get at an authentic taqueria, not what you’d get at a Super Bowl party in Cincinnati or Green Bay.

A final note

If you follow these directions, don’t be surprised if your friends and family gush about how great your guacamole is, like you’re some kind of legit chef. It would be deceitful to accept the credit, though, given that all you did was cut up and combine some basic ingredients. Reply modestly, like, “Oh, I didn’t make this. God did. I just assembled some stuff without screwing up.”

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Review - Los Gallos Taqueria (or, How To Choose a Mexican Restaurant)

Introduction

Road trips can be great for dining. They can also be lousy if you guess wrong about a restaurant. (For example, I went to a dynamite-looking Bavarian pastry shop in Michigan back in ’94 that looked so promising until the first grainy, filmy, insipid bite.) Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google can obviously help, if you’re able to sort through the conflicting reviews.

This I did with my brother Bryan on a recent road trip that took us through Reno. This post reviews a great taqueria there, and in the process lays out some solid criteria for evaluating one. I also cover (once again) some of the pitfalls of amateur reviews.

Restaurant Review – Los Gallos taqueria, Reno, NV

While Bryan drove, I searched top-10 lists for Reno taquerias. My method is simple: see if the same taqueria pops up in the top-10 lists of Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google. Then I scan the reviews of a favorable place and look for undeniable evidence for or against a place being good. Undeniable would be along the lines of “whole wheat and gluten free tortillas offered!” (against) and “best lengua I’ve ever had!” (for). What I’m looking for is authenticity and assurance that that Sysco is not involved.

Just in case you’re not familiar with lengua, it’s beef tongue. I only had it once, from a mediocre food truck. My burrito had giant rubbery hunks of it and it made me feel kind of ill. I hauled the tongue out of the burrito and put it in my cat’s dish, so I could set up a family member to ask me, “Whatsa matter … cat got your tongue?” (Nobody did.) Interesting aside: the resemblance of “lengua” to the word “language” is no coincidence, and the Russian word for language, язык, is the same as their word for tongue. Anyway, I will probably never order lengua again, but I like to know it’s on the menu. It’s like a shibboleth.

Los Gallos taqueria showed immediate promise based on this statement from a 5-star review: “Burrito-gasms= spicy pork and lingua.” A 4-star review said, “Any restaurant whose theme is cock fighting, just check the wall decor, has to be confident in their grub… If you ever wanted to try buche, tripas or lengua, this is the place.”

(I thought going into this review that the person would be complaining about the cockfighting motif. Frankly, I would not watch a cockfight, but that doesn’t mean I think this restaurant should be avoided. I mean, I wouldn’t fight in a war if I could avoid it, but I don’t shun Hemingway’s work just because he wrote about war.)

I’ve never wanted to try tripe, but it’s an excellent sign that Los Gallos serves it. And buche? What the hell is that? Google translated it as “maw,” which isn’t really helpful. No animal’s throat would yield much meat, would it? But there’s a Spanish definition given as well: “Abultamiento del esófago de las aves, en forma de bolsa membranosa, donde almacenan los alimentos para reblandecerlos antes de triturarlos en la molleja.” Google translates this as “Bulging of the esophagus of the birds, in the form of a membranous bag, where they store the food to soften them before crushing them in the gizzard.” This puts Los Gallos up there with those really trendy “whole animal” restaurants that cost a fortune. Another good sign!

Of course, it’s important to look at the 1-star reviews as well, to make sure there are no ugly surprises, such as “They don’t have burritos, only ‘wraps,’” or “They charged me $2 extra for guac and it was only the faintest smear,” or “I watched the cook shoot the dishwasher in the stomach just to watch him die” (this was Reno, after all).

But the 1-star reviews I saw weren’t very damning. One said, “Place in kinda run down but was clean. I just found the food to be meh mediocre and do to its dreary decor I don't want to even bother giving it another try.” That first bit, “Place in kinda run down,” is problematic. If “in” was supposed to be “is,” then there’s a verb tense problem with “was” later in the same sentence. If it’s just an extra tacked-on word, well, then the person is sloppy. The fact of “due” being spelled “do” confirms the borderline illiteracy of the reviewer, and any focus on décor shows poor judgment if not poor character. This person does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Another 1-star review said, “Nasty and nasty. I was so disappointed both my husband and I were. I was upset also with the girls that work there at the front they  both were rude. $23.97 went to the garbage can.” The sloppiness of this review (e.g., the run-on sentences) shows remarkable cheek in somebody so utterly unforgiving of her fellow man. And “girls” seems a bit sexist, as surely the employees were adults. I’m not sure what the redundancy of “nasty and nasty” was intended to convey. And I’m dismayed that she threw away her food. (I’ve been known to rescue marginal food from the family compost bin.)

My favorite 1-star review read, “Love the food been coming here for years ... NOW I GET HOME AND THE BURRIOT HAS PICO WHICH I CLEARLY DIDNT ASK FOR!!! ASTONISHED, if this isn't taken care of I will never return, my family won't return and my friends will hear of this.” OMG. Is this person for real? First of all, who doesn’t like pico de gallo? And if this person has loved the food for years, couldn’t a little goof like this be forgiven? “Astonished” … really?

