Mexican Standoff

I've been searching for a taqueria for a while near my hometown of Lansdale. The town and surrounding towns have a good amount of immigrants who have been opening up nice markets and produce stalls, but not too many restaurants. Specifically, there are a good amount of Mexicans in the area, but not any reputable taquerias. My thought was that 1) The Mexicans are keeping the food to themselves or 2) I am not aware. My experience with Mexicans is that they are very generous people on the whole so I was pretty sure it was my ignorance that kept me from finding out about the goods. That plus I am rarely in Lansdale.

So this past Saturday, my dad suggested we get Mexican food and we drove to Souderton where there was a promising restaurant named Xinantecatl. In my experience, mexican restaurants in the US that are named in mesoamerican languages tend to be good. This one was a small mexican grocery store with a room/open kitchen in the back and 4 tables. One of the tables was occupied with a Mexican woman chatting up the chef in spanish and her Indian date. The chef, Juan, was a pretty cool guy and apparently worked with a lot of Indians, who he labeled hard workers (bonus points in his book). He also seemed to like the indian food his co-workers brought to lunch.

Juan hooked us up with a couple great tortas, tacos and a shrimp and potato soup that has the house special. The tortas were excellent and I'll go back for those. I've recently been transitioning away from tacos to the torta as my go-to carb accompaniment to the meat...and this place re-inforced that.

Juan was the man and mentioned that the owner and his son (Juan's brother and father in law) are renowned for his whole goat barbacoa...hopefully they start cooking that up in the summer.

We talked a bit about the similarities among the Mexican and Indian people. I think Juan might be part Indian.


http://www.soudertonmexicanrestaurant.com