Dallas Food - Mexican on Maple (Part 7)

DFW Food Links

Mexican on Maple (Part 7)
Posted on Monday, June 13 @ 23:19:36 PDT
Topic: Mexican

Moving right along, we come to the block between Kings Road and Motor for Rosita’s (briefly) and Juanita’s. On to the food...

Rosita’s, located at 4906 Maple Avenue.

Even if there weren’t any customers in the restaurant, one could tell at a glance that this is a gringo-oriented place--chile posters, glass tabletops over brightly colored sarapes, and a menu full of Tex-Mex standards. And, like all of the gringo-oriented places on Maple thus far, business appeared to be brisk, even late into the lunch hours. As we perused the menu, chips and salsa were served. The salsa seemed fresh, but had a very high cumin level. The yellow-corn chips were somewhat stale.

This is the burrito plate. Two large flour tortillas were loaded with beef and topped with chili con carne and cheese. I got about halfway through one of the burritos before laying down the fork, disconsolate. The burrito’s filling, billed on the menu as guiso de res, tasted like an American-style canned beef stew (e.g., Dinty Moore). The tough, stringy chunks of beef were mixed with bits of overcooked potato and bathed in an unpleasant gravy. At first sight, I thought the thick layer of cheese and chili con carne (also with a heavy cumin flavor) would overwhelm the meat in the burrito. But it didn’t and I rather wish it had. The rice was pretty dry, but not bad. The beans were actually pretty good, compared to those of the other gringo-oriented places on Maple.

Here are “los tres amigos”--an enchilada sampler with one chicken enchilada in sour cream sauce, a ground beef enchilada in chili con carne, and a cheese enchilada in “processed cheese product.” The beef enchilada was, perhaps, the least offensive of the lot. But all three enchiladas were poor. There was a lot left on the plate.

In a column about a decade ago, film reviewer Roger Ebert responded to someone who envied his job. He wrote, “It is fun to go to good movies, but not so much fun going to bad movies. Remember, I have to see them all. The consolation with the bad movies is that I usually get in free, and get to write about how bad they are in the paper.” Whether with movies or food, having a bad experience free of charge and then an opportunity to vent about it seems like meager consolation.

And, since I’m not a food critic, I don’t even have that consolation to fall back on. While I really want to give every Mexican joint on Maple a fair shot, returning a few times and sampling the menu broadly, I have to cry “Uncle!” on this one. Life’s too short. I mean, what would happen if I died on my way home after my next (and probably equally dissatisfying) meal at Rosita’s? I can picture myself lying in the twisted, flaming wreck, sobbing with regret over that choice of a last meal. Nope. Unless I’m persuaded by a reliable source that there’s something else at Rosita’s that’s worth trying, I won’t be going back.

Juanita’s, located at 4810 Maple Avenue.

Anyone who’s followed this series of reports now knows the meaning of those words in the foreground. As a rule, a restaurant that cares enough to serve fresh handmade tortillas is also going to care about other items on the menu. Juanita’s is no exception.

The storefront advertises food in the style of Tierra Caliente (near the border of the states of Michoacan and Guerrero), but also mentions birria de chivo which is more commonly associated with Jalisco. The menu I was presented on my first visit was in English and consisted entirely of Tex-Mex standards. When I asked for and obtained the Spanish version of the menu, I found many more interesting options.

The beef fajita burrito was the most conventional item I tried at Juanita’s. Bits of beef, lettuce, tomato, and cheese filled the large, grilled bundle. The rice, flecked with peas, green beans, and carrot, was rather bland. And the beans were unexceptional. Still, for the price of $4.50, it was a filling and fairly tasty meal.

In addition to the line-up of common meats for antojitos, Juanita’s had cecina de res. This is thinly cut beef that’s partially dried, then sautéed or fried. While the cecina appears fried in some dishes on their menu (e.g., the breakfast dish of machacado), it was sautéed in the taco I ordered. The meat had an agreeable flavor and a deliberately chewy texture. Pretty good and uncommon in the Dallas market. For some reason, on this day they served me manufactured corn tortillas with the taco, instead of handmade ones. On all other dishes and visits, I was served the tortillas hechas a mano.

Juanita’s also serves huaraches, which are far less common than most antojitos in Dallas taquerias (e.g., tacos, gorditas, tostadas, sopes, etc.). A huarache is basically an elongated oval of masa (either in the form of a thick tortilla or a thicker masa “boat” sort of like a sope) topped with refried beans, your choice of meat (and, in some places, non-meat items such as nopales, huitlacoche, or squash blossoms), then lettuce, tomato, cheese, and crema (i.e., a homemade sour cream that’s closer to crème fraîche in flavor). In the huarache I ordered here, pictured at the top of this article, I asked them to hold the lettuce and tomato so the meat could be seen better. I chose Juanita’s house-made Tierra Caliente-style chorizo. The sausage had an interesting sweetness, but also plenty of kick that was controlled by the crema and bits of cotija cheese. Better beans would have made for a better huarache, but this was still very tasty.