Man, people suck. Fricking prima donnas. I have enjoyed Joe Blow’s Yelp reviews for years, but now I read the non-word “burriot” instead of burrito which is clearly a misspelling! ASTONISHED! If this isn’t taken care of I’ll never read another Joe Blow review, and my family and friends will hear of this! (Note: it has occurred to me that this person’s review could be satirical and/or tongue-in-cheek, but if so that’s no favor to the restaurant given the widespread gullibility of Internet users.)

Of course we should take the favorable reviews with a grain of salt as well. A 4-star review reported, “This place has been on my list for a while.  It’s a bit embarrassing because I live around the corner from the place. Why I haven’t I gone?  The obvious is I’m lazy.” Ah, a classic self-referential blathering review. What do I care of the reviewer’s traits and circumstance? And who is that lazy? Should I trust a lazy person?

A 5-star review raved, “Tacos were filling, meat was savory, and the bottled coke was delicious.” Look, all tacos are filling, if you eat enough of them, and to call any Coke “delicious” shows an exceedingly sunny disposition that must be marvelous in a human being, but not very useful in a critic.

Okay, enough of the received wisdom—on to my own experience. If I were writing a Yelp review, I’d probably give this 5 stars and proclaim, “Totally great place—I was driving through Reno with my brother, coming back from Colorado where we settled our late father’s estate, and we were really hungry from hours of driving along Highway 50, which is a much better route than I-70 or I-80 by the way, and check this out—Los Gallos doesn’t have a parking lot but it does have street parking, and when we got there, there was 36 minutes left on the meter. THIS PLACE ROCKS!”

Fortunately, albertnet has higher standards so you won’t get my life story. We headed in there, and the menu told us straight off that we were in good hands. Check this out:

Not only was the lengua confirmed, but they have cabeza (beef brains) and buche (which term they helpfully translate for us). They also serve menudo, which you will never, ever find at Chipotle or Trump Tower, and birria, which is goat. (I thought about asking if they’d put birria in my burrito—which I happened to know would be great—but remembered that I’d been warned that “the girls that work there at the front they  both were rude.” I wonder what the items were that have been whited out and papered over on the menu.

The super burrito is a bit pricey ($9) but at least the guacamole comes stock. The cashier asked us if we wanted the cheese that the burritos came with. I take this as another sign of authenticity, as I’m dimly aware that traditional Mexican food isn’t brimming with cheese. (Being a gringo, I actually do want the cheese, but it’s nice to be asked.) The food took a while, which is also good. I once went to Chipotle (it was the only place open on a holiday), and although the place was as deserted as it deserves to be, the cook put my burrito together so hastily and half-assedly I almost lunged across the counter to strangle him.

Interestingly, Los Gallos accepts Android Pay. The only reason I care is that I got my housecat from the animal shelter, where they implant every animal with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip. That means if you update your pet’s profile online, adding your credit card number, you can use the animal as a mobile wallet. Not at Los Gallos, though … they don’t allow pets.

While waiting for our burritos we helped ourselves to thick, crunchy chips that were just the right amount of greasy. There was a salsa bar with at least five kinds of salsa, plus the little radishes and pickled jalapenos that I never eat. The salsa was really good and really fiery. It made my mouth hurt. I’m sure there’s a 1-star review out there complaining about this, but it’s how Mexican food is supposed to be (at least as far as I know).

Here’s a photo of the interior. As I’ve said, I’m not hugely into décor, but the original artwork was fun (and decidedly non-institutional). I would give Los Gallos a 5-star review based on this dude’s beard alone. (Yes, that was hyperbole.)

Okay, let’s cut to the chase: how were the burritos? Delicious. I’ll walk you through mine. First, the tortilla was perfectly grilled. (I like grilled way better than steamed.) The first bite obviously had more tortilla than subsequent bites would, as I bit through the “cap,” but I didn’t have to deal with a bunch of wadded-up tortilla like what you get when there’s too much tortilla for the filling. I hate that, even as a lover of large expanses of starch.

The meat—I ordered my burrito al pastor—was a bit greasy, but in a good way. Let’s face it, anyone who doesn’t like a bit of grease would avoid al pastor entirely. The ingredients were perfectly apportioned. I hate it when there’s too much meat in a burrito, even if the meat is good. The flavors must be balanced. The ingredients were also perfectly distributed. I won’t say I dislike coming across a huge pocket of rice, since I like rice, but I obviously don’t prefer any big deposits of a single ingredient. Everything tasted great. Have a look:

I freely confess that’s not a very good photo. The burrito isn’t even in focus. But this actually attests to the burrito’s superb quality. Having tasted it, I couldn’t be bothered to waste a lot of time photographing it. In fact, every moment I spent not stuffing my face was intolerable. But look closely and you’ll see my brother is sweating. That’s because it was spicy. I should have taken another photo toward the end of the meal to better showcase this. (As spicy as the filling was, I kept adding more salsa anyway simply because it was there and it was so good.)

