Mexican Food and Summerlicious

Tried my first Canadian Mexican food last Friday when a friend from work and I went to dinner. We first tried to get Persian food at Pomagranates, a place Omid and I had tried to go when we first got here but that was closed at the time (it was Monday, and lots of places seem to be closed on Monday). Hungry and ready for some gormeh sabzi and tahdeeg, we drove over to College Street to find that Pomegranates was yet again closed, this time for what looked like summer vacation.

I then mentioned that I'd wanted to try Jalapeño, which seems to be the best-reviewed of the Mexican restaurants here. So, we headed back down to King West to give it a shot. It turns out that Jalapeño is participating in Summerlicious, which is a local food festival where good restaurants set aside a certain number of tables each night to serve a low-priced prix fixe menu. Even though we didn't have reservations (pretty much a necessity during Summerlicious), we were able to get a seat indoors and order off of the prix fixe menu, which turned out to be the only menu they had. For $20 you got an appetizer, entree, and desert. Not too bad.

The real question of course is whether the food was any good. And you know, it wasn't half bad. Jalapeño wouldn't survive very long in a Mexican-food-saturated Texas city, but it made a reasonable showing with some interesting homemade salsas (one of which was very similar to the Ninfa's green sauce) and a decent plate of chicken enchiladas with a tomatillo sauce. I bet the restaurant does even better with the seafood selections and dishes like the cochinita pibil. Certainly not an impressive meal, but better than I expected. I shall likely return to Jalapeño in the future.