Wö®§t M&xik@n €v@®!

So, this last week has been more or less a nutritional disaster. One that I had seen coming, but still. Between being away all last weekend, and busy every single evening from 7 to 11(+), I had no time whatsoever to buy food and cook it. I also did not want to spend a whole lot of money eating out, because I knew I would be doing it all week. So, lots of visits to the well-known lunch stops around my workplace (cheap and decent), bakeries (cheap, decent, but somewhat lacking in variety), McDonalds (cheap and crap), one of those ubiquitous noodle places (cheap and ok-ish), and some late-night grub at after-orchestra-beers (moderate and decent). But at lunch today, my string of boring-to-questionable culinary experiences hit a low of epic proportions.

Part of my problem with the lunch places around my building is that I grew sick of them years ago and to my dismay, the 5 years away seem to have made no difference: I am still mostly sick of them. So, interested in checking out a new place within walking distance, I came across this café with an all-American menu. It featured burgers, a Philly cheesesteak, cesar salad, and some “Tex Mex” options - burritos and tacos, served with “nachos”. Now, don’t get me wrong here, the moment I walked through the door, I knew I was asking for trouble. The place did not look either Mexican or American, the server was from Eastern Europe, and there was nobody else there having lunch. But I stayed, partly out of curiosity, partly thinking, “Well, how bad can it be?”

I had no idea.

I ordered a beef taco and a coke. The coke was good. But what I found on my plate was so far removed from Mexican food it would have made Taco Bell look authentic. The “nachos” were just a pile of tortilla chips with nothing on them (in retrospect, that may have been a good thing). Not that there is anything wrong with chips and salsa, but it took two dips into the salsa for me to recognize its base flavor and main ingredient: ketchup. The taco was a flour tortilla clumsily half-wrapped around a pile of cheese-laden ground meat that was closest to a cheesesteak in consistency and flavor, but would still be a little bit of an insult to a cheesesteak. I am still trying to figure out whether the cheese was Emmental or Gouda…but I digress. The point is, that taco filling wasn’t even a cheesesteak, let alone anything from anywhere near Mexico. Needless to mention, nothing on the plate had ever been in the same room with anything hotter than a bell pepper.

I figured this abomination of a taco was so thoroughly un-American, there was no point in even trying to grab it, so I pretended I didn’t know any better and ate it with knife and fork. I tried my best to make a dent in it, but had to give up after two thirds of it (that’s pretty whimsical for European portion sizes), paid, fled in terror and wanted to forget the whole thing.

Except that I had to set eyes on the place again when I took the tram back from work (yes, this means I will have to look the other direction twice a day from now on), and got angry. Not because I spent too much money on a bad meal, that's my own darn fault, but because the place is such a disgrace. To Mexico, to the US, and to Vienna. Even if they know nothing about Mexican food (which they clearly don’t), and don’t bother to ask the interwebs at all (which they also clearly don’t), heck, we are in the center of a European metropolis! With the Sacher and the Imperial two miles away as the crow flies, don’t they have any sort of intuition that melting cheese over ground beef and throwing it onto a cold tortilla might not be good food? Are they thinking that “American food” means you HAVE to make it as bad as humanly possible? I mean, no wonder people here think that American food is garbage, if places like this, along with McDonald’s, Hooters, and TGI Friday’s are the culinary ambassadors!

I want this place to go out of business, asap!