This is not the first invasion Denver has suffered. There was a sci-fi geek incursion just a couple of weeks ago, that basketball thing a couple of years ago. We've had Baptist conventions and World Series games and a thousand smaller, less publicized wrenches thrown in our collective works. And while, yes, the Democratic National Convention is big in all senses of the word — big news, big weirdness, big annoyance, big fun — and a challenge for anyone even tangentially affected by its massive gravity, like the man said: This, too, shall pass. Very soon, there will come a day when it is all a memory, bad or good, when our city will be back to itself again and likely none the worse for wear.
Mark Manger
Tacos Jalisco serves up Southern comfort.
Location Info
Details
Burritos (regular): $3.25
Flautas: $7.75
Fajitas: $15.75
Tacos (per four): $6.75
Camarones rancheros: $11.25
4309 West 38th Avenue
303-458-1437
Hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
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Until that day? You take your comfort where you can. You camp out in your living room, call in stranded to work and blame it on the Secret Service (an excuse you can only use for another day or two), do everything in your power to avoid the hassles orbiting the convention venues like electrons in unstable valences and, if you're anything like me, eat. For peace, for solace, out of boredom or smoldering rage, you eat in hopes of finding something soothing for every jangled nerve and offended sensibility — searching for comfort in the form of things killed, grilled and shoved in your food hole.
Denver does a lot of foods well. We do steaks and potatoes out of historic, autonomic reflex. We do burgers because a man can't eat porterhouse every day and live long at it. We do sushi because we happened to be the settling place for a handful of sashimi savants, and Vietnamese food because we were fortunate enough to have been a gathering place for those displaced by war and made hungry by the trip.
But Denver does Mexican food because we can't not, because it is integral to who we are in the West and what we love. If Denver has a cohesive soul anywhere inside its stone-and-iron body, the core of our collective psyche wears a sombrero. When it feels like getting out and about, it drives a chopped and custom lowrider. And when it eats, it has a flood of carnitas, tacos and chicken burritos flowing through it — a spangled and bean-smeared tapestry of mutt cuisine that ties borders in knots and passes like a coyote invisibly back and forth across them.
Colorado Mexican is not Mexican-Mexican. Colorado Mexican is regular Mexican with two shots of tequila on top and a chile pepper stuffed with cheese. It's a Tex-Mex sizzle platter of fajitas trailing steam through the dining room. As Irish cuisine is one of siege and sorrow and penury, Colorado Mexican is one almost exclusively of celebration: Saturday-night tacos and Sunday-morning menudo, breakfast burritos to greet the day and margaritas to rejoice in its close. And we are incredibly goddamn fortunate that, in many of this city's best neighborhoods, you can't walk blindfolded for fifty yards without stumbling through the front door of some taquería or other, tripping and falling face-first into a plate of carne asada. God knows I've done it often enough. Sometimes without even the blindfold as an excuse.
Last week I counted the Mexican-food enterprises as I drove toward Tacos Jalisco. Taquerías, carnicerías, panaderías, chile roasters just getting in the year's first crop, dudes in trucks with pictures of dancing tacos on the side and salsas kept in plastic half-jars that once held pickles or kimchi or god-knows-what. Counting as I rolled up West 38th Avenue, I almost got in three different accidents as I jerked the wheel unconsciously back and forth. I'd eaten at many of these places, bought bread, pastries, bags of tamarind candy. I could remember what each of them had done well (huaraches here, tacos there, a killer bowl of posole on this corner one night), how the service had been, whether the chips were fresh and free. And by the time I made it to Tacos Jalisco, I was starving. It had taken all my scant willpower not to stop and buy a couple of tacos to hold me over, but I was committed. For decades, Tacos Jalisco has held down the corner of a strip mall full of laundromats and storefronts like the final picket in a defensive line, holding firm against the remodels and condo buyouts approaching inexorably from three directions, the whole area humming with an unstoppable force/immovable object vibe. (The owners also have El Sarape on South Colorado, and had a second Tacos Jalisco in a mutt neighborhood on Leetsdale Boulevard until 2003.) The stolidity of Tacos Jalisco in the face of all that progress was thrilling, and so was the thought of a plate of camarones rancheros.
The name, of course, makes no sense at all. There's nothing ranch-like about this dish, although it does contain shrimp — big gulf shrimp, butterflied and served in a bath of carbolic acid and red dye #5, in a thin, vicious soup of liquid napalm and that stuff they dip candy apples in at the fair. It is hot as considered sin, painful like a mouthful of needles for the first few bites — the shrimp bodies prized from their tails, cut, swirled through the red-chile sauce puddled in the well of the plate and laid on a tortilla with a dollop of smooth and lardy beans, a little broken steam-table rice and a touch of almost-but-not-quite-fresh house guacamole. In their inferno sauce, the shrimp share space with a chopped medley of innocuous-looking bell peppers, a few bits of soft onion — but this is camouflage for the unwary. This stuff is hot, murderously so. But it speaks to the masochist in me, the kid who, upon discovering chile on his first night in New Mexico many years ago, immediately began ordering it on everything, heedless of warning, ignoring all good advice to the contrary. Beyond that, it is delicious.