There’s only so much you can say about a burrito without starting to blather like a wine “expert” so I’ll stop now. But I have two things to say about the service. One, when I went back to the counter to ask the cashier to thank the cook for me, she was perfectly friendly. Two, even if the cashier had been totally rude, had insulted me and even my mother to my face, I wouldn’t hesitate to eat at Los Gallos again. I almost wish I had some reason to go back to Reno.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Review - Da Crack Taqueria, Poipu, Kauai

Introduction

As I discussed in my last blog post, I took a vacation to Hawaii recently, and though I know you don’t want to hear how great a time I had, and conversely nobody wants to hear any complaints that start out “When I was in Hawaii,” everybody loves a restaurant review, right? Well, given that it’s a review of a hole-in-the-wall on the most remote archipelago in the world, and you will probably never go there, maybe you’re not that interested.

But wait, are you a foodie? And do you like taquerias? Are you curious about one man’s effort to find good spicy food in the land of poi? (If you haven’t heard of it, poi is a paste made of taro corm that ancient native Hawaiians allegedly ate, and which you can still get, and which I did try, and which has a flavor a lot like Spackle or Bondo but not as intense. And yes, “corm” is a real word, and yes, I did enjoy using it just now—first time!)

Okay, what if you’re not a foodie? Might you be a tech-weenie? Well then, read on, because—lacking a laptop PC in Hawaii—I dictated this entire review to my smartphone. That leads to all kinds of fun: you can decide for yourself how impressive the voice-recognition software is; laugh at it biggest gaffs; and try to decode (via context) the intended words lurking beneath best-efforts like “dustless pros,” “whole ten toes,” and “run Russian unicorn.” I’ve left the haphazard capitalization in place, such as the so-called smartphone’s decision to capitalize “Chipotle” and “Thunder” but not “hawaii” or the first word of any sentence. I’ve also left misspellings uncorrected, because poor spelling seems to be an island tradition.

(Note: I originally sent this via e-mail as a race report to my bike club. My race reports focus almost exclusively on the food, to the point that it simply doesn’t matter that I lacked a bicycle during my vacation.)


Restaurant Review – Da Crack Taqueria, Poipu, Kauai

Greetings,

This is a non race report because I’m not doing any racing much less riding while I’m in Hawaii but I’m going to give you a report anyway because not riding racing should never stop you. the food is what’s important I’m going to regale you with the tale of our taqueria here on Kauai because you like to try different taqueria is at least some of us Lindsay of course being the notable exception who hates all Mexican food. okay now I’m really ticked because my whole last sentence all of which was dustless pros has been lost because it couldn’t connect. you see, I’m using the voice recognition because I have awkward stubby fingers to type like the dickens on a proper keyboarding but don’t do so well with these smartphones. stupid anyway, the place we went to as this little hole in the wall taqueria called Da Crack. it was highly recommended on Yelp or whatever those one of those sites one of those rating websites. the logo was a crew leader on cartoon of a guys butt crack. on that basis Alexa refused to eat there but we didn’t give her a choice. Lindsay meanwhile hates all Mexican food on principle making me wonder who the father really is.

so what’s a walk up place just a counter no tables no chair there’s a little tiny bench along the wall outside but it’s really a carryout deal. the whole menu is on a chalkboard but they are also selling their logo bearing hats and shirts. so it’s a combination of small time and self congratulating big time. not that I have any problem with that my favorite place ever la fiesta sold really groovy t shirts. but now I have stolen my own Thunder by mentioning la fiesta because you know that I can’t possibly given to Sterling review to any place having summoned the ghost of my long lost favorite place. this is Andy speaking not Andy and right now I’m eating with a weird seeing images.

Erin has a fish taco for $11 and I do mean fish taco, singular, but hey Islands prices, right? Alexa and I both had pork burritos, but they were not carnitas, they only had shredded pork, which is a shame, and is matched by the offering of only whole ten toes or whole black beans, not the refried beans that I think should be required in all talk worldwide. but the burritos to come stalk with cheese and sour cream, which is pretty nice because of some expect to be nickel and dime stood up on everything when you’re traveling in hawaii.

so one of the unique things is that they offered two kinds of sour cream or perhaps it was dressing for the fish taco and that was either Chipotle or what sabi and I had to guess that erin would want massage me because she had wandered off to supervise Alexa who refuse to be seen standing in front of a place called Da Crack. Not “what sabi” or “massage me” but wasabi, geez. the burritos were un remarkable and run Russian unicorn remarkable in terms of choices except that it was Mexican brown rice, and cabbage instead of lettuce. Unicode Lindsay ordered see Keiki kids cheese quesadilla, which route was about five dollars, and wish we could have easily made at home which we should have done because of course we took these back to our condo to eat on the lanai.

okay, down to brass tacks. how was it already, you surely want to know. well, the fish taco have these little bricks of fish that looked slightly funny, and meet us a little nervous, at least me, because you know this is the land of spam. not spam as in unwanted email like this one, I but I mean real spam, as in shoulder of pork and meat, or whatever spam stands for. you know, Hormel spam. but the fish, which was probably mahi mahi, was not at all like spam and in fact was quite tasty, and those hotties sour cream, which you’re going to have to figure out what I mean kama because surely this voice recognition software is going to butcher wassabi yet again, was quite tasty. it was a flour tortilla, oddly enough, but there’s a silver lining in that in that the taco, there being only one of them, it was fairly big. it had a side of pinto beans and that aforementioned Mexican brown rice, which were both pretty good, and if there was any complain I had with this thing is that there wasn’t enough salsa, but we had some handmade store bought salsa from the island heater that was fairly good. plus we had some dose Aki’s beer, the special lager with the green label, which wash everything down real good.

