Tuesday, February 22, 2005
(2:53 PM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
Restaurant Review: "Pepe's," near 53rd and Woodlawn, Chicago
Mr. Kotsko has graciously invited me to take a rest from the back-breaking labor of single-handedly maintaining some degree of credibility at The H is O. Here, I have the freedom to pursue my true passion: cuisine. And so you can expect me to pop in from time to time, making and breaking the careers of restauranteurs who come my way. Mr. Kotsko has asked me to focus on the Chicago area so that he can better make use of the advice that I am so graciously deigning to give the readers of this humble blog -- teetering, as it does, between "Flappy Bird" and "Adorable Little Rodent" in the blogging ecosystem -- and accordingly, I have opted for a restaurant that is near Mr. Kotsko's current academic "stomping grounds."My first impression of Pepe's was a positive one. Located a few doors down from the Kimbark Shopping Plaza, home of such delectable destinations as Cedars of Lebanon and one of the approximately 20,000 Chicago Leona's locations, it is a humble, unassuming eatery, sharing parking with the Plaza. I had taken the Green Line, in a not-to-be-repeated attempt to take in some of the local color, but I would imagine that the ample parking of said Plaza would provide a much-needed relief from the unrelenting horror of squeezing into a parking spot on the street, only to come back and find one's windshield broken, tires stolen, and driver's seat urinated upon.
The sign was promising; that is, it promised "Wonderful Mexican Food." I'm not sure if I'd have grounds for a false advertising lawsuit per se, but this announcement was surely out of the normal bounds of advertisarial exaggeration. I ordered a beef and bean burrito, for which the clerk heartily thanked me. I then selected a seat, waited a few moments for my food to be prepared, and took the food, for which the clerk heartily thanked me. Opting for thematic unity over strict chronology, I will remark that the clerk also heartily thanked me when I threw away my trash. Such overblown gratitude seems to me to betoken a certain desperation in a restauranteur and, in short, created an atmosphere of uncomfortable formality and overfamiliarity at the same time.
I was eager to "dig in." My meal, I noted with glee, came fully equipped with tortilla chips and dipping sauce, as well as the extraneous lettuce and tomato that seems to serve as a garnish in Mexican restauarants. After eating a few chips, I picked up my burrito and was shocked to learn several facts all at once. For convenience, I will enumerate them:
- No cheese had been included in my burrito.
- No lettuce or tomato was included inside the actual burrito; apparently I was supposed to open it up and re-roll it, as part of some hackneyed attempt at fostering greater customer participation.
- The thing was so loosely rolled that it began to fall apart almost immediately.
In a futile attempt to find a silver lining, I thought that the meat that had fallen out would serve as an attractive dipping resevoir for my chips, but the whole affair was so bland that I would have prefered to take my chips plain. I hurriedly finished my meal, threw away my garbage (see above for details), and went on my way, receiving my perfunctory divine blessing from the busker outside, entertaining the ungrateful masses with the soulful sounds of inverted buckets.
Once again, I thank Mr. Kotsko for the chance to expand my blogging horizons beyond The H is O and hope you'll tune in next time for my continuing series of "Restaurant Reviews." Thank you, and good night.
