Sunday

I ran into this little article online, dateline today, wherein the commentator discusses a restaurant experience that he had "just the other day" in Guanajuato. In this strange little article, the writer enjoys a well-prepared dinner at Restaurante Vegetariano Yamuna off the Plazuela de San Fernando. You'll remember,* of course, that Sunshine and I looked for this place when we were in town last year, finding a menudo shop where it was supposed to have been (re: Lonely Planet). Later, after giving it up for closed, we discovered that it had, in fact, only moved across town. What's strange about this article? Well for one, he mentions that tourists might have trouble finding the place, but then neglects to tell his readers the restaurant's name. He alludes to being a resident of town, but seems convinced that the place is invisibly tucked away; even though, as he says, it is just a few steps up an alley off a popular central plaza. Another detail seems spurious to me: I do not recall it feeling any more like I was in someone's home than any other establishment where proprietors live on the upper floor. Yet, even nameless, this is indisputably the same place we visited last June; a place that opened sometime before 2003 and moved to this location sometime before last summer--so certainly not recently as of "the other day." This guy seems hell bent on keeping his little place secret, and romanticizing its informality, while challenging the rest of the world's tourist-minded assumptions of restaurant culture here and industriously propping-up the mythology of México's homey provincialism. If you are ever in Guanajuato, eat at Yamuna. If you see this guy, point out the restaurant's name, painted in nearly foot-tall letters on the wall beside the door. [Cavin]