so on to the main item that being the burrito, the tortilla was grilled rather than steamed which is great, and the size was pretty good, and the beans were black which of course is not as good as refried was pretty darn good I actually like the rice pretty well. the cabbage was good, & I think I’m going to start using that in our home made make your own tacos, an albert standby, because it gives a little extra crunching is probably better for a kids at being cruciferous. the meat of course is the star of the show, & I couldn’t help but to wish that my shredded pork was carnitas, or that I’ve gotten beef, because it turns out most of the beef on this island seems to be local grass fed beef, but I forgot that and when you’re getting something at a sketchy walk up counter called Da Crack, there’s something that causes you to hesitate about taking any gambles on your meat.

the salsa was okay, but I ordered hot and this stuff was pretty darn tame. they did have a great nation called fire but I avoided it on principle because I think it’s lame to call something fire, and by the way didn’t Taco Bell already steal that name? so anyway I said it was a good burrito, but not a great burrito, and then Gertrude Stein punch me in the face.

so, a little background about the name of this place, which I have to admit did not entice us to eat there. according to the counter person, this place was huge in the 70’s and had some sort of standard name, play pou taqueria or something, but everybody nicknamed Da Crack, and then when it folded in 2007 it was a great opera and everybody back for them to open up again and so when they did this time they just gave it the official name of Da Crack. so what has the script loyal following, almost every review you read says its where the locals go, & I guess I can’t blame them because it’s one thing to come from the Bay Area, possibly the best place for burritos in the entire world, but another to be on some isolated island where most of the food is not Mexican, and where most of the food probably shouldn’t be Mexican, if I’m to be perfectly candid.

bottom line? if I found this place in the mission I might think it was kind of neat because it was a little different a little island inflected, a little islandy you might even say but I wouldn’t go back there because it was perfectly mediocre. but if I found this plays in Saint Johnsbury Vermont, or in Ashburn Virginia, or in an airport, or hell, even in Boulder Colorado, I would think I was a revelation and be very glad to have it around. but that doesn’t mean anything could ever have me rocking a Da Crack baseball cap.

Mahalo.

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2012 (Stage 2)

Note:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and mature themes.

Introduction

In last week’s post I described the exploits, particularly the gastronomic ones, of my friends and me as we tackled Stage 1 of the 2012 Everest Challenge stage race.  Now, with the professional sport of cycling collapsing around us—Lance Armstrong’s team, his maid, and even his pet hamster have confessed to participation in his doping ring—I offer the sorry tale of my un-drug un-fueled assault on Stage 2 of the 2012 EC.

Pre-race

I slept unusually well for an EC second night; that is to say, I slept some.  As my roommate John pointed out, the AC unit had a continuous fan feature, as opposed to those enemy-of-sleep versions that turn on and off all night.  Still, as the chilled air compressor periodically cycled on and off, its low, deep groaning came and went.  (Or was that John?)

The Uncle Sam cereal was even harder going the second day, because I was at the end of the box and all the heavy stuff—various kinds of seeds and, I think, gravel—had settled to the bottom.  John and I ate in silence, which frightened me.  Normally, the EC motel room banter is the giddy, profanity-laced stuff of locker rooms, but this was almost gloomy, like a wake.  John and I could be accused of having a poor attitude, but as you shall see, prescience would be the better description.

We got to the start line as the sun was rising and the moon was setting.  I think there was even an occultation of Venus in progress, but I was a bit distracted and didn’t look for it.

The main source of my distraction was my bowels.  You may be rolling your eyes and groaning:  “This again?!”  Well, remember, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”  The fact is, evacuation is a critical part of this sport, and is too often swept under the carpet.  Now.  Don’t get me wrong, the organization of EC is excellent overall, but they need more San-O-Lets (aka Port-A-Potties).  On this day there were only two, and what’s worse, they were still atop a trailer.  Not only did I not have time to wait in line, but I feared, albeit irrationally, that somebody would drive off while I was in there.

Fortunately, I took a lesson from last year when a guy coming out of a San-O-Let told me, “That thing’s out of toilet paper.  I had to use my arm warmers.”  So I’d brought a roll of TP from the motel.  I found a good bush off the side of the road that would provide excellent cover from most vantage points—but not including, alas, that of the van.  And that’s where the setting moon came into play.  All the guys were about to photograph the moon over the jagged saw blade mountains when I entered the frame.  There was nothing I could do—I had to go.  You will not be seeing this “double moon” shot on this blog, though I hear it’ll be on the cover of “Forbes” next month.

Stage 2 – 76 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing

During the race, I drank four bottles of Cytomax, two bottles of Gatorade, a bottle of Heed, and two bottles of water.  I ate four gels.  I swallowed enough pride to produce a glut of bile, which tasted only a bit better than the Gatorade (which was lemon-lime, a flavor I burned out on during my 1994 bike tour and have wisely avoided ever since).

