This is Nanzaro’s eating out adventure in downtown Vancouver.

He went for the Rememberance Day ceremony and parade at the Victory Square.

After the ceremony, he went for lunch at Chipotle Mexican Grill on Howe St. According to Nanzaro, it’s a fast food kind of place like Subway.

He had the Burrito Bowl. His choice of ingredients in his Burrito Bowl are:

• Half white cilantro lime rice
  Half brown cilantro lime rice
  Fajita veggies
  Black beans
  Half chicken meat
  Half steak meat
  Hot salsa
  Shredded cheese
  Guacamole
  Romaine lettuce

Nanzaro felt that this is a healty meal.

He had been to Chipotle a few weeks ago. He had a Borritto wrap in his earlier visit. (more…)

Truth is I know very little about Mexican food. Sometimes I get confused with what is what in Mexican cuisine. Perhaps what I know about Mexican food can be summed up as follows:

Quesadillas has cheese. Tacos can be soft shell or hard shell. Burritos is a Mexican wrap. Oh … what is fajitas now? Can I say it is like quesadillas without the cheese? What is enchiladas now? I can imagine some of you now shaking your heads side  to side and tsk-tsk’ing me. Go ahead. 🙂

Apart from not having someone to teach me about the cuisine, perhaps one of the things that prevents me from trying more is because I associate Mexican cuisine with beans. I just never liked beans. Never did since when I was young.

Another thing too. I always thought of Mexican food as colorful food. I am not sure why. Maybe it is because of the fruits I had before or the colorful chips.

And of course … Mexican food is spicy!

We met up with Mo and Patch. This is so long ago I can’t even remember when exactly it was. Maybe it was at least 2 months ago.

Mo is the one who writes the EcoGreenBean blog. Mo suggested that we meet in Dona Cata and since we had not blogged about this place before we readily agree. It is good that we blog about non-Asian food once in a while, right?

The Dona Cata is a popular restaurant, and is one of only a handful of Mexican restaurant in town. The Mexican flag draped in front of the restaurant tells me that Mexicans are proud of their flag. How come we don’t often see Asian restaurants have flags draped outside the restaurant is what I was trying to say.

This is one restaurant that is well covered by the media for sure. They had amassed quite a lot of news articles which they proudly frame up and hung on the wall. They are running … (more…)

Ever since Alejandra and Estanislao started telling me finer points about Mexican food, I get more interested in finding out about it. I used to be so oblivious about Mexican food. If you ask me, I would not be able to name one Mexican restaurant or even know where to find one.

Since the past few weeks, I had began to understand a lot more and that Mexican cuisine is more than just tacos and burritos. A month ago, we went to the El Mariachi. I wanted to try the Sopa Azteca (Aztec Soup) that Alejandra said I should but unfortunately they did not have it. But when I found out that the Salsa and Agave has it, Suanne and I made a beeline to the restaurant.

Salsa and Agave is located in the middle of Yaletown. This hole in the wall had gained quite a reputation and is arguably one of the best Mexican restaurants in Metro Vancouver. They closes on Mondays but on other days they are open for lunch and dinner between 11AM to 9:30PM.

I was curious as to what the word Agave means. Estanislao told me that agave is a type of cactus that is used to make Tequila, particularly a type of agave called the blue agave. But if you think they serve tequila in Salsa and Agave, you will not find it here.

Salsa and Agave is really small … and extremely popular. We counted only 8 small tables each able to hold 2 people each. As usual, Suanne and I were there early at about 4:45PM. So there were a lot of empty tables. By 6PM when we were about to leave, the restaurant was filled with customers standing in between tables waiting for one to free up.

It was freezing cold outside and I guess no one wanted to wait in the cold. That is why everyone was cramped into the little space.

ALL of the customers speaks Spanish. We stuck out like sore thumbs being the only Asian faces.

Service was very friendly. First thing we got was tortilla chips and red salsa served in a mortar like bowl.

We were sitting there for a few minutes trying to understand the menu. It was confusing for us — all of them looked the same and we can’t imagine what most of them were. We told ourselves we will not want the tacos stuff and wanted a true dinner.

Our waitress was friendly and helpful. We told her we don’t know what we wanted except that we definitely want the Sopa Azteca and “real Mexican dinner”. First thing she told us, in a hush tone, is “do not get the burritos, we make it like the Americans”. We had a good laugh.

At first I wanted to order a Mexican pop but then I noticed that they had a drinks dispenser with a white and a red drinks. Even though we do not know what it is, we ordered one of each. We just had to try.

The red drink is the hibiscus (a kind of flower). Hah, one learn new things everyday. In Malaysia, hibiscus is the national flower and no one even thought that it could be made into a drink. The drink is sourish. While it was OK, it will not be something we will enjoy a lot.

But the white drink was fantastic. It is called the rice and cinnamon water. It is sweet … and cinnamony, of course. One can easily mistaken this for milk. I think a lot of people will like this.

So … finally … this is Sopa Azteca. It is a tomato soup with tortilla, diced avocados, cheese, sour cream and chipotle pepper in it. It tasted “cheesy” and not too spicy. The fried tortilla presents a balanced … (more…)

I still do not quite get it. When you use Twitter, do you say that you Tweet or you Twit?

I am not sure if you know that we are on Twitter. You can reach us at @chowtimes if you want to follow us.

Anyway, this post is about my first food blogger meet organized via Twitter. @604foodtography sent a twitter to @tibbidy, @edlau and myself asking if we wanted to have a quick bite at La Taqueria. @seasaltwithfood picked up our tweet and decided to join us as she was already in downtown. Unfortunately, @tibbidy pulled out at the last minute … saying that she had to deal with this thingy called work.

La Taqueria is located on West Hastings and Hamilton in downtown Vancouver.

I had never walked along this stretch of the road before. So it was a surprise when @604foodtography pointed to me that La Taqueria is located just across the street from Marc Emery‘s headquarters (Marc Emery is known as the Prince of Pot in Canada) and next door to Vancouver Seeds Bank (which sells Marijuana seeds for medicinal purposes).

It was OK. I did not feel unsafe waiting outside La Taqueria in bright daylight. It was cold though waiting outside. Both @604foodtography and I were there first. I told @604foodtography I had a feeling that @edlau would be late because he had a reputation for being late. True enough, he was!

La Taqueria is really small. At best, I think they have stools for only 12 people. People either wait for a table or like many people do, they take away. Waiting for a table is not a problem because it doesn’t take long to gobble down 4 small tacos anyway.

@foodtography knows this place very well. He had been here several times already. He said that at times there are lines that goes right out to the door. But on that day, it wasn’t too bad. We even managed to get the counter seats — all four of us. All four of us who were armed with hefty SLR cameras!

The menu is really small and simple. Even that it was bewildering for me who is not familiar with Mexican food and names. But it is easy once you read the description in English underneath the Mexican names. You can click on the picture above to show a bigger image to read the menu if you want.

So there are about a dozen types with something for everyone … beef, chicken, fish, vegetarian, vegan and even the more exotic ones like cow tongue.

Each taco is $2.50. People normally order four. If you order four, (more…)