Thursday, July 2, 2009
Food Fight Food Fight: What's Up, Guac?
Posted by Carrington Fox on Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:48 AM
While La Hacienda on Nolensville Road remains the Fox family go-to restaurant for weekend lunch and dinner, Cinco de Mayo at the corner of Charlotte and White Bridge Road recently made a strong bid for our affections.
Most notable was the guacamole.
From as soon as our children could use spoons, guacamole has been their great love, to the point that when we sit down in those clunky woven barrel chairs at La Hacienda, Margarita or Maria delivers two bowls of guac, stat, without even asking. With a smooth texture punctuated by white onion, cilantro and slightly water-logged bits of tomato, and with a faintly brown tinge that suggests maybe it's been sitting around long enough for the avos to oxidize, it's a serviceable guac that nonetheless elicits a Pavlovian craving from our family as we approach the taqueria from the back alley, past the corn silos. For that reason, it would be hard to beat LaHa's guac in our minds--short of Sol or Cantina Laredo's tableside versions, but that's not the price point what we're talking about.
To our surprise, Cinco de Mayo delivered a similarly priced and sized small bowl of the green stuff, but this was actually green, like a pistachio ice cream or--more relevantly--like fresh avocados. Studded with diced white onions and tomato, and flecked with vibrant cilantro, CdM's guacamole was sumptuously buttery and reassuringly interspersed with hunks of avocado.
"Do you make this guacamole," I asked our server."
"No," he replied, crushing my spirit.
Then I rephrased the question: "Does somebody here make the guacamole? I mean, is it fresh?"
"Of course," he said, as if to say, "Who in the world would serve guacamole that wasn't fresh?" He added, almost apologetically, "Well, this was made about 10 a.m., so it's sort of fresh." It was 11:25 a.m. --the precise moment that we declared Cinco de Mayo the guacamole champ.
Comments (3)
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Your experience with that guacamole was much, much different from mine. Well, except the electric green part. I can't imagine that they actually make that stuff there. It looks like the frozen stuff to me.
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