Mark Flider's Blog

A group of us from work tried out a new Mexican restaurant just up the street. As it has already been written about, I can only add that it wasn’t bad. With its selection of goats, brain, and headcheese, it was certainly looking to appeal to the more traditional Mexican palate.

The only other Mexican place I’ve had in Pittsburgh, Baja Fresh, is definitely of the fast food variety. The general consensus — which I’m sure was accurate — was that Taqueria Mi Mexico was just leaps and bounds better than Baja Fresh.

Now, there exists a type of person known as a “foodie”. Such a person is, while not necessarily obsessed with food, what a non-foodie would at the very least call “picky”. Though inside the foodie circle this is referred to as “refined taste”. Of course, not everyone exhibits such meticulousness about particular ingredients, but there is a large and rapidly growing community online consisting of people who enjoy the finer things in life, with regard to food.

Sidenote: I tried to link to a site as an example, but the first two pages of results for “foodie” in Google were so atrocious that I couldn’t with clear conscious provide a link. Suffice to say, you’ll have to trust me on this whole “widespread” and “community” claim.

Anyway, my point is, I am not one of these people. Sure, I can tell the difference between a $5 meal and a $100 meal, and all things being equal I would much rather have the latter, but when it comes to the subtle differences in cuisine one experiences in similar restaurants, I am at a loss. For example, chinese food pretty much tastes the same to me, no matter where I have it. The crap at the airport is little different to my taste-buds than a hand-served dish at a sit-down restaurant.

Not to say I don’t enjoy food; if anything, I enjoy it too much. It’s just that I have a binary sense of taste: things are good, or bad, and not incredibly so. Of course there are exceptions, like peanut butter cookies (oh my GOD I would kill children for those) or Brie (which makes an unflushed stall at a baseball stadium seem like a veritable tour de force of flavor).

Anyway, it is clear that peterb and psu weigh in on the side of foodies. Which is why I trust that their assessment of the restaurant was accurate and their conclusion that — especially for the price — Taqueria Mi Mexico is the superior restaurant to be correct.

Me, I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between Baja Fresh and Taqueria Mi Mexico if you put both in front of me.

Posted 6 years, 9 months ago, under Pittsburgh, Society.
Subscribe to comments (RSS) for this post.
Email this post to a friend.