The first climb went pretty well, except for a) knowing that I was in 10th place and should defend that, while b) knowing I should pace myself, which meant watching twenty of my competitors ride away as soon as the road went uphill.  It was sort of the “presidential primary” strategy:  don’t do anything bold that might backfire; and, hope my opponents do. 

John and I did the first climb and about half of the second climb together.  It was hot and dry and my legs were heavy and I plinked along in my lowest gear a lot of the time, remembering how I’d cracked on the third climb the previous year.  The idea was to save up my strength and finish strong, but I couldn’t find much strength to save.  Paul, racing in the 45+ category that started ten minutes behind, blew by us, inspiring me to … well, to train better next year, or race smarter, or switch to an activity I’m better suited to, like typing.

The race promoters lengthened the second climb this year.  They’d announced this on Friday evening, but didn’t say how much longer it would be.  Looking back, I think we were all unknowing subjects in some kind of cruel psychological experiment.  I kept expecting to see the leaders of my race coming down the other side, and the longer I went not seeing them, the closer to despair I came.  (A more foolhardy rider would have supposed he was simply not that far behind.  I knew better.) 

I spent much of the climb trying to work out how I might calculate how far behind I was, based on when and where the leaders passed me on their way down.  Doing math during bike races is notoriously hard, but I had plenty of time to think.  By the time I finally saw Craig coming down, I had it worked out:  I held in my head the current altitude at that moment (a better landmark than anything visual in this stark, Road Runner terrain) and the clock time.  When, an eternity later (the climb having been, finally, four miles longer this year), I crossed that altitude again on my way down, I checked the new clock time and subtracted.  Craig, it turned out, was twelve minutes ahead of me at that point.  Pretty amazing, since he was still as sick as a dog, breathing raspily and almost unable to talk.

I couldn’t be bothered to pedal or get in an aerodynamic tuck during that descent.  I just sat there, coasting, and waited for it to be over.  I finally reached the van, which was parked at the base of the third and final climb, and saw Craig there, off his bike and in street clothes.  As well as he’d’ been riding, he was still sick, and the heat and altitude made it impossible for him to breathe well enough to continue.  He and Ian gave me some drink, gels, and encouragement, and I struck out for the final climb.

I was feeling pretty close to despondent.  Where was all that energy I’d been saving up?  Where was the enthusiasm I’d had on this climb the first couple times I raced EC?  I couldn’t face the reality of what I had left to do:  over two hours of climbing, with over 6,000 feet of elevation gain, in the baking heat.  In previous years I had a teammate or two to ride with; this time I was off the back and oddly, breathtakingly alone.  No rider in sight, anywhere.  I could be anybody out here, on any day, in any era.

I couldn’t use my mileage to measure my progress because I hadn’t worked out how much longer that second climb had been.  Meanwhile, the thought of slowly ticking off the altitude benchmarks—4000 feet, 5000 feet, 6000 feet, 7000 feet, 8000 feet, 9000 feet, and, yes, even 10000 feet—was far too demoralizing to face.  (Plus, as often as I wiped the sweat off my bike computer, I couldn’t keep the screen clear enough to read it anyway.) 

I devised a plan:  instead of looking around me at the terrain to figure my progress, I’d just keep my eyes on the road ten feet ahead.  That created the illusion of speed, at least.  And I decided to “play” the entire double-album “Pink Floyd The Wall” in my head, including all the background sounds, TV snippets, the schoolteacher yelling “wrong, do it again!”, etc.  Because I knew my frazzled brain would get caught in endless loops of certain songs, I could be confident that by the time I got to “Outside the Wall,” I’d have been climbing for at least 90 minutes.  Then I’d be close enough to the end to monitor my progress without sliding into despair.

(The other benefit of this strategy was preventing the random songs that sometimes pop into my head while I’m riding.  All the way up Alpe d’Huez during the 2003 La Marmotte, I had Ravel’s “Bolero” in my head, which was the musical equivalent of a prison sentence.  John had had it even worse during the final EC climb of Stage 1:  pondering that he had such a long way to go, he suddenly got “Ride Like the Wind” by Christopher Cross stuck in his head, and couldn’t get rid of it.  Poor bastard.)

Around the time my brain got to “Goodbye Cruel World” I was actually doing a little better.  At the higher elevation the heat had subsided a bit and I had a decent rhythm.  I passed a couple of fellow Masters who had dropped me at the base of the second climb, well over an hour before.  They were really crawling.  “Dude, you’re a fucking stud!” one of them said.  I have to admit, that encouragement felt pretty good.

There’s a descent about 2/3 of the way up this climb.  The road drops some 200 feet, erasing your progress toward the finish.  It’s totally demoralizing.  I took the opportunity to eat a gel.  Hunting in my jersey pocket I came upon a sleeve of Clif Shot Blocks that Craig had given me.  My hand groped it, trying to figure out what it was.  Once I’d identified it, my brain tried to comprehend what Shot Blocks were and what they did.  You eat them, right?  But what are they?  And how do you get into the package?  Is it like Pez?  I give up trying to fathom this great Shot Block mystery and managed to find a gel.

