Dallas Food - Mexican on Maple (Part 9)

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Mexican on Maple (Part 9)
Posted on Saturday, August 13 @ 16:14:16 PDT
Topic: Mexican

Well, after twenty Mexican and Tex-Mex restaurants and scores of meals, my reconnaissance of Maple comes to a close. Does it end with a bang or a whimper? Happily, it’s more of the former. This final installment takes us to Brothers Mexican Restaurant and La Hechizera. On to the food...

Brothers Mexican Restaurant, located at 5415 Maple Avenue.

I’ve driven by Brothers many times without ever feeling tempted to go in, largely because of the English name which led me to believe they’d be pitching to the gringos. So my expectations were limited on the first visit. When the menu arrived--in English--I sensed my fears would be realized, since it was almost entirely gringo-oriented Tex-Mex staples. I requested a menu in Spanish.

After a brief delay, the waitress emerged with the menu. It was in Spanish. It was much larger than the English menu. It was, in fact, a menu from a restaurant with a different name and address. And, in addition to the typical Mexican-American dishes, a sizeable chunk of the menu was devoted to Honduran dishes. Honduran tacos, Honduran enchiladas, and some dishes with no obvious Mexican counterpart.

I started with a Honduran enchilada. What arrived looked much more like a Mexican tostada or chalupa. A freshly fried tortilla was topped with a black bean puree, an intensely flavored, sweetly saucy ground beef, shredded cabbage, crema, and shredded asadero. Since tostadas rarely float my boat, I set into it more out of duty than anticipation. I was very pleasantly surprised. Something about the combination of flavors and textures really works. I enjoyed it so much that I had one on each subsequent visit. One of the better antojitos I’ve sampled in this series of reports.

Baleadas featured prominently on the menu. These land somewhere between a Mexican taco and quesadilla. A fresh, handmade flour tortilla contains a meat of your choice (chorizo above) and cheese. Dressed with some of the serrano-based table salsa (which, from visit to visit, ranged from pleasantly spicy to incendiary), it was an enjoyable though simple dish.

An appetizer of pastelitos ended up being much larger than expected. Four good-sized, freshly fried meat pies arrived with a garnish of shredded cabbage, tomato, and bell pepper. The pies were filled with a tasty mixture of seasoned ground beef and rice. Another good dish.

On some visits a black bean salsa (topped with cheese) was served along with the red table salsa. The thin, crisp chips were above average. On the beverage side, they have a rotating selection of uncommon aguas, including passion fruit (maracuya), hibiscus (jamaica), and cashew apple (marañón). In each visit, the tortillas have been fresh and handmade.

Honduran tacos were like a hybrid of Mexican flautas and enchiladas. Chicken-filled tortillas were fried golden, topped with cheese, cabbage, tomatoes, and bell peppers, and served with a light, almost broth-like sauce. Portioning on this, as on most dishes at Brothers, was generous.

Weekends at Brothers feature a number of specials, including the Honduran national dish, sopa de caracol. Unfortunately, the snail/conch soup wasn’t available by the time I arrived, late in the afternoon. Instead, I got sopa de jaiba. A couple of crabs bathed in a broth rich with coconut milk. Lurking underneath were a pair of starchy plantains with the texture of boiled potato. Delicious in a mellow sort of way.

One of my favorite dishes I tried at Brothers was tajadas con carne asada. This consisted of lightly fried plantain chips (just on the verge of crispiness) topped with cabbage, tomato, and crema, served with great carne asada. The crispy bits of meat (pictured at the top of this article) had been punched up in flavor with an unknown marinade. Way too much for one person of normal appetite, but I just kept going and going. There’s also a chicken version of the dish made with fried chicken. The chicken was good, but not as compelling as the beef.

It turns out that the menu I saw on my first visit was the only copy of the Spanish menu that they had. And they haven’t had it on subsequent visits. (I was told someone took it home to prepare an updated version with this restaurant’s name and address.) So if you want the Honduran specialties, you’ll have to ask the waitress to list them. As for the Mexican items, I’m afraid I still haven’t tried much (apart from some very fine sopes). I suspect that drilling deeper into that side of the menu will also be rewarding. Brothers is one of the better finds of this series. If everything is as good as what I’ve had there so far, I’ll be a regular.

