San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The ocean’s bounty offered at Señor Fish
The slogan at Señor Fish Seafood Bar is simple: “If it swims, we have it.”
The new, independently owned Mexican seafood restaurant on Broadway, in the former space of Tacos and Tequila by the Pearl, quietly opened Feb. 20 and is now doing full service.
Already, the menu is vast, with more than 40 items. Yet general manager Francisco Medina said it will grow over time as the staff receives more training. Executive chef Gerardo Ramirez is getting seafood from the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Patrons will find a wide variety of options made with scallops, clams, shrimp, oysters, octopus, tuna, ceviche and more, as well as steaks and salads. There is also a “build your own” tostada option in which you pick your protein and pair it with one of five sauces.
Menu pricing averages around $17 per item, and many include at least one side.
Customers also are given a complimentary basket of corn tostadas and crackers, served with a house mango habanero sauce, red chile sauce and a
small bowl of seafood broth that can be sipped like a cup of tea as a starter.
“The goal with everything is to provide a relaxed atmosphere and focus on freshness,” Medina said.
Señor Fish also has two bar areas configured in a wraparound horse-track setting, as well as a large outdoor patio area that overlooks the intersection of Broadway and Josephine Street. The bar menu is as large as the food menu, with more than 30
types of tequila, 20 beer varieties and six specialty margaritas.
Tacos and Tequila closed in October 2017 after opening in 2014.
Señor Fish Seafood Bar, 1915 Broadway, 210-475-3730, Facebook: senorfishseafoodbar, elsenorfish.com. Hours: 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays.
In San Antonio, we’re mostly used to gorditas with a deep-fried corn tortilla pulled apart and stuffed like a Hot Pocket. The Happy Gordita does not serve those.
Here the large, thick fried tortillas are almost the size of small dinner plate and are treated more like a tostada. The tortillas are crispy on the outside and pillow-soft on the inside, with their topping spread from edge to edge.
Owner Hope De La Fuente was ready to roll with her food truck in March 2020, but due to COVID-19, she really didn’t
get the truck going until October as more of the genesis of her business. De La Fuente has roots in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, and uses family recipes for her menu.
The Happy Gordita keeps a simple menu with five different gordita options, birrea tacos, corn in a cup and chips and queso. That allowed De La Fuente to manage everything from taking the orders to cooking the food during our visit at StreetFare SA on Austin Highway, with a minimal wait time of about 15 minutes.
Best dish: The Guacamole Only ($5.50) gordita was one of the best things I have tasted in more than 20 years of living here. Fresh avocado with a perfect citrus hit of acid, a creaminess from crema and a zing from queso fresco. Order two, thank me later.
Other dishes: The El Classico ($4.50) was another testament to simplicity executed perfectly. The
creamy refried beans were loaded with seasonings and smoky, bacon fat flavor and topped with a thick blanket of melted queso menonita that overhung the tortilla with charred bits of cheesy heaven.
Don’t skip the corn in a cup ($3.50 for a small). Unlike some places that stack the cup with the sweet corn and mayonnaise mixture and simply top it with cheese and seasonings, the version here is put together more like a lasagna, so every bite has the cotija and spices.
Birria tacos ($7.50 for two) have been having a moment that doesn’t appear to be subsiding anytime soon. The Happy Gordita uses beef with a mixture of cilantro, onions and melted cheese. There just wasn’t quite enough birria in each taco, and it barely occupied half of the tortillas. But the dipping
broth that makes birria a star dish was good enough to enjoy on its own as a soup.
The Viva La Gordita ($6) is the fanciest menu item, with ground beef, beans, cabbage, tomatoes and a thick dousing of crema and queso fresco, but lacked
the flavor intensity of the simpler items. When you took a bite, there was nothing offensive, but there wasn’t a single ingredient that stood out in the mix.
Though I have lived in Texas long enough and eaten enough breakfast tacos to feel like an honorary Texan, I was not born in the Lone Star State.
I grew up in the Northeast, where St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal. There is a mad dash to the grocery store for green food coloring and corned beef. Among my important childhood lessons was that green mayo does not make a turkey sandwich more festive (thanks for giving it a try, Mom) and that corned beef is delicious.
