Pellegrino's Top Fifty My Ass!

S. Pellegrino's annual "World's 50 Best Restaurants" list was released on Monday, and let me tell you, I’m more than a little upset about the greasy spoons they chose to acknowledge.

Most of the restaurants are in Fifi places like New York, Paris, London, but not a single restaurant on the list is located in what many Chicanos like me consider the culinary capital of the world, El Paso, TX.

En serio. Not a single El Paso eatery made their pinche list.

Check it out if you don’t believe me. Click this then.


El Chuco, Texas has in-doobid-lee some of the best culinary establishments in the world.

We have for example, Lucy’s at the King’s X, which is reported to be the place where Machaca was invented. ¡Ay! the way they smother it in American cheese sauce should have teased the taste buds of at least one of these pendejo judges of fine food.



And what about Carnitas Queretaro? Have they tried their pozole?

click on this then!

Ask them judges if they ate here. I bet they haven’t.

And the Good Luck café on Alameda?

That place is open all night long, so after the bars close and you want a little menudo or beans fried in lard to sober you up, you can go there.

Have even one of these so-called judges of good taste enjoyed one of their Lucky Burgers. Damn, they’re the best!

They’re served with two hamburger patties, bacon, ham, a weenie and a slab of spam and three slices of cheese.




(I found this picture online, and it don't even come close to the Lucky Burger. This is what you eat while you're waiting for your Lucky Burger.)

And the burger comes with a pile of French fries, which are fired so long in grease that they go wet and limp in your fingers, and if you don’t wash down each bite with horchata, the fat congeals on your tongue.

Sure, Paris may have their Chateaubriand, but El Paso has what is perhaps the world’s number one eating spot, La Pachanga Tortas. Now I admit, not a lot of people know about this place.

It’s downtown, only open for lunch, and they only have four tables. Isn’t that a sign of class?

Hey, you Pellegrino pendejos! Did you even try this place? Did you ever give this pig a chance?

The ham torta! Oh, man, ¡deliciosa!

Their Cubana is fat and juicy, and if you’re an insider, you know to slip the owner a little extra, and she’ll put together una Torta de colita.

How could these Pellegrino’s pendejos miss the places we Chicanos love so much?

The only conclusion I can make is that the judges are racist.

Sure, El Paso is nothing but a sprawling metropolis (including Ciudad Júarez) in the Chicanada. We are not powerful people, at least not the butt-load of us, but we are poor and afraid of what the day can bring to our cities. We are addicted to hope and despair in equal doses.

But ask anyone, Mexicanos know how to eat.

Like Burciaga suggested in a cartoon, if some UFOs were to land on earth, those little green people with antennas sticking out of their heads wouldn’t say to the first human they see, “Earthing, take me to your leader.” Oh, no.

They’d say, “Do you know where I can find some good Mexican food?”

We El Chuco Chicanos, I must proudly say, are some of the fattest people in the world with some of the highest rates of diabetes. I’m a type two. And I am, gulp, a little fat maybe. Here I am at the Andres Montoya homenaje with poets Lee Herrick, Oscar Bermeo, Craig Santos Perez, and Javier Huerta, and no offense to my homies, but I must be más Chicano de todos 'cuz look at my stomach!



Why are we big?

You think it's because we don’t get any exercise?

Hell no it ain't!

We can’t afford cars, so we walk everywhere, to our job in the early morning, to our job in the afternoon, to our night job on the graveyard shift. We walk to Wal-mart and then carry all that shit home by ourselves. We know what work is.

We clean houses, wash cars, scrub toilets, work on rooftops, we clean the grease from drains and we haul garbage bags down three flights of stairs in 100 degree heat and with a hangover. We can do anything with our bodies if we get paid for it.

We can pull giant palm trees from the ground, load them up on a truck and replant them in front of some rich man’s home.














We’re not overweight because we're lazy and lack exercise, we’re fat because we know how to eat!
Okay, maybe I'm a little lazy at times.


The heck with the Pellegrino pendejos (PPs), you don’t have to go to Europe or Manhattan to get great eats.

You can start right here in Aztlán with a chile relleno burrito from Ciros. And they’re so damn cheap you can get two.

Albeit, one of the resultants they listed as the top fifty in the world is in Mexico City, but it’s called Biko (Mexicans don’t even have a “k”) and how many Mexicans do you think can afford to eat there?

It’s located in the Palanco neighborhood, and the menus are in English.

Need I say more?

Let’s protest this racists decision by PPs.

Let’s all meet tonight at La Malinche’s downtown for a bowl of caldo and some enchiladas montadas.

¡Ajúa! from the Writer’s Block!