Andi Berlin was a food critic in Tucson and Phoenix for over a decade. Naturally, over the years, she’s eaten a lot of Mexican food. She even spent the summer of 2015 taste-testing 100 different tacos in Tucson.
Recently, Berlin moved to New York, and published a list of her top 10 best Mexican restaurants on Long Island. Berlin joined The Show to discuss how she’s had to revise her expectations when it comes to Mexican restaurants.
Full conversation
ANDI BERLIN: There is great Mexican food in New York, but you have to go out of your way for it, whereas in Phoenix or in Tucson or pretty much anywhere in Arizona or in the Southwest, pretty much any restaurant has decent Mexican food. There's very few places that I've been to in Arizona that I thought was bad, and obviously there are some restaurants that are just absolutely incredible.
SAM DINGMAN: So, let's talk now about your New York Mexican food adventure. How did you go about the challenge of finding good quality Mexican food on Long Island in particular? What was your thought process? Did you just kind of start wandering into places or were you pre-screening?
BERLIN: Well, so I've been on Long Island for a couple years and I did a list of the best tacos a couple years ago. So I already had a little bit of knowledge about it, but I decided to do best Mexican restaurants this year, and I really wasn't expecting that much, but I realized that in my list that most of the places were higher end, because there are all these buzzworthy spots.
So then I really dug in to find those “hole in the wall” mom and pop shops. And, with places like that, these little hole in the wall spots, they're really making food that has to appeal to not only the Mexican-American crowd, but also people from Central America, South America and white people. So, the menus can often be a hodgepodge, like it might have pupusas on the menu because they gotta please everyone, but I don't hate a pupusa. I like a pupusa, so that's not that bad.
DINGMAN: That's interesting. So, if I'm hearing you right, the target audience is different in New York and that affects the way that the people who are constructing the menus. Even if they would have an ancestral claim to a certain kind of authentic cooking, they might not necessarily lean into that because they know they're dealing with a different kind of clientele than a restaurateur here would be.
BERLIN: Yeah, and out on Long Island, I would say that especially the Long Islanders choose their menu. They want what they want and that's a problem for restaurateurs. If they want pupusas, you give them pupusas. But, in New York City, and especially in Brooklyn lately, there have been a lot of regional Mexican food spots that have opened in the past couple of years that are uncompromising in their authenticity, for lack of a better word.
DINGMAN: Well, let me ask you about this place that you found in the Hamptons called El Verano.
BERLIN: Yeah, that was interesting.
DINGMAN: You said the chef has been called a “taco master of NYC.”
BERLIN: Yeah, he's a chef, Julian Medina. He's from Mexico City originally, and he has a string of buzzworthy spots in New York City. And like a lot of New York City chefs, he went out to the Hamptons and opened a very fancy Mexican restaurant called El Verano. I went for lunch, and the food was very good, a beautiful dining room, but the funniest thing about that place was, I've just been thinking about it a lot, they have tacos on the menu, lobster tacos. Because this is Long Island, everyone loves lobster. And the tacos are, it's $35 for two tacos.
DINGMAN: Oh my God.
BERLIN: Yeah. So if you do the math, that's $17.50 per taco. It's lobster on top. And honestly, it was really delicious, but I'll let you be the judge of whether that's worth it.
DINGMAN: I will let the listeners be the judge, but, my reaction to you quoting the price perhaps is a bit of a tell.
BERLIN: I mean, it's the Hamptons, but it reminds me. There's another restaurant that I wanted to mention in New York City. I haven't been to it, but I've read about it. It's called CORIMA. Everybody is talking about it right now. Read an article recently. The chef is from the El Paso-Juárez region. He has a $98 tasting menu. And the first course is a flour tortilla. So, it's $98 and the thing you're supposed to get there is a flour tortilla, and you can get it with like caviar. And they call it the bread course and everybody is raving about this, and I think it sounds great, but this just lets you know how Mexican food is in New York. They're raving about a flour tortilla.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, right, just imagine a flour tortilla.
BERLIN: But honestly, I wanna try it. It sounds pretty good.
DINGMAN: If I'm hearing you right, there's maybe a higher likelihood that someone from Arizona is gonna go into a Mexican place looking for, say, Sonoran-style Mexican food made to a certain standard, whereas a New Yorker might not even have that as a palette. They might just have a general Tex-Mex awareness and be served something like a flour tortilla with caviar on it and be like, “OK, sure.”
BERLIN: I mean, I would rather have the flour tortilla with caviar than have a flour tortilla that passes for a flour tortilla at most of the restaurants in New York. What I mean is there are a few people that are pushing the flour tortilla boundaries, pushing the landscape and making excellent flour tortillas. And if they want to serve caviar, OK, I'm all for it as long as it's a good flour tortilla. Because a bad flour tortilla is an insult, in my opinion.
DINGMAN: Well, I remember it being a very eye-opening experience for me as a lover of Mexican food to have mole for the first time, and it was the first time that I had ever tasted this combination of the sweet and the savory and the slow cooked nature of it. It was just a total revelation, which I'm sure, yeah, I know that's not unique to me. What has been your impression of the mole game in New York? And is mole the kind of thing that you remember people really pining for here or or not so much?
BERLIN: Most Mexican restaurants in New York and Long Island have mole. Because it's Oaxaca, it's Puebla. Most of the immigrants in New York are from that area. So most people have mole. To be honest, I have not tasted a mole here that was nearly as good as the moles that I've had in Oaxaca City and also in Tucson. One of the best moles that I ever had was in Tubac. At Elvira's, which is halfway between Tucson and Nogales on the I-19, wonderful, beautiful restaurant. That's some good mole, but to be honest, I haven't had that quality here.
DINGMAN: OK. Well, good to know that, even though you've left us for New York, maybe the mole will occasionally call you home.
