From sweet to spicy, Paleteria Oasis has it all
From house-made frozen favorites to spicy-sweet snacks, Paleteria y Neveria Oasis is the destination for Mexico’s best bites
The world is full of snacks. If you travel or if you’re an immigrant or if you’re a visitor far from home, you might be able to get a reasonable facsimile of your cherished cuisine in Santa Fe, but you’re unlikely to find the snacks, those crave-able not-quite-meals and sweets that often trigger more fond memories than dinner. And if you do, they’re rarely truly authentic. The challenge is in the details: methods, ingredients, etc. To really get it right, you have to mean it.
If you come from Mexico, however, Paleteria y Neveria Oasis has you covered.
Paleteria Oasis at 4641 Airport Road is a true Mexican paleteria, a combination ice cream shop-snack shop bursting with every guilty pleasure and childhood craving that can strike anyone who grew up in (or spent time in) Mexico. It is owned and operated by Omar Reyes, his wife, Erika Castañeda, and her father, Oscar Castañeda. Paleteria Oasis has been in the mini-mall at Airport and Zepol roads for about two years, a second incarnation of a smallerscale paleteria that Oscar Castañeda and Reyes had on St. Michael’s Drive that closed four years ago.
Paletas are Mexican ice pops, all made from scratch in-house at Paleteria Oasis. The Castañedas and Reyes are dedicated to authenticity, in everything from flavors to equipment. They make their paletas on a massive Mexican ice pop and ice cream maker in the backroom.
“For us, ice cream here is good, but it’s not like our ice cream,” Reyes says.
The flavors of frozen pops at Paleteria Oasis are encyclopedic — everything from the sorbet-like nondairy guava, strawberry, lemon lime, watermelon or coconut, to the creamy arroz con leche (with raisins), strawberries and cream, vanilla, pistachio, and pecan (its most popular flavor, according to Erika Castañeda). Paleteria Oasis will even make avocado, pinto bean or corn flavored pops — in bulk, on request. The ice cream itself is not too sweet, the flavors nuanced and rich without that unpleasant sugar overload. You can also get esquimales, pops dipped in chocolate and nuts or sprinkles (again, made to order), regular ice cream in cones or sundaes or however else, or Mexican snow cones, made either with Mexican syrups (popular with kids) or fresh fruit.
But while ice cream is the prime mover of Paleteria Oasis, it also offers a bewildering array of Mexican snacks.
“In Mexico, there are different traditions,” Reyes says. “Everybody here thinks it’s just tequila, mariachis, Mexican food. [Paletarias] are a tradition that families do every Sunday after church. If you go to Mexico, outside of every church there’s always a paleteria. For us kids, our parents would tell us, ‘If you behave in church, I’ll take you to the paleteria.’ That’s something that, when we came to the U.S., we didn’t have.”
Anyone who hasn’t been to Mexico will probably find most of the snacks in need of explanation. Luckily, the Castañedas and Reyes have taken pictures of everything and festooned the walls with them, so if you’re confused, you can just point to something that looks appealing or ask what’s on it. Many of the snacks involve decadent piles of chips, cheese, chicharrones and-or fruit. There are dorilokos (nachos made with Doritos, imported from Mexico because, according to Erika Castañeda, they’re different across the border), elotes en vaso (corn with cheese, lime and sour cream, like Mexican street corn but in a bowl) and even the theatrical sandia loca, half a watermelon hollowed out and filled with fruit, Japanese peanuts and other crunchy snacks and then covered in chile.
Because almost everything has chile on it. This is not New Mexican chile, but rather Mexican chile powder or one of two bottled chile sauce condiments: chamoy, which is a Tabasco-esque sauce of chile, sugar and salt, and Salsa Valentina, which is similar but with vinegar, very like Tabasco. These sauces are the flavor signature of most of these snacks, a distinctly tangy-sweet combination that hits all the parts of your tongue at once. You can get, for example, a chamango, which is a cup filled with mango sorbet (made in-house), fresh mango chunks and chamoy — a spicysweet fruit cocktail you eat with a spoon. There are even chile-and-fruit paletas, like chile and mango, and chile and pineapple.
“This is the stuff that we’ll make for our parties at home,” says Reyes. The sandia loca, for example, serves four people. And Paleteria Oasis is happy to cater your party — if you want large amounts of these treats (including the ice pops), call a week in advance to order.
While most of these snack combinations are straight out of Mexico (and then tweaked by the Castañedas and Reyes), they have different names and incarnations in different regions; hence, the pictures. Many of the names for the snacks are also puns, with sometimes-naughty double meanings, like the papas encueradas, house-made potato chips drizzled with avocado, sour cream and pickled chicharrón (pork skin) — the word encuerada alludes to the chicharrón but also means “naked.”
“In the Mexican culture, a lot of things mean two things — the good way and the bad way,” Reyes says. “That’s why a lot of these names stick with people.”
Paleteria y Neveria Oasis has been reasonably successful where it is, but the Castañedas and Reyes want to expand their reach. To that end, they hope to go mobile with an ice cream truck, and they’re participating in this year’s BizMIX competition.
“All our customers are either Hispanic or Mexican,” Reyes says, “but we want to be known by other cultures, too. … BizMIX has been opening our doors a lot; we’ve been meeting a lot of people. Even if we don’t win, we feel like we won because we’ve met a lot of people who have been helping us out.”