La Salsa

Down on Mary’s Street in Galway is a little restaurant called La Salsa. I mean little: it has enough room for three customers and a cash register on the first floor and five tables on the second. Walking into the place gave me a flashback to Gazpacho in Durango (the town’s celebrated New Mexican cuisine, where the margs flow smoothly). It was Mexican (or New Mexican?) food in Galway, Ireland.

In my experience, going for Mexican or Latin American food in Europe is like shooting craps. (No pun intended, although sometimes it works out to be all too true. Don’t dwell on that one.) Sometimes you just have to walk into a place to realize that this “Mexican” restaurant sprang to life when some enterprising individual (God rest his soul) saw a blog about Mexican food and said, “Hey, I can do that in Ireland!” It’s like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates: you’d be surprised what kind of crap you can get. (Too many puns dropping here. Cleanup in Paragraph Two, please!)

But we gave it a shot, because we wanted cheap food that could also fill us up. And hey, there’s always the long shot. So we gave our orders to a woman who looked and spoke as Irish as they come. Spicy smells emanated from the kitchen in the back and a young woman dished out metal platters with burritos wrapped in paper. It was a good start.

We went upstairs and sat down on chairs painted in solid primary colours and padded with materials that looked like they came from the Mexican section of Oriental Trading Company. There were paintings of scenes from Chihuahua and Guadalajara on the walls; sombreros decked the windows and banister. Everything you’d expect from a good overwrought attempt at Mexicana. The only chink in the glitzy neo-Mexican armour of the joint was the television playing past episodes of Charmed. But hey, even New Mexico stoops to having Charmed on its airwaves.

The food was awesome. If I closed my eyes I might actually imagine I was back at Gazpachos, Nini’s, or any other hole-in-the-wall beans-and-rice joint south of the Four Corners. Bonus: the portions were even Southwest portions. The burrito was big enough to feed a prospector and his horse for a week in winter. Just enough to feed me ’til dinner.

As we left, I had to ask the lady at the counter. “Where’d you learn to cook Mexican food?”

“San Francisco,” she replied in her gorgeous Irish lilt.

Well, it ain’t New Mexico. But she could have fooled me, and that’s good enough for this cowboy.

~emrys