Corned beef and cabbage is not really a traditional Irish St. Patrick’s Day dinner but rather a transformation of Irish dishes by immigrants using ingredients that were accessible and affordable to them in America. And what luck for us, their descendants and fellow countrymen, because we have adopted one of the greatest, most versatile foods as our shared holiday tradition.
Corned beef is brined beef brisket, which makes it perfect for Texas. The whole brisket is soaked in a salted and spiced mixture, which flavors and preserves the meat. It is often pink from the use of commercial curing salts, similar to cured hams.
Like all brisket, corned beef can be roasted, smoked or braised until it is tender and succulent. It is often braised in water or broth with pickling spices, cabbage, carrots and potatoes, all served together with plenty of mustard and Irish soda bread.
I like a semi-traditional preparation, choosing to braise the corned beef in a rich beef stock and then roast the vegetables separately, with just a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Not only is it more flavorful overall, I also think it makes for the best leftovers, and leftovers are really why I make corned beef and cabbage in the first place.
My second favorite St. Patrick’s Day leftover is a Reuben sandwich: sliced corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut (double for me, please) and Thousand Island dressing on rye bread, griddled in butter until the bread is crisp, the cheese is melted and everyone
is drooling.
But, if you can believe it, even that basically perfect food is still not my No. 1. For me, the absolute best St. Patrick’s Day leftover is corned beef hash. I grew up in the land of diners, where corned beef hash was diced corned beef (often from a can) mixed with diced boiled potatoes and maybe some onions. It wasn’t great, but I saw the potential.
Day-after-St. Patrick’s Day corned beef hash is a horse of a different color. Roughly chop your corned beef, cabbage and other veggies.
Heat a skillet over high heat and add a little oil or butter — or
bacon fat if you really want to go for it. Add all of your chopped leftovers and cook them hot and fast, stirring just occasionally, until everything is seared all over. Add about ¼ cup of the leftover corned beef cooking liquid per serving to the pan, and let it reduce and get a little saucy.
If you can resist eating this from the pan over the stove, adding a runny egg and a few dashes of hot sauce take it to the next level.
If you’re looking to bring a little Texas style to your St. Patrick’s Day, treat your corned beef like a brisket. Serve it smoked alongside a tangy cabbage and carrot slaw, and mustardy potato salad. All the classic pieces are there, but like this Northeast transplant has learned, everything tastes just a little better in Texas.
Brunch is the dine-in restaurant occasion I miss most during this pandemic.
These days, working at home means the couch often doubles as desk. The cocktail hour creeps into consciousness at dusk. The snack drawer beckons all day.
So here’s several restaurantworthy brunch dishes. Eggs covered in a creamy sauce, bacon-y potatoes, seed and nut pancakes sweetened with jam.
I never have enough pancake recipes, and I nearly always make my own dry mix. Ingredients on hand inspire the use of various flours, seeds, nut and fruit additions. I translated a love of muesli cereal into the version here, chock-full of oats, almonds and dried currants.
I stock bags of frozen cranberries for this speedy cranberry, fig and ginger jam. Make a double batch and package in small refrigerator containers to give your former brunch buddies with the dry pancake mix and instructions for cooking.
Bacon and potatoes are a match made in heaven, especially when indulging in breakfast-for-dinner. The hash here can be served in individual skillets topped with an egg, reminiscent of pancake house skillet meals.
Like many, I struggle to poach eggs so they look beautiful and stay soft-set. The best technique I’ve found is simply to keep the barely simmering pan of water swirling when you add the egg. The movement of the water helps coat the yolk with the white. Once done, after about 3 minutes, use a slotted spoon to transfer the egg to a bowl of lukewarm water. The eggs hold in this manner nicely while you reheat the potato mixture to piping hot. Top everything with a lemony, mayonnaise-based sauce — easier than making hollandaise.
“Iknow a lot of you white people have never seen an Indian do stand-up comedy before,” joked Charlie Hill on “The Richard Pryor Show” in 1977. “Like, for so long you probably thought that Indians never had a sense of humor. We never thought you were too funny either.”
Hill’s TV debut, making him the first Indigenous comedian in prime time, is one of the milestones that Kliph Nesteroff chronicles in “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem,” an illuminating and stereotype-busting history of Native Americans and comedy.
