The Swimming Hole, Seafood Adventures and Taqueria Gonzalez

Yesterday, Ellen and I took Lupe out to my favorite swimming hole, which is about an hour away from here, just off of the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. It is a beautiful place, with some of the clearest water I have ever seen, nice trails and campsites, and plenty of places for Lupe to swim and run around like a lunatic.







After hanging out there for a while, we headed off back to Asheville and out to dinner. Now, we have recently been discussing our lack of experience with many of Asheville's restaurants. Sure, we've eaten at nearly all of the local vegetarian places, the Indian restaurants, the sushi places, and some fancy places. You get the picture, I'm sure. There are so many local places, "normal" places, however, that we have not yet tried.

In our defense, in many cases this is because many of the places we haven't eaten don't look appetizing. Nonetheless, we decided to venture out and give one of them a try. "Fisherman's Quarters II" was the name of the place we picked, due both to its proximity to our homes and the cheesy sign looming over the parking lot.



I'll make a long story short: I will, in the future, trust my instincts more with regard to food establishments in the region. The place wasn't terrible, but it certainly wasn't anyplace I would recommend to a friend. Nonetheless, I suppose that I can congratulate myself on eating in a restaurant in Asheville in which at least 75% of the people eating there were surely from North Carolina. This is rarity here in Asheville, as much of the town, and nearly all of my friends, are Asheville immigrants. I rarely, in fact, ever meet anyone that is actually from here.

So, at least I get local points for my adventurous spirit. I lose points, however, for going to a seafood joint in the mountains.

There is, however, one type of restaurant here in town that I am always prepared to try--Mexican. Much of the Mexican food in Asheville, unsurprisingly, is terrible. There are a number of places that serve insipid, uninspired, overly cheesy, overly saucy, messes of food that they claim is Mexican. A quick story about one such place:

I went to a certain restaurant for lunch one afternoon with a friend. It was a beautiful day, we had just played a game of basketball. We sat outside and each ordered a beer and enjoyed the restaurant's tortilla chips and salsa. We ordered--I can't remember what my friend asked for, but I ordered a "chile relleno", which, in Spanish means "stuffed chile pepper".

(A quick aside: I have lived and traveled and studied in Spain and Mexico. I taught Spanish for five years. I have eaten Mexican food in great quantities. I just want to be clear on one point--my qualifications for understanding perfectly the nature of the chile relleno are outstanding, stellar, spotless.)

The waiter delivers our food, and on my plate is a mess of cheese, random morsels of ground beef, and a few strips of green pepper. I look at it with suprise, try it, and look up at my friend with disgust. We both wonder what the hell I have just been served. So I call the waiter over to the table, and I ask him, "Where is the chile relleno?" I ask him in Spanish.

"it is there on your plate," he responds.
"No," I say, "on my plate there is cheese and meat and a few strips of pepper."
"That," he explains to me with an air of superiority, "is how the chile relleno is served."
"But," I tell him, "it is impossible to call this a stuffed pepper. By definition it is impossible. Where is the pepper with things on the inside of it?"

The conversation continued for a bit along this line, as he tried to explain to me that I was eating a stuffed pepper, and I tried to tell him that in order for something to be called a stuffed pepper, there must actually be a stuffed pepper present in the meal. This is the kind of Mexican food that I could really do without.

There are, thankfully, also a few places in town that serve delicious, though somewhat "Americanized" Mexican food. And then, there are the Taquerias.

Ahhhh, the taquerias of Asheville. Never before have I seen a white face (besides my own and those of my friends of course) in these places, these hidden gems, these havens for lovers of true Mexican flavors. I am not, of course, the only non-Mexican in town that enjoys these places, but truly--I have never, ever seen "whitey" in any of these places.

These totally under-utilized places serve up incredible plates and delicious, cheap tacos (usually around $1.50 per taco. I am stuffed with three, Ellen gets two.) And where else in town can you get a cow's head taco? I mean, come on! Look below for an example of a delicious dinner from Taqueria Gonzalez (located on Haywood Rd. in West Asheville.) The tacos shown are (starting from the top and moving clockwise) chicken, barbeque, and tacos al pastor.