I ran out of head-music.  The last lyric, “Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall,” was eerily apropos.  My own heart was working far better than my poor legs; in fact, the heart’s foreman had sent half the chambers home.  On the shallower pitches my heart rate wasn’t even in the 130s.  My breathing was strangely, unsettlingly slow at times.  I kept pushing on the right shift lever, hoping in vain that I actually had one lower gear.  The final few miles were like slow motion.  The guy I’d passed earlier, who’d called me a stud, now passed me back; if I’d had the energy I’d have said, “Do you care to rescind your earlier statement?”  Worst of all, I was starting to feel lightheaded.  Stretches of the climb appeared that I don’t recall ever having seen before.  It was like when something familiar, looked at too closely, starts to look odd and strange.

Finally I reached a terribly steep ramp with a couple spectators on it, and someone said, “200 feet to go!”  I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t dare.  But then, why would he lie?  I saw race officials sitting on lawn chairs.  I saw a line painted across the road labeled “FINIS.”  Still I couldn’t believe it (even though the finish line seemed long overdue).  “Is this the finish?  Am I done?” I cried out desperately.  The officials laughed.  “Yeah, you’re done.”  Normally I would coast a few hundred feet down the other side to where the food was, but I couldn’t manage it.  I clipped out and stopped.  “Did you get my number, 802?” I asked half a dozen times.  They had.  “Can I borrow that empty chair?”  Yes, I could.  I sat there at the finish line for a good ten minutes, watching other riders come across.  Two or three of them cried out desperately, “Is this the finish?  Am I done?”

Finally I made it to the rest area.  Jamie, 4th overall in the Masters 55+, greeted me enthusiastically and took my bike.  I found a chair and re-slumped.  I could smell the spinach-and-feta quesadillas the volunteers were cooking up, and I was hungry, but I literally lacked the energy to stand up and walk over there.  For a whole hour I just sat.  I couldn’t even bring myself to hunt for my bag of warm clothes.  I’ve never been so shattered after a race. 

Eventually I made it to the food tables, drank some Coke, drank some chocolate milk, drank some ginger ale, and then spied a big bottle of V-8 juice—the only real electrolyte replacement drink.  I asked if I could pour myself some.  “Yeah, please finish it up because it’s our last bottle.”  I followed this with infinity quesadilla slices, then had to sit again.  The chairs were all taken.  I sat on a tarp.  I found my bag, spent five minutes stretching my arm warmers over my squeaky, sticky arms, and got out my camera.

Paul sat down too.

At some point John showed up.  As with Stage 1, he suffered terrible cramps during the last climb.  (All my photos of the Stage 2 summit are from the seated vantage point.)

John made his pilgrimage to the food tent.  He came back after awhile asking, “Could you guys find any V-8 juice over there?”  Oops. 

Eventually we found the energy to begin the descent.  Normally I love this descent, but I really didn’t feel like being on my bike anymore.  A short way down we stopped at a scenic overlook to snap some photos.  Here’s one.

Unfortunately, the effort of descending that short distance overwhelmed me and I needed to lie down for a bit.  The sun beating down on my face was intolerable.  I was really in bad shape.

Miraculously, Ian and Craig showed up with the van.  Here’s our whole crew, stoked to be done with riding for the day.  (The exception was Paul, who manned up and rode the descent, just for fun.)

For the data nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):

- 248 watts at 142 bpm on the first climb;

- 220 watts at 133 bpm on the second climb;

- 220 watts at 136 bpm on the last climb (my cadence was 61, so you can see my 39/27 gearing was actually plenty low enough, at least for a mosher like me)

Note that these are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain, my speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.

Post-race

We stopped at a little hot springs resort to shower.  (I won’t tell you where it is; it’s great that no other cyclists have discovered it.)  One of the guys complained that his coin-op shower had been ice-cold.  Craig went to investigate and determined, to his great mirth, that the rider in question had only turned the Cold handle, not the Hot.  This is how shattered an EC rider can be.

A member of our bike club, Mary Beth, had been in Bishop a few weeks before and recommended Astorga’s Mexican restaurant.  We gave it a shot.  The salsa was good and hot, I had my first beer in many weeks, and someone ingeniously ordered guacamole.  It was fantastic.  I was starting to feel normal.  But then things got really dicey because there wasn’t enough guac to go around.  The only fistfight I’ve ever seen in a restaurant was at Juan’s Place in Berkeley and I had the feeling I was about to witness, if not participate in, another.  Fortunately somebody had a cool head and simply ordered more guac.

My dinner was the giant combo plate:  chile relleno, chicken enchilada verde, beef taco, beans, rice, and—just for the empty calories—a side of flour tortillas.  It was a serious plate of food and I attacked it with a severity I only wish I could bring to bike racing.  It has been said of my eating, “Sometimes I can’t bear to look.”  I know Ken had a chile relleno burrito because I recommended it; other than that, I had tunnel vision and the rest of the table became peripheral blur, their speech a low drone.  I was in The Zone.  I should have been stuffed by the time we got out of there, but I was only just sated.