La Hechizera Tortas, located at 5611 Maple Avenue.

La Hechizera, just east of Inwood, may be the busiest non-gringo-oriented restaurant on Maple. Day or night, there always seems to be a crowd--workers, families, young couples, people picking up take-out orders, etc. A few years back, D Magazine recognized La Hechizera’s torta poblana as one of the top sandwiches in Dallas. The readership was apparently unmoved, judging from the near total absence of white faces in the place.

Though La Hechizera is best known for tortas, they do have a good selection of antojitos. Their huaraches--such as the one above, with cecina and carnitas--are quite good. A crisp masa base is spread with a layer of beans, your choice of meats (and/or veggies, such as papas, rajas, and nopales), lettuce, cheese, crema, and sliced avocado. (They always seem to be upping the “rico” quotient by loading cheese, crema, and avocado on things.) They even have plastic plate covers that seem expressly designed for transporting huaraches, making this unwieldy dish manageable for take-out.

The tostadas were also quite enjoyable. The fried tortilla base was topped with a choice of meat, lettuce, tomato, cheese, crema, and avocado. A couple of interesting meat choices turned up on the tostada menu, including pata (i.e., trotters) and tinga. Tinga, pictured above, is a Pueblan specialty, consisting of pork or sometimes (as in this case) chicken that’s stewed with a variety of seasonings, headlined by chipotle. Smoky, scorching, and with an acidy adobo tang, this was a fun change of pace. (I rarely see tinga in Dallas. If anyone has suggestions on other places where I can find it, shoot me an e-mail at dallasfood_scott@yahoo.com.)

La Hechizera’s quesadillas are among the best I’ve had in Dallas. Instead of a folded-over, griddled tortilla (which is what usually passes for a quesadilla around here), raw masa is formed into a pocket, filled with meat (chorizo, in this case) and quesillo, squeezed shut, then deep fried. Made to order, the hot masa is crisp and the cheese gooey. The garnishes heaped on top (i.e., lettuce, tomato, crema, and avocado) were superfluous.

The variety of torta options is a bit overwhelming, especially since most of the tortas have names that give no clue as to their contents. Pictured here is a torta Cubana, one of the few with which I was familiar. It contained a milanesa, ham, cheese, crema, and a sautéed, hotdog-like sausage. Tortas are perhaps my least favorite taqueria dish. But this Cubana, like most tortas I’ve had here, was pretty good. The bread tasted fresh and the milanesa was crisp, but with tender meat.

Another attraction of La Hechizera is their excellent selection of Mexican sodas. There are the half-liter bottles of Mexican Coke (made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but also Sprite, Fresca (cane sugar instead of aspertame), and Pepsi. There are several flavors of Jarritos, Topo Chico, Boing!, and Barrilitos. A couple of cola-looking sodas I’ve never had. But one soda seems to outsell them all, if you scan the tables: Lift! Bottled by Coca-Cola in Mexico, Manzana Lift is a gently carbonated, cane sugar sweetened (but not overly sweet) apple soda. It’s delicious on its own, but also goes well with Mexican food. (According to the Mexican Coca-Cola web site, it’s sold in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Germany, Columbia, Costa Rica, and Chile. Three versions of the drink are available in Mexico: regular, green apple, and golden apple. So why can’t we get it in stores in Texas?) Also in the fridge is Sidral Mundet, another apple soda. It’s good, but has heavier carbonation.

One item on La Hechizera’s menu that I don’t recall seeing elsewhere in Dallas is the pambazo. Filled with chorizo, sautéed potatoes, cheese, lettuce, and crema, the sandwich is dipped in a mild guajillo sauce and griddled. Messy, tasty, filling, and very unique.

I can see why La Hechizera brings in the business. Everything I’ve had there has been good. And they have several items that are hard to find elsewhere. In past visits, I’ve been unimpressed by their tacos--my usual benchmark for taquerias. But these recent visits led me to believe I’d underestimated them.

On the other side of Inwood, the Mexican on Maple dries up. And so ends this series of reports.