One of my rules of thumb is, “When there’s an animal pictured on the storefront signage, order the animal.” So when I saw a goat on the sign indicating birria de chivo, I had to try it. For those unfamiliar with the dish, here’s Diana Kennedy’s description:

“The word ‘birria’ actually means something deformed or grotesque, and it is used colloquially in the northwest to mean a mess or failure. This certainly looks a mess when cooked, but it is a very savory one! This is a very rustic dish; usually a whole goat or lamb, although in some places just the offal, is seasoned with a paste of dried chiles and spices and cooked in a pit barbecue.”

In contemporary practice in the US, birria is usually done in an oven, with the meat cooked over a water bath. The water receives the drippings to form a broth that’s often served with the meat in the same bowl. At Juanita’s, the broth wasn’t served with the dish. Instead, I was presented with a sizeable mound of the meat. As Kennedy said, it sure doesn’t look like much.

But looks are deceiving in this case. Despite the dark, chile-stained, occasionally crisp exterior of the meat, the interior was tender and succulent. The goat had a mild, pleasant flavor, with no noticeable gaminess. Eaten with their handmade corn tortillas (as pictured above), the birria was quite delicious. It was way too much to eat in a single sitting, so I took most of it home. The next afternoon, I made an excellent sandwich of the meat, straight out of the fridge. (That was my first cold goat sandwich, but probably won’t be my last.) Birria offerings in Dallas are somewhat scarce. This was enough to make Juanita’s a good find.

There’s a small section of guisos in the Spanish version of the menu. Pictured above is guiso de res en salsa verde. As with the birria, this was a dish that tasted much better than it looked. Thin slices of beef (probably of the same type used to make the cecina) were stewed with potatoes in a hearty, spicy green salsa. I was expecting tomatillo tartness, but couldn’t detect any. Though I couldn’t figure out all the components to the sauce, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Loading the meat, potatoes, and sauce onto the hot, fresh tortillas, I ate until I was stuffed and then kept going till it was all gone. An excellent home-style meal.

As I perused the menu, I saw two items involving huilotas. I couldn’t recall every hearing of them and didn’t know what they were. So I ordered them.

Meet huilota, aka Zenaida macroura, aka Mourning Dove. (This fellow was photographed on Abbott, just north of Knox, last Sunday morning.) This is one of the most common birds in North America, despite the fact that it is hunted through most of its range, which extends through all the contiguous states, Mexico, and Central America. Part of its success arises from its aggressive reproduction. Monogamous breeding pairs can have as many as five or six broods a year. As an interesting bit of trivia, doves and pigeons are the only North American birds capable of suctioning water into their esophagus. They can keep their heads down and use their bills like a straw to drink continuously, while other birds have to scoop up a billful of water and throw their heads back to swallow. Mourning Doves are also one of few birds that feed their young with “crop milk” (or “pigeon milk”)--a liquid rich in fats and proteins that’s produced in the crops of both male and female parents. (Since Mourning Doves are almost entirely vegetarian, this allows the hatchlings to get the necessary nutrients that the young of most other bird species obtain through insect and animal protein.)

Yes, they’re neat birds. And you can eat them. (Got to stay focused.)

Juanita’s offers huilotas two ways: asadas or en salsa roja. I opted for the latter. The meat was very tender and mildly flavored. (It wasn’t very dark, though, which suggests that these were either non-migratory wild birds or farm raised. I didn’t notice any shot in them, so the latter is probably more likely.) With only a few ounces of meat per bird, it’s a lot of work to pick through the tiny bones. The salsa roja looked and tasted a lot like a mole colorado. Good flavor, but I found myself wiping much of it off the dove so I could better taste the meat. Despite the excessive sauce and bone-picking toil, this was a unique and tasty dish.

There’s still a lot that I’d like to try at Juanita’s. (And I noticed on the menu that they have another location on Singleton. Don’t know if the menu is the same there or not.) Coming from Michoacan, I imagine their carnitas are pretty good. They offer a variety of mariscos. And there are still several items in the menu’s “guisos” section that I haven’t tried. Apart from the fairly bland rice and beans, everything I’ve had here so far has been good to great. And, it terms of distinctiveness, Juanita’s ranks near the top of the Maple pack.