As we drove by the pizza place in Groveland, too late at night to stop, I looked longingly out the window.  I got some potato chips from a convenience store when we stopped for gas.  By the time we made the Bay Area I was more tired than hungry, and had to figure out how to get home from Rockridge.  Ken loaned John and me his old van.

“It’s been totaled and the chassis is bent, so I had to remove the gear shift template, but I made a diagram of it,” he told me.  Actually, that quote might bear no resemblance to what he said; I was barely coherent by this point.  It was surreal driving that van across Berkeley at 1:30 a.m.  Sometimes I was able to work the gears just fine; other times I couldn’t find first and just sat there, idling, hunting.  As Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The last long lap is the hardest.”

Ghost-written Race Report - Central Coast Circuit Race

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

I got a strange offer from a bike club pal on Saturday: his leftover lunch in return for my ghost-writing his race report. You may have read a few of my own race reports in these pages (here and here and here, for example), but I’ve never written somebody else’s before. I love Mexican food and a literary challenge, so I accepted. Sean described the restaurant to me (I am always encouraging my teammates to dwell on food in their race reports), and later sent me his notes about the race, encouraging me to embellish freely. I turned his accounts into the following report. (It might seem irresponsible to cover an event I didn’t even attend, but I’ve been to enough bike races to know the truth about them, even if I have to guess at some “facts” and contrive others. Meanwhile, Sean’s notes—which comprise about a quarter of the report—gave me a solid nonfictional starting point.)

By the way, the response from the club was interesting. Sean e-mailed the report from his account, and a number of guys apparently didn’t grasp that I wrote it. The result was that it got a lot better response than anything I’ve sent out myself; two guys called it the “best race report of all time.” If I had my own marketing department, its leadership would have to be worried about the Albert brand.

Race Report - Central Coast Circuit Race

I [i.e., Sean - ed.] drove down w/ Ken in his Prius. I felt really good, doing that. Finally, a slight easement to my liberal guilt. Plus the dashboard, or more precisely the top surface of it that heads out toward the windshield, is really deep. I wanted to climb onto it and take a nap because I heard that Bernard Hinault often napped before time trials. But of course he’d have been going to races in some tiny Renault.

We stopped for breakfast at this tiny little shack. All they had was stinking black coffee, pre-packaged pastries, and the “house special” which they called “huevos al baño.” I didn’t realize until I was thinking about it later, my stomach roiling, that this translates “restroom eggs.” But Ken’s pastry looked even worse: it left a little ring of grease on that giant dashboard.

Mark drove the “magic bus” carrying Ryan, Tony, and Matt. At least, they call it the “magic bus.” The only thing that makes a bus “magic” is if it helps you pick up chicks, but those guys were already at the race when we arrived, and they weren’t attended by any chicks. Mark was racing an early race, prior to the other trio jumping into the M35+ 3/4.

Ken and I rode the M45+ 3/4. This was “the only decent and Christian thing to do,” according to some guy in the line at registration. I’m still trying to figure that one out. The field was 31 riders, of which 28 finished. One guy who dropped out had dropped his chain and just bagged it. Another guy dropped his habit. His habit of racing? No, a nun’s habit. He was naked underneath. This caused a crash, which is why the third guy dropped out. Later he said he broken his duodenum. I guess he’s of the Andy Schleck school (just like the guy who dropped his chain, come to think of it).

The circuit covers part of the old Ft. Ord course. One hour race, or 5 laps of the 4.3 mile loop. No free laps—believe me, I asked. It was upper 60s, sun like a big egg yolk, a yellow one, like from those queerly uniform eggs you get at Safeway that are $1.49 for 18 and they seem to always be Buy One Get One Free, which makes you wonder what new cost-cutting measures the hens were subjected to. There was a headwind in the Stairmaster section of the course (so named because you feel like you’re getting nowhere, which turns out to be true).

I led the race from the gun for the first mile, mostly because nobody wanted to come around me, no matter how slowly I rode. I think they were all afraid, because I was exuding Command Presence. It happens sometimes. I had to make some self-deprecating jokes before anybody would pull through. The only other time I led was coming through the start-finish area with one lap to go, having followed two other guys who made a meager break attempt a half-mile earlier. But actually by that point the whole field was upon us “like a gorilla on shit,” in Riccardo Riccò’s parlance. (Riccardo who? Exactly!)

There were only a few such break attempts during the race, and nothing really sustained or vicious. I should point out that there were some vicious attacks, but they were all verbal. One guy yelled, “Hold your line, Davis!” (Like us, the Davis team has bright orange jerseys.) I turned to him and said, “It’s EBVC, you stinky douchebag!” Only then did I realize there actually was a Davis guy wobbling all over the place. I called him something even worse, and he started crying. I almost felt bad but mostly I felt big. Not like big as in Godzilla, but important, you know?

But the pace was okay. I only really felt in trouble maybe once during the race, when someone was trying to get away on the series of nasty little rollers. I should have let the guy go, because he was obviously a wanker, wearing a sleeveless jersey with armwarmers (hello?) and then I thought, wait, why would they even let him race without sleeves? About this time I began to think I’d imagined him, and as soon as I thought this, he was gone—probably absorbed by the pack, but possibly by my subconscious.

