Guanajuato

Guanajuato Mexican Restaurant in Bay View is at 2317 S. Howell Ave., but more significantly it's close enough to the corner for me to call it "on the corner" of Howell and Lincoln, pretty much the east end of Lincoln, and if you don't know, Lincoln has just an incredible amount of Mexican restaurants along it - so many I have not ever been able to count them - as it stretches from Lake Michigan to Waukesha. Okay, so maybe there are more on another street, like National, but if you're looking for Mexican food you can't go wrong driving along Lincoln, and at one point I considered just doing a blog about tacos on Lincoln, called "Tacos on Lincoln," but decided to expand it to anywhere serving anything remotely Mexican in the greater Milwaukee area. Maybe a narrower focus would have been more conducive for success of this long-neglected project, but that's all water under the bridge, now, or something.

If you were going to start on the east end of Lincoln and head west systematically, this would be number one, and it's a good place to start because it's in a lot of ways very typical of Mexican restaurants in the greater Milwaukee area, based on the menu, the food, the decor, and that it's a beloved spot for many; if you interviewed Milwaukee, or specifically Bay View residents, you'd find a lot of them claiming this as their favorite. I like it a lot, myself, and I've eaten here countless times and never had a bad experience or anything less than a delicious meal. It's got a bar with a lot of goofy decor, and indeed oceans of tequila help keep the ship afloat, I'm sure, and the food fairly inexpensive, especially if you're going pound for pound. The people who work here are among the warmest in this sometimes cold, cold town, and there is heat in many other forms here, including the swinging kitchen doors with windows shaped like chili peppers.

On my last visit I decided to try different dishes than I'd eaten before, then neglected to take notes so I don't remember much about it (this is a constant problem with me) except that it was all delicious and I kept my membership to the "clean plate club" in spite of generous portions, including rice and beans. One thing I do recall eating was a tongue taco, and that would be beef tongue, I believe, which every so often I try to come around to, but am never in love with. I'm not crazy about meat, in general, and tongue gets just a little specific. Maybe I should go back to my original idea of just trying to order avocado, cilantro, onion, and lime tacos at each place and doing a head to head comparison. I kind of abandoned that narrow approach, however, as different places have their own specialties, and you'd be doing yourself (and the reading public) a disservice to ignore that. Not to mention that I also want to explore the basic enchilada, as much as possible, in order to re-frame the idealistic memory of my childhood crush, lowly Taco Flats in Cleveland, just for nostalgia's sake.

So ultimately I feel like I have more work to do here, at Guanajuato, but don't pity me, it's a rigorous job but someone has to do it. I'll return with more data, insights, and better notes at a later date. That's another decision I made about this project, I'm going to say it's okay to return to a place multiple times, and certainly not worry if I write about one place several times before I've covered every place in the greater Milwaukee area to eat Mexican food (a task, which, you might realize, may be impossible for a single digestive system). I may even post some memorial thoughts and laments for some of the fine establishments that are no longer with us, a few new casualties which have come to my attention just recently, tragically, really. But to my eyes (you never know, of course) this place is in great health and is going to keep on making people happy, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't visit today or sooner, because life is short and restaurant/eater relationships are even shorter.