Wednesday

We've just returned from fine semi Mexican fusion dining at the swank little Oyamel.* That sounds like a north Caribbean boutique spliced onto a raw bar, doesn't it? We'd planned to meet our good friend Holly at Zaytinya,* near Chinatown. We got there five minutes late and Holly already had the little beeper for letting us know when our tables were ready. The wait was going to be something like an hour. Screw this, we all agreed, let's find something else. So we gave our beeper back to the Zaytinya staff, and headed off through Chinatown searching for another place. Since we'd already anticipated a tony DA hotspot, we walked right past many genuine Chinese places to check out a bricky, shoebox looking club-type restaurant. The wait was going to be something like an hour. We wandered on: past a curvy little veggie Japanese place with a stainless steel theme, then on to a fluorescently colored place with a polished wood shtick. Finally we were all the way down 7th Street at D, where the wait at Oyamel was about half an hour and there were seats at the bar.* So we got the beeper and waited. Sunshine and I had been at Oyamel before, back in 2005 when we were seeking a Mexican place to prime us for living in Monterrey. At the time, I liked the food a lot but also dismissed it as being more posh District fusion and less authentic Mexican food. I was wrong. The things we ordered tonight, huitlacoche tacos, queso fundido, chili poblano, sweet platanos, and café de olla, were all very authentic, holding up well in comparison with similar posh pre- slash post-Colombian-fusion cuisine popular in Monterrey right now. Not only was this food awesome, but now I'm mildly homesick. [Cavin]