How much does a pseudo-Mexican restaurant filled with high school kids ordering margaritas, middle age men trying to score, families out to dinner and a bar full of 30-somethings trying to forget work weigh? It weighs as much as Pedro's, winner of the Isthmus Readers Poll 1996-1997 Best Place Where Chips and Salsa Make a Meal Award! Remember a couple years ago when Chi-Chi's ran that TV ad where it threw a New Orleans-style funeral parade for its dead menu? I know where they hid the body. It's at Pedro's, seafood chimichanga and all.
I know all this because I went to Pedro's last Thursday, which by the way is half-price margarita night. We had, appropriately enough, about a one-cigarette wait to get a table in the smoking section. It gave us time to admire the faux adobe exterior and the parade of people coming and going. The parking lot was completely full at this West Towne Mall area strip mall; Saturns were double parked. A family entered with a young girl slung over her father's shoulder.
It felt like my youth in the south suburbs of Chicago all over again. I steeled myself to eat terrible pseudo-Mexican food and consume shitty margaritas. Pedro's is big on claiming that everything is freshly made. The chips weren't warm so I don't know about them, but they were serviceable. The green salsa was nicely spicy and not overly goopy like some tomatillo salsas, but the red salsa was fantastically forgettable in both freshness and flavor. Flour tortillas are made on the premises. Ooh, what's that big metal thing by the lobby where they have all these trays of doughballs sitting out? Why, that's the tortilla press and oven which produces these doughy flatbreads that are brought to your table after you have finished all the salsa with no hope of any more coming because it is so busy.
In order to inform you of this fact when you're sitting at your table by one of the omnipresent arches and hanging plants, a card is placed which tells you of the wonderful tortillas and how you can put butter on them. Huzzah! It is nice to have warm tortillas, but I'd prefer reheated nonsticky tortillas to fresh, gooey tortillas. And there are no corn tortillas to be had at all. Oh bother.
That's when I ordered a 46 oz. margarita to go with my $7 enchilada plate. The menu basically consists of burrito plates, enchilada plates, chimichanga plates and taco plates all priced between $7 and $12. You can usually choose between seafood, chicken, ground beef, shredded beef or cheese as your filling. Like I said, it's basically the old Chi-Chi's menu.
The margarita came quickly. There were plenty of bartenders stuffed behind the rails that existed beyond the saloon doors. I went in there and the humanity of working 20 and 30 somethings overwhelmed me and I feared they would discover the college kid and force him to play darts or make out with the office slut, so I ran back to my table where I could smoke anyway. Then the food came to our table.
I was expecting a couple of small enchiladas, but instead there was one giant one filled with shredded beef and cheese. The enchilada sauce was alright and the shredded beef and cheese were a little better than a Don Miguel microwave burrito (which is the best of the microwave burritos). The side of black beans was actually quite good. They had a very mellow cooked all day and almost chocolatey taste. Better than the undercooked beans at El Dorado and sans the pomp. The Spanish rice, on the other hand, was drier than a Sonoran wind'but without the bite. My friend's steak fajitas were \exactly what I expected."" There were more onions than anything else and the steak was good enough to put on the gummy tortillas.
I wanted some hot sauce to put on my rice and beans and the waiter asked how hot. I said hot and he brought out a basket of various hot sauces you see in a specialty store. Dave's Insanity sauce was included as were various Jamaican sauces. I wondered where the Cholula featured in a picture was. Maybe it was in the non-insanely hot basket of sauces. I don't know.
All I know is that no one should, under any circumstances, pick Da Bomb. It has the flavor of dust and the effects of battery acid mixed with a mild hallucinogen. I was in serious pain and the weak margarita didn't help anything. It wasn't getting me drunk and it never did. Maybe you get more tequila if you ask to be carded.
We decided to order dessert because of one intriguing item: the Snickers chimichanga. I also convinced the waiter it was my friends birthday. A dry little round vanilla flavored cake hiding in a veritable vat of whipped cream came sans birthday song but with a candle. He was full anyway, but it was free. The Snickers chimichanga was a disgusting mess of oil, melted snickers and ice cream. It really is not good. The caramel somehow seems to sour when mixed with the flavor of vegetable oil and tortilla. My fried ice cream was fine though. I always have loved the French vanilla ice cream wrapped in crispy stuff and covered in honey. It was served in a dish in order to discern it from the plate and tortilla topping Chi-Chi's fried ice cream. We observed a forty-year-old man attempt to buy a wonderful evening with two women by ordering impressively piled nachos (at least eight inches) and Pedro's helium balloons. We quickly finished putting items from the table in my margarita slush, consumed the after dinner Andes mint (another old Chi-Chi's deal), and got out of there. That's when I discovered that perhaps the tortilla dough would be better served as a windshield topper on a Chevy truck. It sticks great!
