Mexican food review

Last night we went out for dinner at The Flying Burrito Brothers, a Mexican restaurant. We had been hesitant to try the Mexican food here - we come from southern Arizona, where burritos are plentiful and Tecate is cheaper than water. Sadly, the days of $2 tacos and bottomless bowls of tortilla chips are gone. Way gone.

Flying Burrito Brothers has a nice atmosphere that feels kind of Mexican. There are wood and metal crosses on the walls and lanterns hanging from the ceiling. They even had some of those cowhide chairs at some of the tables. So far so good.

Then we opened our drink menu. Tecate: $8. Dos Equis: $8. This is per bottle mind you, not for a six pack. It hurts to pay $8 for a bottle of Tecate. But we did it anyway.

Our beers were properly served with lime wedges, only the limes were yellow. (No, they were not lemons.) Not sure what's going on with that, but we had noticed this in the veggie markets already. No green limes, just yellow ones. Weird, but okay. Yellow limes are much juicier than green ones, as it turns out. Either that, or every lime we ever had in America was stale and dried out. Also a possibility.

I can never say no to a quesadilla, so I ordered the vegetarian option, a mushroom quesadilla. We've never known mushrooms to be widely used in Mexican food, but it's cool. I love mushrooms. Gareth ordered a veggie burrito. We started with jalapeno poppers. (okay, these aren't really Mexican at all probably, but we love them.) All of this was crazy expensive for Mexican food. A burrito = $23. No joke. And apparently avocados are as rare as saffron here - they wanted $14 for guac and chips. Insanity! We did not order guacamole.

The poppers were probably better than what we'd had before. Instead of cream cheese, they were filled with more jalapenos. mmmmmm - caliente!

Then the mains. The mushroom quesadilla was lovely, no complaints. Gareth's burrito, however, was more like a gourmet wrap. Instead of a regular flour tortilla, it came in a pesto-flavoured one. And it had pumpkin in it. Delicous? Yes. Mexican? No.

So it would seem that Kiwis have their own idea of what Mexican food should taste like and they charge an arm and a leg for it. Of course this makes sense - Mexico is really far away. Mexican food is exotic now.

If we are ever back in Phoenix, we are totally hitting up Juan's on Thomas Road and loading up on flautas.

Another thought is that we might be able to make our millions by opening up a real Mexican taco stand.