But I was often hurting during the race. It’s a tough little course, the Reno of circuit races (as in “biggest little city in the world”) and as we all know, if the road goes up, Sean pretends to struggle but it’s all a big mind game (which some of you seem not to have yet figured out). After our races Ken berated me for telling Ryan that the course “wasn’t that hard, no real climbing, just a little stairstep on the backside.” At least, that’s the ostensible reason Ken had for berating me. Really I think he was just sore at me for saying his car was “cute, like a golf cart.” But that’s just how I roll. I call a spade a spade, to its face, and sometimes I call a club a spade.

Ken also covered one break attempt previous to mine, and said it really took a lot out of him, not just as an athlete, but as a human being. It was interesting to me that he found the front side of the course, and its long false flat, by far the most difficult part of the course, while for me there’s no question—it’s that stairstep on the back side that kills me every lap. Ken is what English majors like Dana would call an “unreliable narrator.” The more you heed his comments the further into the weeds you find yourself (or “farther,” as an English major would pompously interject).

So it came down to a field sprint. I knew that to finish well I needed to be very near the front when we made the second to last turn, into the longish, fast descent with one more turn before the 200m uphill sprint. Knowing and doing are two different things. Actually, they’re three different things. The knowing, the doing, and the separate act of knowing, which is like a spectator, standing aside (figuratively speaking) to measure the philosophical distance between knowing and doing. I guess I was doing too much of this third thing because before I know it everyone else was clogging up the downhill like un-flushable Maxi-pads in a swirling toilet, and it was absolute mayhem, with guys who tried to go too early dying and sitting up and stretching their backs and sighing as others behind tried to move up and past them, all at the same time. I hit the brakes more than a few times, and it was only in the final corner that I was able to get around to the outside and start a kind of semi-sprint, knowing that it was futile, that in fact life is futile and we’re all just hamsters on a wheel pretending we’re getting ahead when actually anything worth having in life was probably all used up before we were even born. Still, I moved up from about 20th to 13th at the finish simply by the fact that this was a criterium, and I am Davis Phinney, and no of course neither of these statements is true but I dare you to challenge me on them because you weren’t even there, you armchair director sportif.

Ken finished 19th. But at least he can live with himself.

For lunch we hit this little Oaxacan joint. (I’m talking about a restaurant, not a doobie.) We chose it because I thought “hit this little Oaxacan joint” had a ring to it. I caught Ken mouthing the words in the rearview mirror and before you smirk, go try this yourself. Elvis couldn’t look cooler (and not just because he’s dead). The restaurant, which is in Seaside, is called La Tortuga Torteria and they feature these entrees called huaraches, or at least they call them that, but really they’re more appropriately called “pupusas” but I wasn’t about to correct anybody. There were photos of the food on the wall, which is normally an indicator of a terrible restaurant, but I was feeling bold after keeping down the huevos al baño from earlier, and besides, they were black and white photos, which is kind of ingenious because as faded as they were at least the foods weren’t the wrong colors. The photos had to be from the ‘70s or earlier.

The waitress didn’t speak any English but somehow communicated that we could choose what kind of meat I wanted on my huarache. I said “pork” but there were like six variations, one which was cooked with either pineapple or urinals (as I said before, my Spanish is spotty) so when she got through describing the second one I said I’d take it, even though I hadn’t understood or even heard what she’d said. She was mumbling and blushing—I think she wanted me. Anyway, the portions were absolutely huge.

As you can tell perhaps only somewhat from the photo, a huarache is basically a stuffed, folded-over corn tortilla big enough to fit over a human head. It’s filled mainly with a layer of beans, and then all this other groovy stuff, like the meat, is piled on top, along with cactus. I asked for the spines on the side, which Ken hassled me for, like I’m some kind of wuss, though he didn’t even order the huarache. I don’t know what he got—just some big mess of stuff drenched in mole sauce with these giant raw onion slices on top, and boy am I glad he didn’t eat those raw onions because driving all the way back with the windows down would really hurt the gas mileage, even in a Prius. Anyway, the food was delicious. The corn tortilla was crispety and crunchety and chewity and coarse and dense, the cactus tangy without burning my lips off, and it all kind of came together in a very authentic way that made me desire, oddly enough, to stop at Chipotle on the way home and punch somebody in the face.

Well, it was so much food I couldn’t even finish it, so I dropped by that one guy’s house, the tall skinny guy on the club (I know, that doesn’t exactly narrow it down) and I said he could have the leftovers if he’d ghost-write this race report for me. He jumped at the opportunity—all he was doing was losing to his young children at Scrabble anyway. 

He divvied up the huarache three ways, finding it remarkable that it was so tough he had to move it to a cutting board and use a big serrated knife on that bad boy (maybe huarache is the right name after all), and then his wife appeared out of nowhere and he had to share his part with her. One daughter said, “The cactus is extremely disgusting. Slimy and bitter.” That judgment didn’t keep her from eating every morsel, and when her sister said, “I don’t like it” and bailed, she asked for her portion. Denied!  His wife praised the tortilla as being “very homemade-tasting.” Easy for her to say. She didn’t even race!