The most important decisions are made over salsa. Mostly, what to order to follow said salsa. But if you eat at enough Mexican restaurants, it also becomes indicative, Pavlov-style, of possibility—of that part of going out to eat, when you walk in, meet your party, get your jacket off, see what futbol is on the corner TV, and just for presenting yourself upright, are offered a bowl, maybe some squirt bottles for variance, of spices and tomatoes, a synthetic marital collision of chilies, onion, garlic and slow-cooked kitchen love whose combinations and intricacies and nuance can go in one million directions.
At this point you can too. You can decide if you want a bubbly Jarritos to chase the salt. Or maybe you deserve a beer, a Bloody Maria. Maybe you're going to order an app, some queso fundido and go all in, risk a GI overtime infraction, the need for a nap, a sick day tomorrow. Or maybe it's time to scarf some mid-workday tacos and get back behind the mule. It's probably what ancestral bonfires were like, the center of making friends, where the most important can’t wait-stories are told, alliances arrived upon, when peace is made, with plans for the future—and the future meal—laid out, changed, made new again. Either way, it's a time of the communal, collective crackle of salty fried corn, bonding with the waitress, the ultimate arbiter of happiness, while hands are too busy, greasy to check phones, where compulsive shoveling of shards into mouths is accepted, expected.
But how can something so comforting, so central and everyday, also be so thrilling? So endless? A rollercoaster with infinite possibilities, unheard of chilies, a taste glimpse of sunny southern nether regions, distant agrarian lands never to be seen, open enough to be an avenue for innovation, awash with a pique of capsaicin-induced adrenaline, a thrill, a whiff of danger, the need for more water and/or another bite.
Salsa is a Mexican restaurant's soul in microcosm, an instant indicator of quality and potential, the synopsis and the trailer, the opening band you remember better than the headliner the next day, the first impression that keeps popping up again and again. And if you eat at enough Mexican restaurants, you start to go to other types of restaurants, and wonder if they even care that you came: there you are staring at your compatriots dumbly, over a glass of water, maybe a bowl of bread if you're lucky, unsure of what to do with your hands.
A restaurant welcome mat can and should hold so much more. Here are Milwaukee’s warmest and best.
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C-Viche
The aji verde cumbia’s—like much of the menu here—are over the dividing line between salsa and hot sauce. Coming as a side in a petite dish may hint towards the latter, but I often find myself treating it like gravy on Thanksgiving night, when I eventually take the entire boat back to my place, just looking for scraps of stuff to scoop it on, the topping becoming the scene stealer. Especially here when there’s a plate of tacos on the table, and it swims through a particularly juicy bite of steak, yielding, basically, the fatty essence of life, kicked up a notch. It’s simple—serranos, mayo, lettuce, oil. And versatile: try it on eggs, salmon, beef, beef hearts, plantains, yucca. But forget for a second the most topographically diverse menu on the South Side. re really may be no better savory Milwaukee bite than a healthy spoon of the stuff souped atop the downhome earthiness of pork beans.
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Café Corazon (Bay View)
None of the Day of the Dead bric-a-brac, Loteria kitsch, or second location amidst gentrifying, ever-condo-erecting Bay View fosters thoughts of hardcore Mexican chili mixing. Yet Corazon surprises with a soulful scorcher of verde side salsa. The deceivingly garden- green blend packages the potent punch of habaneros in a chilled, velvety concoction, rife with a pleasant, sneaking burn that can be felt near the base of the sinuses, a few bites eventually necessitating hat removal. It makes the warm salty chips sing, the chorizo too, in a crumbly-meets-creamy texture duet. It’s actually enough of a counterpart for soy chorizo, showing even tacos geared for the fitbit-ed Outpost crowd can pack some authentic Scoville scale oomph.
