There is an excellent Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth called Joe T. Garcia's. It is often derided by fans of traditional Tex-Mex for its bad food. They are known to serve a great margarita. The drinks are in fact amazing, but I have to take up here for the food, which is far more bland than most admirers of spicy Tex-Mex can admit.
I visited Joe T's recently and had the cheese enchilada dinner. Enchiladas, I think, should always be eaten hot, so I addressed those first. They come with a bit of onion, but not enough to suit my taste. The Spanish rice is nearly excellent, while the beans must be doused in the house salsa (very good) to be tolerable at all. As I took my enchiladas first, I was never able to progress to the meat tacos that come along with the meal, and only had a token bite of the "nachos" (not traditional ballpark nachos at all, rather large tostada shaped discs with a decent amount of chopped pepper on top of plenty of melted cheese.) I have to admit I was far too busy concentrating on the guacamole. It is lush. Maybe some of the best I've ever had: chunky avocado bits, plenty of cilantro, and tomato. Avocado may be my favorite fruit, and my mind wandered to Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, which gives a description of her grandfather's recipe for (I think) grape jelly sauce for avocado. There's a lot of great eating in The Bell Jar; it's not all mental illness and horror. But to return to avocado: I have to say I prefer avocado made guacamole with just the right simple blend of ingredients.
Maybe the purist food critics are right, maybe Joe T's red sauce comes from a can, although I found that as my meal went along, it became one of the best parts of the dinner. I began to sop it up with the Spanish rice. However, what's just as important as the dining at Joe T's is the plan of the restaurant. It has a popular outdoor garden, where stone walls topped with potted plants ring the tables and a central fountain makes joyful music. Also, smoking is allowed. I find a cigarette or two helps me set the tempo of a meal, and Joe T's permissiveness soothes a sore spot of mine...that smoking is prohibited in so many restaurants these days.
Finish your dinner and take a stroll around the garden sometime. It's well stocked with a plant with a yellow fruit, reminiscent of star fruit, showing white blossoms and green oval leaves so smooth I believed they were fake, until I felt the wet soil at the bottom of the pot and was reassured. Another fountain with an intriguing shape hides shyly at the back, and be sure to look at a small hall devoted to succulents and tile work, mostly blue, white, and yellow.
They've also got an oak leaf hydrangea stuck slyly in their garden. I had been to the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens the previous day, and happened upon the Fragrance Garden, a delicious nook with a quiet pool and a welcome bit of shade. In Texas it seems the oak leaf takes the form of a flat, cream four leaf clover type blossom, sometimes with pale pink along its creases. The leaves are giant and a healthy, friendly green. The Fragrance Garden also contains viburnums of many sorts, a plant I love, as a certain sort of viburnum, also called guelder-rose, is one of the strongest notes in Vivienne Westwood's fragrance "Libertine," a favorite of mine for its elegant combination of passion and restraint. (Sometimes it takes a kooky Englishwoman to come up with a really bewitching perfume.) They also have a nice Nikko Blue Hydrangea, although you can't let the name fool you: probably due to our soil, this plant's flowers are bright cyclamen. I also enjoyed a reserved little plant called "Eve's Necklace." But the best smell of the day may have reached me as I headed out of the Fragrance Garden and passed a Mexican Plum. I'm still not sure whether it was the tree that caught my attention, or a baby's breath sort of wildflower growing beneath it, but it was a well done bit of casual planting. I don't think the Botanic Garden spends all its effort on the gardens themselves; they have put together a very thoughtful experience for the wanderer and even the tourist.
As I'm not a real tourist but a mere suburban visitor, I'll probably never grow tired of Fort Worth's attractions now that I've decided to prefer the town to Dallas. Where Dallas is a bit formal, Fort Worth is expressionist, abstract, even surreal and absurd, but with plenty of recognizable Texas style thrown in for stability.
Exploring the city next door is just what I have to do to compensate for all those trips to The Gap.
No comments:
Post a Comment