Nesteroff profiles Hill, who died of cancer in 2013, as well as other Indigenous comedians whom Hill influenced in much the same way Freddie Prinze and Eddie Murphy inspired Latino and Black comics with their phenomenal success at a young age.
But at its heart, Nesteroff ’s book shows “the importance and influence that proper representation in the media can have,” the author said in a phone interview. “Nine out of 10 Indigenous comedians to whom I talked said that Charlie Hill was the guy. Whether they started in the 1980s, the ’90s or the 2000s, they said that they never knew there were other Native American comedians, and when they saw Charlie Hill on TV, that was the moment they decided they wanted to get into comedy.”
“We Had a Little Real Estate Problem” takes its title from Hill’s most famous joke: “My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.” The book is a welcome addendum to Nesteroff ’s critically acclaimed history of American stand-up comedy, “The Comedians,” which was published in 2015. Michael Sims, reviewing it for the Washington Post, called it
“an insightful overview of the most independent and subversive entertainment genre of the last century.”
Nesteroff, an encyclopedic comedy historian, said “racism and fascism were on the rise when I got the (book) deal in early 2018. I was trying to figure out what I could do to counteract that in some positive and meaningful way, and writing a book that would give non-Native people a proper historical perspective was one way of doing that.”
Although Nesteroff, who is white, was approached to write the book, he was cognizant of Hollywood’s poor track record of putting Indigenous people in positions of ownership to tell their own stories. When it came to writing the book, he made a commitment to his subjects by getting out of the way. “As much as possible, I tried not to inject myself, so there are several chapters of contemporary Native American comedians speaking in their own voice and being quoted verbatim,” he said.
One of those voices is Terry Ree, a
Lakota comedian who, with Bruce Williams, is part of the popular comedy duo also known as Williams and Ree. They entrusted the story of their more than 50-year career to Nesteroff, who chronicles the evolution of their “the Indian and the white guy” act. In a joint phone interview, the pair said the Indigenous comedian is an essential,
albeit unsung story.
“It’s about time people realized there are Indians out there working,” Ree said wryly. “When Bruce and I started, there were no comedy places (for us). We had to do what we did in lounges, and we had to have a band because they wanted music. And we just wanted to make people laugh. We didn’t run into these talented Native people until years later. We looked up to Charlie Hill. That was our goal: to do “The Tonight Show” like Charlie Hill.”
As with “The Comedians,” a theme throughout Nesteroff ’s newest book is influences. It’s the Circle of Laughs: Hill inspired the Navajo comedy team of James Junes and Ernie Tsosie, and they inspired Navajo comic Isiah Yazzie. But other Indigenous comedians cite more mainstream comedy influences, including Bob Newhart, Monty Python and “Saturday Night Live.”
Throughout the book, Nesteroff shares the Native comedians’ own stories against a backdrop of the horrific harassment, discrimination and subjugation that Native Americans have endured in this country. This forms a wellspring of much Indigenous comedy that comments on unique struggles while confronting stereotypes. Nesteroff writes about the groundbreaking Indigenous sketch troupe the 1491s, who made a breakthrough appearance on “The Daily
Show” in a confrontational 2014 segment about the debate over the Washington Redskins mascot.
But Nesteroff did not want to immerse readers in what he calls the “poor Indian” trope. “Not everybody went through that,” he said.
What Indigenous comedians share with their non-Native brethren is the career struggle, whether it’s Ojibwe social worker Jonny Roberts’ 10-hour round-trip drive, just for the opportunity to perform at an open mic, to Williams and Ree performing for 13 people at a Holiday Inn early in their career.
A new era of inclusion may lead to wider opportunities for Indigenous comedians. Nesteroff writes of Sierra Ornelas, a Navajo screenwriter who has written for the TV shows “Happy Endings,” “Superstore” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and is now producing her own NBC sitcom, “Rutherford Falls,” with “Parks & Recreation” creator Michael Schur. The writing staff includes Indigenous writers and comedians. Last December, FX gave a series order for “Reservation Dogs,” cocreated by Sterlin Harjo, a member of the 1491s, and Taika Waititi.
“Indigenous people matter, and their concerns are valid,” Nesteroff said. “Non-Natives will understand that if they receive a more informed perspective. In a small way, maybe this book will expand awareness.”