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Chicken Palace & La Michoacana
For a town lousy with bars, there is a serious shortage of salsa bars. Enough so that on my first trip, feeling unfamiliar, unexpectant, upon placing my order and inquiring about salsa, I was told with a gesture to turn around. Suddenly “Dream Weaver” was blasting overhead and everything was in slo-mo. Life since hasn’t been the same. Chicken Palace’s name has changed through the years, but the grilled chicken remains, served best, and, most importantly, most dunkable, in a tlayuda—basically a crisped, fried quesadilla whose house takes on the texture of a piece of pizza crust. It’s a perfect canvass for a round robin, a speed dating of chili blends. Sample the habanero and onion-pickled blend that harkens back to a personal discovery of the mix as a ubiquitous tabletop condiment in the Pitillal neighborhood of Puerto Vallarta. There’s the more familiar, localized creamy green sauce. There’s a pickled jalapeno number that’s like a ballsier version of a chunky pico de gallo. Throw in a fresh verde, a roasted verde, a fresh tomato, and almost as afterthought, the spicy king—a fiery, torch-red blend equally tangy and mean. The peripatetic beauty comes from not knowing what is what until you dive in. Even if a large man sitting adjacent to the station, looking very much like he knows a thing or two about the joint, offers, “the green one’s good.” Do you trust him? A salsa bar is no place for the timid.
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Don Lucho Carnitas
565 W Lincoln Ave, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53207When I was little, I used to want to be a garbage man because they only worked one day a week. It not only was indicative of burgeoning laziness, but showed a lack of worldly perspective and a broader sense of reasoning. Such is the case with the weekend-only carnitas joint in the shadow of the Basilica of St. Josaphat. Just try the salsa de molcajete—the mortar and pestle grinding method that many Mexicans swear by—and you realize a lifetime of work, prep, tinkering, perfecting is really therein. It’s a method akin to a well-seasoned pan, with ghosts of salsas past echoing in the basement. The result is an intensely deep-flavored, smoky, dangerously spicy sauce swimming with seeds. There’s also two standards, red and a green, equally bawdy, popping, onion-laced, thick and bold, clearly blended without a thought of volume-stretching water. Try any on the salty, fatty, lard-fried pork carnitas, the none-too-greasy chorizo, the strangely sweet, marinated pastor, barbecued barbocoa, or slow stewed cochinita. Those with exceptional gastrointestinal fortitude may opt for the popular, singular Montalayo i.e. Mexican haggis. Wrap in homemade tortillas, dunk with thick chips very recently fried, still sheeny, crackly and crumbly. Whatever the base, all three salsas showcase the behind the scenes work, letting it all come out on game day.
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El Canaveral
2501 W. Greenfield Ave., Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53204Currently in a holding pattern of salsa slingery, Canaveral expects to reopen sometime in May, only heightening anticipation for the return of their cadre of slick sauces, ushered swiftly upon seating, presented lovingly in a cascading half moon of ascending spice. Creamy emulsification is their game too—a jalapeno sits next to a habanero mix, like a significant other got an immersion blender for Christmas and won’t stop experimenting. There’s also a tomato and chipotle brew, bringing smoke and freshness to the lineup. Alternating such sauces atop an expansive, steaming, alambre plate—chorizo, steak, bacon, cilantro, onion, tomatoes, draped with melty cheese—is like the Dr. Seuss tale of all the places you can go. It’s a tortilla full of all the taste promise a meal can hold.
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Guadalajara
901 S 10th St, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53204The ever-friendly corner haunt has the basics and grandma’s dated kitchen table charm, and that might be all that is necessary to really appreciate the old spot. But, look deeper, and Guadalajara’s kitchen actually has the nouveau hipster proclivity toward specialization and obsession. Mainly, in the form of the chile de arbol. Sample seemingly each of the 30,000 Scoville Heat Units (by comparison jalapenos top out at 8,000, serranos at 22,000) in the bistec en chile de arbol. Scraggly beef chunks swim in a dangerous, oily stew. It’s a DIY taco mix, to be amped to eleven by the upon-request salsa. Yes, arbol salsa —piquant and acidic and aptly blood-colored. You can slide back to garden fresh—on the grease of upper lip sweat and sinus drip—in the bowl of jalapeno-y verde salsa. But there’s a reason the tongue heat doesn’t dissipate. Look with a squint, through the tears, and, yes, there are tiny flecks of arbol just below the surface. There’s also a jar of the pepper in powdered form on every table. From a mortal taste perspective, pain is pleasure.
