I’ve
mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods. Meat is salted, but not marinated, before
roasting or broiling over the fire. When
we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this
generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of
almost 3 million inhabitants. According
to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants
in town now. Roma-Tijuana seems to serve
Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found. Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to
the Italian-Uruguayan palate. The salsa
was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include
enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>. La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican
food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted
like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the
same web site as the previous restaurant review.
After
Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or
less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very
lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming. Fortunately we had by then made friends with
several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo. One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when
we admitted to craving Mexican food.
When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday
at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for
gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine. “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada
sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.
He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to
spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at
the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large
expatriate community.
