John S wrote:
People have always told me that Tex-Mex is really different from what we think of as Mexican food.
It is very different from real Mexican food. However, I believe that across most of the country what people think of as Mexican is really Tex-Mex.
Tex-Mex got its start commercially in the Dallas area in 1916 and in 1926 just outside Dallas in Kaufman when the Martinez and Cuellar families started their restaurants. While they tried to replicate dishes from their home regions in Mexico, they also adapted those dishes for locally available ingredients and local gringo customers.
Mexico as a nation has a great variety of foods and food preparation methods. After all it is a country almost 2,000 miles long with climates varying from seacoast to high desert to tropical rain forests.
Personally I find El Fenix to be excellent good quality food. But there are so many great small mom & pop Tex-Mex places across the state they can't all be listed.
The very best Mexican / Tex-Mex food I've ever had was on Guam, of all places, in a small restaurant owned and run by a Japanese gentleman who did all the cooking.
He wanted to immigrate to the US about the time of the Korean War, but couldn't get a visa. He went to Mexico, and ended up cooking for a local mid-scale restaurant in Guadalajara for 25 years before getting into the US and becoming a citizen. By then he was old enough to want to be closer to his birth place, and moved to Guam.
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