Authentically Impaired
On a quest for authentic Mexican? Keep looking.
The sign hanging outside of El Ranchito, a no-frills spot that opened about a year ago, advertises "Authentic Mexican Food," and no one standing on the sidewalk would have reason to doubt the claim.
The restaurant is just a few steps down from the elegant spire of St. Michael's church, which conducts bilingual masses as well as purely Spanish ones. A little farther away, the Puerto Rican Café Coláo is serving up morcilla sausages and fried plantains. Authentic Latin food would seem to be well within the neighborhood's capabilities.
Maybe there would be some birria or pozole on offer. With a little luck, a nopales salad. And surely there'd be a few big plastic jugs of horchata to choose from.
But like too many of its Philadelphia brethren, El Ranchito serves none of those things. French fries? Check. Shredded iceberg lettuce? You got it. Tomatoes that Cole Hamels could hurl into a catcher's mitt without bruising? Batter up.
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You may not have laid eyes on El Ranchito, which, after all, is a simple corner café with no more ambition than to provide the neighbors with an easy takeout option, but you've tasted the food. Seven-dollar burritos stuffed with chicken, rice and cheese, period. Tacos without so much as a whiff of a chili pepper. I shudder to say it, but at least Taco Bell gives you a couple of salsa packets to liven things up.
To be fair, El Ranchito does serve a perfectly good salsa — spicy enough to tickle the tongue, acidic enough to refresh on a hot day — but you'll only get it with a basket of tortilla chips. And the chips are top-notch, too — fresh and thin and just salty enough — but it's not a good sign when chips stand out as the most excellent part of a meal that isn't really all that cheap.
Plus, what's authentically Mexican about shrimp wrapped in bacon, served over frozen fries? Even the overrated Taqueria La Veracruzana doesn't bend over that far to cater to the desultory American mainstream.
There is a paradox in this town. Over the past couple of years, the best places to find "authentic" Mexican flavors have been those that don't advertise themselves as authentic at all. Lolita is shopping up the chayote. You can get your corn smut at Xochitl. And Philadelphia diners have come in flocks.
It is time that more down-market taquerias wised up to the opportunity this presents. Leave the bland quesadillas to yuppie bars; buy a goat hindquarter and cook up a mess of affordable birria, or at least break out the guajillo chilis that local bodegas stock by the bushel. If you serve it, people will come. Or at least I'll tell them to.
El Ranchito
1356 N. Second St., 215-426-8246
Sides, $2.50-$4; Main dishes, $4.99-$15.99
Tue.-Thu., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
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