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Photo credit: Jean-Gabriel Fernandez
Guanajuato Mexican Restaurant
The fierce cult Bay View following that necessitated bigger digs seems to overshadow, overlook GTO’s inconsistency and an unfortunate insistence on defaulting to lettuce and tomatoes as toppings on a taco. But, love it or remain uncertain, there is simply no denying the bright red salsa. Even a mediocre organization can have a prodigy—look at the Bucks, look at the, gulp, Packers. The Giannis/Rodgers of salsas is at once perplexing and familiar—it’s tomatoes, after all, nothing too exotic to identify, it’s only a touch spicy. But there is something undefinably, indelibly satisfying, something so bright and popping about the bursting gardeness. The chunkiness is pleasing, but it’s also liquid enough to penetrate nether regions of tacos. The brace of onions, just this side too big, is balanced by bountiful flecks of cilantro. One would have to suspect a bounty of salt to arrive upon this level of mouth contentment, but it’s not evident. And what’s the point of playing taste Columbo? Really this is mostly word salad, akin to, well, a salad. A recipe with pics you’ll never get to taste. It underscores the Thelonious Monk/Martin Mull idea that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Writing about salsa, something so visceral and Dionysian, is mostly pointless.
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Restaurante La Salsa
119 E Oklahoma Ave, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53207See above. And see below. The creamed spicy verde sauce is a salsa about town—the ‘Milverine’ of chile pepper blends. Find it at random spots, either Taqueria Arandas location for instance, or popping up at whichever is your preferred truck on the Burnham and Windlake taco truck strip. La Salsa’s is a slightly spicier take on this puree of homogenized tongue tang, making it their own, it seems, the fuller, spicier cousin of the jalapeno—the serrano. Either way, it’s still properly emblematic, in the way France has its Bechamel, its Hollandaise, of what should be known as Milwaukee’s sauce.
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Taqueria Buenavista
6000 W. Burnham St. , Milwaukee, WisconsinEmulsification isn’t just a Food Network buzzword, it can also be inspiration for how to live a life: smooth, consistent, together, leaving them wanting more. Such is the taste equivalent when a fat, in this case, olive oil, is beaten together with something thinner, to blend into a thick banded team of viscosity. On paper it sounds more like chemistry than it does at the corner ‘Stallis taco shop, or rolling taco shop generally perched in front of Piggly Wiggly in Bay View. Here it feels like art, in an endlessly addictive, Magic Eye sort of gallery. The creamy jalapeno is a satisfying spruce for any of the greasy, neatly spiced, or sauced offerings - the birria particularly, with fallout from the stewed goat coalescing with salsa driblets on the wax paper, creating a finger-dipping sauce. Or, you can pretend to be civilized, leave it in the never big enough plastic cups for drizzling. Either way it’s one to ask for extras of, to bring home, to keep in the fridge for less than fortunate mealtimes of home cooking.
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Tsunami Taqueria Y Marisco
2001 W Lincoln Ave, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53215Everytime I type or speak the name, I regret it immediately, out of fear my tiny Saturday sanctuary will be overrun with chile thrill seekers. But there is no denying this is the hidden gem not just of the west side taco trail, but of Milwaukee gastronomy. If you can snatch a seat you’ll be met immediately with a deceivingly complex tomato blend, sneakily spicy, bobbing with svelt chunks of avocado. Out of sheer familial generosity—all we did was show up—there’s a ceviche dip too. It’s more than enough to bridge the short wait to whatever you order—be it the city’s best chorizo, fish tacos, charcoal-grilled carbon, deep stewed desebrada. Whatever will be sided by two squeeze tubes: our creamy emulsified friend, here somehow a tad thicker, richer, definitely spicier, reeking of serrano’s; and an acidic burn dark red scorcher. Simply, from entry to gassy stumble out, with arm full of to-go salsas and a soothing horchata, it’s the kind of place that makes you want to showoff check-in on Facebook, that makes you want to tell the waitress these are the best tacos in town, even if she could care less, the kind that makes you sad the meal is over. You might find yourself counting workouts from this week, rationalizing how you maybe deserve another taco, a torta for a later night snack. If you’re this sort, remember even the pollo is an exceptional base.
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