That's Hot

When I returned a few nights later with Bob, Richard and Linda, I warned them that Esquada's kitchen wasn't sheepish about cooking with those chili peppers. Duly prepared, we started far too ambitiously with a big platter of starters. The Ixtapa Sampler was really more of a meal than a presupper snack. After putting away a few beef-filled fried taquitos, pieces of achiote-marinated chicken and broiled sirloin asada, we were almost too full to tackle dinners. But who wants to stop at a sampler?

When our server brought out the meals (on plates nearly as big as hubcaps), Linda took one bite of the shrimp dish and nearly screamed. "It's too hot," she said, fanning her tongue with her hand. I traded her my dinner — a mellow chile verde in a mild tomatilla sauce — and quite enjoyed the combination of shrimp, onion and green strips of cooked cactus. It wasn't too fiery for my palate, but Richard's sliced steak was. The carne charred my tongue, and Richard nibbled on it gingerly.

"They should ask patrons how spicy they want their dinners," Linda said. "I mean, the food is wonderful if you like it really hot."

Bob, meanwhile, was focused on his Deluxe Burrito Manadero, the traditional Tex-Mex burrito made with ground beef and beans in a soft flour tortilla and covered with a bubbling blanket of you know what. "It's very good," Bob said. "This is my kind of Mexican."

To cool down our taste buds, we sampled a couple of Ixtapa's terrific nondairy ice cream creations. "Instead of milk, we use atole," Esquada explained to me later. "It's the cornstarch water left after you cook the masa for tamales." The flour-and-water atole and a chocolate-flavored variation are better known south of the border as beverages, but Esquada uses them as the main ingredients for the creamy frozen dessert.

"It's more like a frozen mousse," Linda said. She marveled at the consistency of the vanilla version, which actually tasted like a buttery caramel. The chocolate ice cream was even better — served on a cookie crust, it was like a frozen mousse cake.

With desserts like that, none of us missed fried ice cream. After all, as Esquada says, "If my public wants something fried like that, they should go to KFC."

Or, more accurately, a Mexican restaurant that aims to please the yellow-cheese people. Ixtapa "My food is not for everyone, but my public knows where I am, and they find me here. I'm a destination point."